January is always an important month for Mac fans, as this is the month that the annual Macworld is held in the States. Last year the big announcement causing a big stir was of course the iPhone. This year the big news is that Steve Jobs and apple have announced the “world’s “thinnest laptop”.

It was widely anticipated that Apple were going to announce a new laptop, and most people who expressed an opinion expected some sort of a very small form factor sub-notebook, or a tablet version of the existing MacBook. However what they actually got was not smaller but “slimmer”. When shut, the new MacBook Air measures only 4mm at the thinnest point and only a measly 19mm at the thickest part. It does looks good, but also seems at a distance a little fragile. You get the feeling that it might be a little too easy to snap it in half accidentally!

Its fairly standard specifications include a 13.3-inch LED-backlit screen, a good 2GB of memory, a 1.6GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor a 1.8-inch 80GB HDD. The trackpad has support for gestures, so that you are able to use finger and thumb to pinch and expand files and images in a similar way to the iPhone or iPod Touch

Like the iPhone, there have been people who love the concept of a light and very thin laptop, but a lot of people who don’t. Detractors point out the fixed battery, the only one USB port, the fact that it relies on WiFi only for networking and the lack of an optical drive as major drawbacks. However only time will tell how successful the Air will be and if you remember the iPhone had a lot of detractors and that has been a success for Apple.

The MacBook Air will not be available for a few weeks, but if you want something now, then for more or less the same price you can get a standard MacBook Pro or a PC aiming at the same market like the Sony Vaio TZ Notebook pictured.