Inside the Moscone West hall on Tuesday, Steve Jobs basked in the cheers of
both the marquee announcements that made up his Macworld Expo keynote. After
announcing the availability of movie rentals through iTunes, Jobs ended his
101-minute keynote by taking the wraps off the MacBook Air, a super-slim addition
to its portable lineup.

It would be hard to gauge from the cheers during the keynote which of the two
new announcement made the bigger impression. As for which product will be bigger
for Apple in the weeks and months following the keynote, that all depends on
who you ask.

Meet the MacBook Air

The MacBook Air breaks a lot of barriers, ushering Apple into the subnotebook
market. While the competition may be strong, subnotebooks remain a niche market
because no computer maker has really delivered that one product that everyone
wants. That is clearly what Apple hopes to do with the MacBook Air.

"It looks like a strong product in an area that Apple hasn't addressed
so far," said Van Baker, vice president of research at IT-research firm
Gartner. Baker added the MacBook Air will appeal to the Apple faithful for now,
but will definitely help Apple in its efforts to build market share in all of
its products.

That's a pretty good bet considering the way Apple's laptop sales have been
going recently. Laptops remain a key part of Apple's business--the company sold
more than 1.3 million laptops in its fiscal fourth quarter, which helped drive
a second-consecutive quarter of record Mac sales.

But this is definitely new territory for Apple, with new challenges. Ross Rubin,
director of analysis at market-research firm NPD, reiterated his pre-keynote
observation that three things have kept the subnotebook market small--price,
battery life and poor design.

Some may agree about MacBook Air's US$1,799 price tag, but with an estimated
five hours of battery life and the design that Jobs showed off at his keynote,
Apple seems to be off to a good start, analysts say.

"It's a very classic Apple design," Rubin said. "It [MacBook
Air] focuses on areas that most impact the end users."

The MacBook Air doesn't come with all of the features you would expect to see
on a full-sized laptop. For instance, it's missing an optical drive and many
of the ports like FireWire and Ethernet that we have come to expect.

Apple has taken care of some of those items by offering add-ons. You can buy
a SuperDrive DVD burner for $99, and you can also buy an Ethernet adapter for
$29. But Apple still makes the case that these add-ons won't be needed.

"They make a strong case for why those items are not a necessity,"
Rubin said. "A lot of the

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