What is it?

Well, as you know, Apple makes the best notebooks on the planet.

The MacBook and the MacBook Pro.

These are the standards in the industry by which competitive products are judged.

Well today, we're introducing a third kind of notebook.

It's called the MacBook Air.

Now, what is the MacBook Air?

In a sentence, it's the world's thinnest notebook.

So, what does that mean?

Well, we went out and looked at all the thin notebooks out there.

Most people think of these, the Sony TZ series.

They're good notebooks and they're thin.

This is what they look like, side view there.

We looked at all of them out there and kind of tried to distill the best of the breed of all of them.

They generally weigh about three pounds.

In this case, in the Sony's case, they're about 0.8 inches to 1.2 inches thin.

Their wedge shape is quite representative.

They compromise, though, to get the weight down on things like the display.

They have an 11 or 12 inch display, most of them an 11.

They also compromise on the keyboard.

Instead of putting full size keyboards in, they make miniature keyboards.

And they don't run them as fast as they could because their thermal envelopes don't support faster processors.

So we looked at this and we said, what do we like and what do we think is a compromise here?

We think the weight's a good target, three pounds.

But we think there's too much compromising to get there.

Too much compromising on thickness.

Too much compromising on less than a full size display.

Less than a full size keyboard.

And we think you could put even more performance in one of these products.

So let's take a look at the thinness first.

This is that Sony product.

Again, one of the best in the field, 1.2 inches down to 0.8 inches.

This is the MacBook Air, 0.76 inches down to an unprecedented 0.16 inches.

Now I want to point something out here.

The thickest part of the MacBook Air is still thinner than the thinnest part of the TZ series.

We're talking thin here.

So it's so thin, it even fits inside one of these envelopes that we've all seen floating around the office.

And so let me go ahead and show it to you now.

This is it.

Let me take it out here.

This is the new MacBook Air, and you can get a feel for how thin it is.

Yeah, there it is.

Look at this.

All right.

Amazing product here.

Full-size keyboard, full-size display.

And this is what it looks like.

Isn't that amazing?

So let's go explore this in more detail.

So again, it fits inside one of these envelopes.

It's that small.

This is what it looks like.

Isn't that incredible?

It's the world's thinnest notebook.

You open it up.

It's got a magnetic latch, so there's no hooks or things to catch on your clothing.

And it's got a full-size 13.3-inch widescreen display.

And the display is gorgeous.

It's an LED backlit display.

And not only does that save power and not only does that give a really bright display, but it's instant on the minute you open it.

On top of the display is a built-in iSight camera for video conferencing right out of the box.

And you flip it down.

There is a full-size keyboard.

This is perhaps the best notebook keyboard we've ever shipped.

It's a phenomenal keyboard, and it's full-sized.

And with the ambient light sensor, it's also backlit.

We've got a very generous trackpad, which is great.

We've also built in multi-touch gesture support.

Now, as you know, our current notebooks have some gestures built in.

We've taken that even further.

When you go to Preferences in the MacBook Air, you'll actually get to turn on all sorts of other types of gestures, and there's actually videos in there to show you what they are.

So let me run through them with you now.

You can double-tap, and instead of moving the cursor around, you can move a whole window around, right?

Just a nice time-saver.

So that's great.

Here's another one.

When you're in a photo, a large photo, you want to pan around.

You can pan around with just two fingers like this.

Another nice time-saver.

You want to rotate a photo.

This works in iPhoto and all the other photo apps.

Just rotate like this.

Again, we've taken some of these things we learned in the iPhone, and now we're putting them in our notebook computers.

Here's another one.

If you want to go between photographs, next photo, just take three fingers and pan right.

Previous photo, pan left.

And you want to zoom.

You can pinch in and out.

All right?

Isn't that great?

So, multi-touch gestures.

Pretty amazing.

And again, you can see how beautiful and thin this product is.

Now, how did we fit a Mac in here?

How did we do it?

I'm a little stunned that our engineering team could pull this off.

Well, let's look at the bottom.

Take off the bottom, and there's three things in here.

It's a battery, hard disk, and the electronics.

On the hard disk, we went to 1.8-inch hard drives.

We shipped tens of millions of these in iPods.

We know them well, and they're great.

And so the MacBook Air ships with an 80-gigabyte hard disk as standard, and there's an option of a 64-gigabyte solid-state disk if you'd like it.

These are a little pricey, but they are fast.

But the real magic is in the electronics.

This is a complete Mac on a board.

Let's take off the cooling system.

That's a complete Mac on this board.

And you think, well, okay, what's so special about that?

Well, this is how big the board is.

It's really tiny.

And to fit an entire Mac on this thing was an amazing feat of engineering.

And we didn't compromise on performance.

MacBook Air uses the Intel Core 2 Duo.

This is a really speedy processor.

It's what we use in all of our other notebooks and our iMacs.

It's 1.6 gigahertz standard, and there's an option to go to 1.8 gigahertz if you want.

Now, we've got a great relationship with Intel.

Both companies are engineering-driven, and they both love to challenge each other.

And Intel's got enormous amounts of technology.

And so when we were building this product, we asked them to consider something.

This is their amazing Core 2 Duo chip, right?

It's a screamer.

We said we want that chip in this product, but we need to go to smaller packaging.

The same die on a smaller package.

It sounds easy. It's not.

They spent a lot of, invested a lot of engineering to create this for us.

This is the same chip in a package that is 60% smaller.

And it's one of the reasons we could build MacBook Air.

And so I'd like to say thank you to Intel.

And it's my pleasure to invite the CEO of Intel, Paul Ottolini, on stage.

I'd like to give him a round of applause.