Apple CEO Steve Jobs has introduced the MacBook Air, the world’s thinnest laptop computer, during the Macworld Expo being held in San Francisco, CA.

It measures an unprecedented 0.16 inches at its thinnest point while its maximum height of 0.76 inches is less than the thinnest point on competing notebooks. In addition to a stunning 13.3-inch LED-backlit widescreen display, MacBook Air offers a full-size and backlit keyboard, a built-in iSight video camera for video conferencing, and a spacious trackpad with multi-touch gesture support, letting users pinch, rotate and swipe. The new notebook is powered by a 1.6 GHz or 1.8 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor with 4MB L2 cache, and it includes as standard features 2GB of memory, an 80GB 1.8-inch hard drive, and the latest 802.11n Wi-Fi technology and Bluetooth 2.1. Starting at just $1,799, MacBook Air begins shipping in two weeks. [Apple News]

MacBook Air is designed to take full advantage of the wireless world. In fact, the new notebook does not provide a built-in CD drive. Apple envisions a wireless world in which 802.11n Wi-Fi is so fast and so available, that such drives will become less relevant as more and more services (such as buying and renting movies online, downloading software, and sharing and storing files on the web) can be performed wirelessly or delivered over the internet.

An apparent inconvenience is that the battery cannot be removed, meaning that travellers or business users, will be limited to its 5-hour battery life.