Steve Jobs had a couple of widely leaked “surprises” to unveil at yesterday’s Macworld show. As we’d all read everywhere for the past few weeks, Apple added rental movies to its iTunes download store. The selection is a bit small and the 30-day delay from DVD release to rental seems ridiculous but, hey, these are the Hollywood studios making the rules. Putting applications like Mail and Weather on the wifi-enabled iPod Touch seems like the correction of an obvious mistake. And I’m all into the wireless router with hard drive baked in at a price that’s actually pretty competitive. The big announcement Stevie saved for last was the new sub-notebook computer, the Macbook Air. What’s the big draw? Why, it’s the world’s thinnest computer. Am I the only one wondering who cares? Are these super-thin computers from Sony and Toshiba actually selling that well? Not really. Does thin somehow make the computer work better or the battery last longer or something? Not really. What’s the real draw then? Macbook Air is also very light weight — three pounds, Jobs said. That makes it more portable and easier to carry around, a legitimate and desirable feature.

I’m all into light laptops, or least I used to be. Back in the early 1990s, I had one of the first thin, subnotebook computers called the NEC Ultralite. It didn’t even have a hard drive. Then I had a couple of the early models in Sony’s lil purple Vaio line, starting I think with the 505. They had hard drives but no CD drives. The screens were tiny, as were the keyboards. I was so into the ultraportables I started haunting the web sites of those crazy firms that bought the very smallest laptops sold only in Japan, reprogrammed them with English software and resold them to Americans at a tidy markup. I even did a little story for Wired magazine. Times has been cruel to this weird niche so most of these techno-lust fulfilling sites are long gone, but one, Dynamism.

Inevitably, super lightweight computing has meant trade-offs. In today’s world, it’s hard to envision the Macbook Air, with its maximum hard drive size of 80 GB, poor graphics card and lack of built-in DVD drive, as the right answer for too many people’s needs. I was also expecting a docking station that might have made it more desirable as a hybrid system with some nifty syncing software. I have already read some folks comparing the MB Air to the ill-fated Mac Cube that emphasized cool design over desirable features and good value for the money. Still, watching Jobs explain in his keynote how many of the activities you used to need wires and drives for can now be accomplished wirelessly, I couldn’t help but get a chill and the strong sense that he’s absolutely on to something big if perhaps a little too early. Better to be ahead of the curve than skidding off the road…

p.s. Whatever you think about the Macbook Air, they’ve cooked up a great commercial for the thing. Fits in an interoffice mail envelope? Wow. What’s the song playing in the background? Yael Naim‘s “New Soul” off her eponymous debut album from last year.