• The New York Times, Wednesday, January 16, 2008 12:15 PM

Apple CEO Steve Jobs, who has made his keynote presentation at the opening of the Macworld Expo trade show a consistent marketing tour de force in recent years, yesterday introduced an ultralight computer called the MacBook Air. He also announced that Apple would rent digital movies

The MacBook Air is a three-pound notebook computer that will sell at a base price of $1,799. Jobs admits that in order to reach his goal of making the industry's thinnest computer, designers made trade-offs that the majority of laptop buyers may not appreciate. Responding to a question about the growing array of media that now swell most users' hard drives, Jobs said, "Maybe this isn't the computer for you."

The terms of the movie service are similar to those offered by other companies, though Jobs says that Apple is the first distributor to persuade all of the major studios to join in its rental strategy. Consumers will have 30 days to begin watching, then 24 hours to finish the movie before it is erased from the hard disk.

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