An ultra-portable Mac laptop will be announced by his Steveness at the Macworld expo in January, according to reports.

Apple Insider seems fairly confident that the new ultra-tiny Macbook will be unveiled at the expo and will have a solid-state hard drive and no optical drive. it will also supposedly tout a 13-inch screen and be half as heavy as the smallest current Macbook model.

The problem is, Apple would be getting into a market that it's already killing with the MacBook and iPhone.

14 Nov 2007

If the Cupertino marketing machine is to be believed, the great thing about the iPhone is that it performs most of the functions you'd expect from a UMPC, short of word processing. And for that, Apple is more than happy to sell you a low-end Macbook.

Apple has to see that as mobile handsets get smarter and laptops get lighter and cheaper, the already-small market for UMPCs is shrinking.