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After the introduction of the ultralight and thin Macbook Air laptop computer at the Macworld Expo, everybody has been weighing in on the pros and cons of the new product.

Those who like to look for faults, otherwise known as critics, have been talking it down already, noting especially the lack of features normally included with laptops, as well as the sealed case it comes with. As usual, there's the grumbling about the high price of Apple (AAPL) products, with the new Macbook Air starting at $1800.

You can read about the specs anywhere online, let's get into the marketing side of the product and why it's even being offered by Apple.

Whenever you hear that a product is dropping some of its features, it tells you one thing about the strategy: they're moving from early adopters to the mainstream. Early adopters of a product are the hardcore users, no matter what market you serve.

With the current market for the thin and light laptops accounting for 50 percent of sales, and the super lightweights like Macbook Air being 15 percent of that, there is a lot of room for growth in the segment.

Growth of screened devices will be largely connected to the mobile lifestyle, and the Macbook Air definitely fits into that category. Apple has lacked an entry in their line of laptops and filled it with the Macbook Air.

The purpose of making the product so thin and light was to position in the minds of users as more of a portable device than a laptop computer, even though portability has been part of laptops from the beginning. This is being done in a different way based upon the design itself.

What's important to learn from a marketing perspective, is the need to identify when a market is going from a early adopter to a mainstream market. Steve Jobs and Apple believe that has now happened in the lightweight computer category, and so put this forth as their entry.

When you go from early adopter to mainstream, the idea is to think in terms of making things simpler. The general population has no interest in learning the large number of features included with products geared to early adopters. So when we go to the mainstream, we must streamline features and know which ones are desired by regular people.

So the strategy behind the release of the Macbook Air by Steve Jobs is to grow market share by offering a product more user-friendly to ordinary people. Consider that if you have a product or service which has stalled in growth. It may be time to develop new products or services similar to the old one, but scaled down for those that want to use it, but not at the level of your original demographic.