Apple CEO Steve Jobs holds up the new MacBook Air. The super-slim new laptop is less than an inch thick and turns on the moment it's opened. (AP)
Posted on 01/15/2008 1:33:15 PM PST by Cagey
(AP) Apple Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs took the wraps off a super-slim new laptop at the Macworld trade show on Tuesday, unveiling a personal computer less than an inch thick that turns on the moment it is opened.
Jobs also confirmed the consumer electronics company's foray into online movie rentals, revealing an alliance with all six major movie studios to offer films over high-speed Internet connections within 30 days after they're released on DVD.
Always a showman, Jobs unwound the string on a standard-sized manila office envelope and slid out the ultra-thin MacBook Air notebook computer to coos and peals of laughter from fans at the conference.
At its beefiest, the new computer is .76 inches (1.9 centimeters) thick; at its thinnest, it's .16 inches (0.4 centimeters), he said. It comes standard with an 80-gigabyte hard drive, with the option of a 64GB flash-based solid state drive as an upgrade.
The machine doesn't come with a built-in optical drive for reading CDs and DVDs, a feature Jobs says consumers won't miss because they can download movies and music over the Internet and access the optical drives on other PCs and Macs to install new software. They can buy an external drive, however, that will retail for $99 (euro66.51).
Trading in Apple stock was heavy Tuesday, the first day of the Macworld Conference & Expo in San Francisco. It fell 5.52 percent to $168.91 at midday.
The new laptop, which has a 13.3-inch (33-centimeter) screen and full-sized laptop keyboard, will cost $1,799 (euro1,208) when it goes on sale in two weeks, though Apple is taking orders now. The company's Web site is already touting the machine. The price is competitive with other laptops in its market segment.
The machine helps fortify Apple's already-sizzling Macintosh product lineup and burnish its polished image as a purveyor of cool.
Apple's Macintosh business hit record sales of 7 million units in the company's fiscal 2007, up more than 30 percent from the previous year.
After hovering for years with a 2 percent to 3 percent share of the personal computer market in the United States, Apple's slice has grown to almost 8 percent, making it the nation's third-largest PC vendor, according to the latest figures from market researcher Gartner Inc.
Other revelations during Jobs' speech reflected the Cupertino-based company's intensifying efforts to push deeper into consumers' living rooms with technologies that blend Internet technology into home entertainment devices.
The movie-rental announcement capped months of speculation that an Apple movie rental service was in the offing. The service launched Tuesday in the United States and will roll out internationally later this year.
Apple will have more than 1,000 movies for online rental through iTunes by the end of February, with prices of $2.99 (euro2.01) for older movies and $3.99 (euro2.68) for new releases. Users can watch instantly over a broadband Internet connection, or download and keep the movie for 30 days while having 24 hours to finish the movie once it's started.
Apple is partnering with 20th Century Fox, Warner Brothers, Walt Disney, Paramount, Universal and Sony on the service, which will work on Macs, Windows-based machines, iPhones, iPods or Apple TV set-top boxes.
Jobs cut the price of Apple TV from $299 (euro201) to $229 (euro154) and announced new software that allows users to order movies through the device and play them directly on their TV sets, eliminating the need to route the content through a personal computer first. The software is free to existing Apple TV customers and will be included in new Apple TV devices shipping in two weeks.
Jobs also unveiled a string of new features for the iPhone, showing how users of the combination iPod-cell phone-Internet surfing device can now pinpoint their location on Web maps, text-message multiple people at once and customize their home screens.
Jobs also said Apple has sold 4 million iPhones during their first 200 days on sale.
The crowd applauded when Jobs demonstrated mapping upgrades to the iPhone. Other features rolling out Tuesday included the ability to switch around icons on the iPhones home screen. Users also can create up to nine home screens.
Jobs also unveiled new software for the iPod Touch music player. New models will have be able to process e-mail and perform new mapping functions.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs holds up the new MacBook Air. The super-slim new laptop is less than an inch thick and turns on the moment it's opened. (AP)
That, I like very much.
The machine doesn't come with a built-in optical drive for reading CDs and DVDs, ...
That, I don't like.
You can get an external *wireless* drive for $100.
I haven’t use the optical drive in my current laptop in over a year.
bttt
G*ddammit. I just bought a new Sony because it was thinner than the Apple I was looking at.
Red Delicious ping
I wonder how many people will snap this in half?
Hope you kept the receipt...
With a titanium frame? Not likely.
Only $1799... Wow.
If you want on or off the Mac Ping List, Freepmail me
Hey, but at least you got a free rootkit with your Sony.
Invariably at these things you will learn about a very cool new gadget or about price reductions in existing cool gadgets.
The expo is always a few weeks after Christmas for a reason.
Very sweet, but I don’t have a need for one.
But here shows why Apple always has the best designs. Every other manufacturer tries to shoehorn existing chips into their notebooks, while Apple actually got Intel to design a smaller one.
No optical drive doesn’t bother me given the market for these. Use a USB key if you need detachable storage, they hold more than a dual-layer DVD anyway. And a Mac can boot from them.
One USB port is not great, but I don’t see much other option given that a USB port is pretty big. The only other answer would be to sacrifice a lot of compatibility by using a smaller port and requiring an adapter. I can see that for the video, but not for the ubiquitous USB.
No Firewire isn’t great, but then this isn’t a machine to be doing your high-speed video editing on anyway.
No Ethernet, again port size problems. It has N, so network transfers won’t be too bad. But again we come to the market for this, probably not people who will be shipping tens of gigabytes around all the time anyway.
In the end, Apple packed more power and usability in such a small space than anyone else has ever managed. It’s not missing too much compared to machines that are two to three times its volume.
Another glossy screen, eh?
The update to the iPod Touch makes it a feasible replacement for my laptop for 90% of the time I spend on my laptop. I’m going to get one as soon as they expand the memory on it.
Apple is selling a USB-to-Ethernet adapter for 10/100BASE-T for $29.
Milspec version no doubt. Works in any oilfield in the world or on the moon: count on it.
This may be the machine that brings Apple back into the corporate world.
As someone who used to travel a lot on business, this is the right computer to have. All of your presentations come with you and get shown on a digital projector that everyone has these days.
You can edit and write new stuff in Powerpoint right up to the last minute.
Enough oomph to run spreadsheets and do all the financials you will ever need.
And, it fits easily in your carry-on.
Plus, it is elegant.
Hats off to Steve again. Liberal or not he does computers right. Heck, I’ve had keyboards that weighed more than this baby.
Suspect many people would want a CD/DVD drive in their laptop and would be willing to have a slightly thicker and heavier one.
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