Apple slims Mac down; New laptop slim, powerful

Apple Inc. chief executive Steve Jobs took the wraps off a super-slim new laptop at the Macworld trade show yesterday, unveiling a personal computer less than an inch thick that turns on the moment it’s opened.

Jobs also confirmed the tech giant’s foray into online movie rentals, revealing an alliance with all six major movie studios to offer films over high-speed Internet connections 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, or about 1.9 centimres thick, at its thinnest, it’s .16 inches, 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.

Trading in Apple stock was heavy yesterday, the first day of the Macworld Conference & Expo in San Francisco. The company’s stock fell 5.52 per cent to US$168.91 on the Nasdaq market.

The new laptop, which has a 13.3-inch screen and full-sized laptop keyboard, will cost US$1,799 when it goes on sale in two weeks, though Apple’s website already has been updated to reflect yesterday’s announcements. 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 seven million units in the company’s 2007 fiscal year, up more than 30 per cent from the previous year.

After hovering for years with a two per cent to three per cent share of the personal computer market in the United States, Apple’s slice has grown to almost eight per cent, making it the third-largest PC vendor in the United States, according to the latest figures from market researcher Gartner Inc.

Other revelations during Jobs’ keynote address 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 yesterday in the United States and will roll out internationally later this year.

Jobs also unveiled a string of new features for the iPhone, showing how users of the combination iPod-cellphone-Internet surfing device can now pinpoint their location on Web maps, text-message multiple people at once and customize their home screens.