MacWorld: Tiny new laptop, iTunes rentals
SAN FRANCISCO (AP) - January 15, 2008 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 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.
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.
Trading in Apple stock was heavy Tuesday, the first day of the
Macworld Conference & Expo in San Francisco. Shares fell $11.85, or
6.6 percent, to $166.93 in late afternoon trading.
Caris & Co. analyst Shebly Seyrafi said the MacBook Air's price
tag "may have been higher than people would have hoped for."
Investors also may be "incrementally" concerned that Apple's
iPhone was not updated so that it can connect to faster cellular
networks, he said.
The new laptop, which has a 13.3-inch screen and full-sized
laptop keyboard, will cost $1,799 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 for older
movies and $3.99 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 to $229 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.
In addition, Jobs announced a new product called Time Capsule
that allows Mac users to back up their data wirelessly on a
500-gigabyte drive that will sell for $299 and another with a
terabyte of storage that will sell for $499.
Jobs also unveiled new software for the iPod Touch music player.
New models will be able to process e-mail and perform new mapping
functions.
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AP Business Writer Rachel Metz contributed to this report from
New York.
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