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Macworld: Jobs Puts Macbooks on Diet
Apple CEO Steve Jobs unveiled a long-awaited slimmer notebook, movie rentals for iTunes, and iPhone and iTouch updates at Macworld in San Francisco on Tuesday.
Mr. Jobs called the new Macbook Air “the world’s smallest” notebook.
Investors were underwhelmed. Shares of Apple dropped $11.55, or 6.46 percent, at $167.23.
Observers expected most of the announcements, and Jobs’ much-anticipated keynote address at the Moscone Center in San Francisco—while filled with showmanship—threw no curveballs.
But the audience still gushed with excitement when an image of the new Macbook Air was shown on a giant screen behind Jobs. With a maximum thickness of 0.76 inches, Apples’s newest laptop can fit in a standard manila folder, a claim Mr. Jobs proved on stage.
The new laptop will have a 13.3-inch widescreen, LED backlit display, a full-size keyboard, and multitouch gesture sensors. It will retail for $1799 and begin shipping in two weeks.
There had been speculation that the new laptop would use exclusively flash memory to help reduce its size, but that proved unfounded. Instead, the MacBook Air will borrow from iPod technology and have a 1.8-inch thick hard drive. Intel’s tiny new Core 2 Duo 1.6 Ghz processors have also helped shrink the motherboard.
“MacBook Air was built to be a wireless machine,” Mr. Jobs said.
The laptop will have built-in Bluetooth and Wi-Fi connectivity and a new option for remotely borrowing the optical drive of nearby computers—meant to make up for the new Mac’s lack of its own optical drive.
Apples’s wildly successful iTunes store will now offer digital movie rentals, where before it only gave the option to buy. Jobs announced content deals with major motion picture studios, including Universal, 20th Century Fox, Walt Disney, Paramount, and Sony Pictures.
“This is a pretty big move,” Inside Digital Media analyst Phil Leigh said.
iTunes has become a retail powerhouse, used by 22 percent of the U.S. and Canadian online population and accounting for at least 20 percent of all U.S. music sales in 2007, according to Forrester Research.
But as popular as iTunes is for music purchases, the same has not been true for video. Apple hopes to change that by offering more content and the option to rent.
The Mac maker also plans to roll out the next generation of AppleTV, which can connect a living room TV directly to the Internet without the need of a separate computer. Users will be able to rent those iTunes movies and watch them on their flatscreen TVs. The new Apple TV will retail for $229, down from the previous $299 price tag.
iPhone users weren’t forgotten either. The new mapping feature will use Skyhook Wireless and Google technology to triangulate the phone’s position and then place it visually on a street map.
“The iPhone is not standing still,” Mr. Jobs said.
iPhone users will now be able to send SMS messages to multiple contacts at once, and users will be able to customize up to nine home screens by adding icons for links to web sites.
Apple also launched Time Capsule, a wireless external hard drive meant for backing up data. The new hard drive will retail for $299 for 500 gigabytes and $499 for 1 terabyte.