Apple reveals tiny new laptop

Apple CEO and co-founder Steve Jobs shows off the new Macbook Air ultra portable laptop during his keynote speech at Macworld.
Photo: AFP

Apple chief executive Steve Jobs took the wraps off a super-slim new laptop overnight, unveiling a tiny personal computer that is less than 2cm thick and turns on the moment it is opened.

At the Macworld Conference & Expo in San Francisco, 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 soon after they are 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 disbelieving fans at the conference.

"It's the world's thinnest notebook (computer)," Jobs said with a smile. "We went out and looked at all the thin notebooks out there and tried to distill a best-of-breed."

At its beefiest, the new 1.36kg computer is 1.9 cm thick; at its thinnest, 0.4 cm, 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 MacBook Air will be available in Australia in February at a recommended retail price of $2499.

World-leading computer chip maker Intel shrunk one of its fast dual-core processors by 60 per cent at Apple's urging to fit the power into MacBook Air, according to Jobs.

"When we started this project we didn't think it was possible," Intel chief executive Paul Otellini said, briefly joining Jobs on stage.

"There were times we sweated over it, but at the end of the day we innovated."

MacBook Air features innovations inspired by Apple's iPods and iPhone, according to Jobs.

For example, the compact hard drives in the laptops are the kind used in iPods, while touch pad controls in the computers mimic touch-screen "gesture" capabilities in iPhones.

"We learned from the iPhone and put it in our other computers," Jobs said

The movie rental revelation capped months of speculation that an Apple movie rental service was in the offing. The service launched in the US today and will roll out internationally later this year, although it remains to be seen whether the service will appear in Australia.