SAN FRANCISCO — Apple Inc. Chief Executive Steve Jobs confirmed the consumer electronics company’s foray into online movie rentals Tuesday, 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.
Jobs also took the wraps off a slim new laptop at the Macworld trade show on Tuesday, unveiling a super-slim personal computer less than an inch thick that turns on the moment it’s opened.
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 0.76 inches thick; at its thinnest, it’s 0.16 inches, he said. It comes standard with an 80-Âgigabyte 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, which will retail for $99.
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 Bros., 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.
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