Apple launches Web movie rentals, thin laptop

San Francisco, January 16 : Apple Inc unveiled a lightweight laptop about three-quarters of an inch thick Tuesday and said it would rent movies over the Web, moving the iPod maker into a very competitive market.

Shares of DVD rental rival Netflix Inc fell 2.5 per cent to $22.20 and Blockbuster Inc, the largest video rental chain, dropped 16 per cent to $2.72.

But Apple shares also fell, by more than 6 per cent to $167.64 in afternoon trading, as investors had expected both developments after widespread speculation.

"There wasn't the 'wow' factor from anything that Apple had to say today," said Michael James, senior trader at regional investment bank Wedbush Morgan in Los Angeles.

Chief Executive Steve Jobs made the announcements at the annual Macworld convention in San Francisco, where last year he showed off the highly anticipated iPhone for the first time, setting a high bar for this year's event.

Apple shares have nearly doubled since last year's Macworld, and in late December topped $200 for the first time.

Jobs said the new aluminum-skinned Macbook Air notebook was the thinnest computer available, at a maximum of 0.76 inches and tapering to just 0.16 inches.

Priced from about $1,800, the Macbook Air bridges the gap between Apple's entry-level and high-end laptops, and analysts voiced concern that it could steal customers away from its more expensive products.

"It's not really clear how many more incremental buyers you can drive, and there could be some cannibalisation," said Shaw Wu, an analyst with American Technology Research.

Macbook laptops have been one of the company's strongest products, with sales rising 37 per cent on the year in the fiscal fourth quarter ended last September.

Apple has enjoyed huge success with its iPod music players and more recently the iPhone, which Jobs said had sold more than 4 million units since its release last June. Jobs showed off new iPhone features such as the ability to display a user's location on a map and a way to customise the main screen with "web clips", or icons linking directly to specific parts of a Web site.

But Apple has struggled to find a big audience for Apple TV, a product designed to be a Mac accessory for watching Internet video on a computer or television and unveiled alongside the iPhone a year ago.

"It's not what people wanted. We learned what people wanted was, movies, movies movies," Jobs said.

A new version of Apple TV will be able to connect to the Internet directly and download TV shows, movies and music through iTunes. Viewers will be able to choose movies directly from their TVs and Apple said viewers could start watching within seconds if they had a fast Internet connection.

Jobs announced deals with major movie studios and several smaller ones to offer movies for rental through iTunes, with new releases costing $3.99 and library titles $2.99. High-definition movies will also be available.

The revamp of Apple TV hardware combined with a broad selection of movie rentals would give Apple an edge over competitors such as Amazon.com Inc, Netflix and Microsoft Corp, Wu said.

News Corp's 20th Century Fox, Walt Disney Co, Time Warner Inc's Warner Bros, Viacom Inc's Paramount, General Electric Co's Universal, Sony Corp's Sony Pictures, Lionsgate, MGM and New Line have all signed on to Web rentals, Apple said.

"It's too early to declare that this is going to be a big hit but this is arguably the best offering out there right now," Wu said. "No one has succeeded in this market, not even themselves."

By Scott Hillis

Light-using connectors may make supercomputers as small as a laptop

London, December 7 : A research by scientists at IBM has raised hopes for the development of supercomputers as small as a laptop.

The researchers say that the work they have completed may make it possible to do away with the copper wires, which are used to couple processing cores to each other.

The connectors produced by them uses light to pass data between the computational cores. This method is faster and uses less power than the method involving copper wires, say the researchers.

Described in journal Optics Express, the new device is smaller than previously demonstrated connectors that had shown promise to shrink computational clusters in future.

The report suggests that the device, called a silicon Mach-Zehnder electro-optic modulator, is many times smaller than previously produced convertors.

It is believed that the new device may replace the copper wires that connect cores with a device that converts electrical signals to pulses of light.

"What we have done is a significant step toward building a vastly smaller and more power-efficient way to connect those cores, in a way nobody has done before," the BBC quoted Dr Tze-chiang Chen, a spokesman for IBM's science and technology research division, as saying.

The researchers say that the new device may boost the power of coupled computational cores, for the speed at which data travels between the cores may be accelerated by using light.

Dr. Will Green, who led the research team, said that the use of light would enable the researchers to cut the amount of power required to move data between processors, and slash the amount of heat that a large computational cluster produces.

The researcher has revealed the technology is about 100 times faster than wires, consumes one-tenth as much power, and can be used to transfer data up to a distance of a few centimetres.

Dr. Green believes that the lower power requirement may help reduce operational costs for supercomputers.

Price of MIT professor's '$100 laptop' hits $200

Boston, October 30: A computer developed for poor children around the world, dubbed 'the $100 laptop,' has reached a milestone: Its price tag is now $200.

The One Laptop per Child Foundation, founded by MIT Professor Nicholas Negroponte, has started offering the lime-green-and-white machines in lots of 10,000 for $200 apiece on its Web site (http://laptopfoundation.org/participate/givemany.shtml).

Two weeks ago, a foundation executive confirmed recent estimates that the computer would cost $188, which was already higher than the $150 price tag in February and $176 in April.

The laptops are scheduled to go into production next month at a factory in China, far behind their original schedule and in quantities that are a fraction of Negroponte's earlier projections.

It is unclear when the machines will be ready for customers, as the Web site said version 1.0 of the software that runs the machine will not be ready until Dec. 7.

Foundation spokesman George Snell declined comment on the pricing or release schedule.

When Negroponte said he could produce the laptops for $100, industry analysts said it had the potential to shake up the PC industry, ushering in an era of low-cost computing.

He hoped to keep the price down by achieving unprecedented economies of scale for a start-up manufacturer, and in April, he told Reuters he expected to have orders for 2.5 million laptops by May, with production targeted to begin in September.

But that has not panned out. So far the foundation has disclosed orders to three countries -- Uruguay, Peru and Mongolia. It has not said how many machines they have ordered.

Wayan Vota, an expert on using technology to promote economic development who publishes olpcnews.com, a blog that monitors the group's activities, estimates orders at no more than 200,000 laptops.

"One-hundred dollars was never a realistic price. By starting with an unrealistic price, he reduced his credibility selling the laptop," Vota said.

Negroponte, a charismatic technologist who counts News Corp chief Rupert Murdoch and Mexican billionaire Carlos Slim among his friends, has attracted a lot of attention for the foundation.

He has met with leaders around the globe and promoted the introduction of computers into classrooms in the most impoverished regions of the world. As he has done that, big technology companies have boosted spending on similar efforts.

The laptop features a keyboard that switches languages, a video camera, wireless connectivity and Linux software.

Microsoft Corp is trying to tailor Windows XP to work on the machine and recently said it is a few months away from knowing for sure whether it can accomplish that task.

The display switches from color to black-and-white for viewing in direct sunlight -- a breakthrough that the foundation is patenting and may license next year for commercial use.

The laptop needs just 2 watts of power compared with a typical laptop's 30 to 40 watts and does away with hard drives. It uses flash memory and four USB ports to add memory and other devices.

Earlier this year the foundation teamed up with Intel Corp, which is developing a rival machine. The two may work together on a second-generation laptop. This first machine runs on a microprocessor developed by Intel rival Advanced Micro Devices Inc.