First Look: New Apple Products At Macworld

Thousands gathered at the Macworld Expo at the Moscone Center in San Francisco early Tuesday to hear their guru, Apple CEO Steve Jobs, lay out the company's 2008 road map and to see what, if anything, could top last year's announcement -- the iPhone.

The audience of Mac aficionados and scads of press people sat rapt listening to Jobs tell of record Leopard OS sales before unveiling the company's new Time Capsule backup appliance (a fancy name for Apple network-attached storage), designed to create automatic backups with Macs running OS X Leopard.

To demo its hourly backup feature, Jobs shows one of its famous Mac vs. PC commercials -- only this time, one lone Mr. PC ran into about a dozen Mr. Macs and asked "What's with all the yous?" winning one of many laughs at the expense of poor maligned Mr. PC.

Last year's show stopper the iPhone got some new software including presence-finding capabilities leveraging Google maps, the ability to create Web clips to access sites from the iPhone home screen, the ability to watch movies by chapter and in foreign languages, and the ability to text several people at once about how much cooler your iPhone is than their BlackBerrys.

The iPod Touch, or the iPhone minus the phone, also got some new apps: maps, mail, stocks, notes and weather. But unlike most of Apple's other software upgrades, this one will cost you twenty bucks at iTunes.

Apple's changing its tune on the Apple TV and trying to revive the slumping product by pitching it as an Apple movie rental system for your flat screen television.

"Apple TV was designed to be an accessory for iTunes and your computer. That's not what people wanted. We learned that what people really wanted was about movies, movies, movies. And we weren't delivering that," Jobs said.

So, to make it more movie-friendly, unlike the original Apple TV, this one doesn't need to network to a computer! Users can download movies directly from the device after hooking it up to a television, much like they can probably already do from cable, making it seem a long shot that this version of the Apple TV will be regarded in higher esteem than the previous one.

In the weeks leading up to the show, Apple had been rumored to be making deals with almost every Hollywood studio, and it turns out the rumor mongers were right. Apple doesn't discriminate when it comes to the sources for its new iTunes Movie Rental service, signing with everyone from 20th Century Fox to Miramax to Paramount.

Movies can be downloaded for up to 30 days, but once you start watching, you have 24 hours 'til it's gone back into the ether, which may give it a slight edge over cable.

The first studio to sign on for Apple's iTunes Movie Rental service was 20th Century Fox, whose CEO Jim Gianopulos was on hand to praise Apple's foresight and genius.

"The real back story is that when Steve came to us with this idea it was a no-brainer. It's the most exciting, coolest thing we've ever heard," Gianopulos said.

The real show-stopper was Apple's MacBook Air ultra-thin notebook computer, weighing it at 3 lbs. and measuring just 0.76 inches wide -- at its widest.

Here Steve Jobs taunts you with the fact that he gets to touch it before you do.

The MacBook Air is small and thin enough to slide into a manila envelope, yet still has a full-size keyboard and a 13.3-inch backlit LCD display.

Jobs brought out Intel CEO Paul Otellini to praise the company for finding a way to make its Intel Core 2 Duo processor 60 percent smaller than its usual size to keep the MacBook Air as slim as possible. "When we started this project we didn't think it was possible," Otellini said.

Gosh, that's tiny!

Following Jobs' address, Academy Award and Grammy winner Randy Newman played a few tunes, including "You've Got A Friend In Me" from Pixar's "Toy Story," which ended the show without Jobs' usual "And one more thing...," leaving the audience slightly baffled.