Right on the heels of the mega-successful CES, the Macworld has kicked off in San Francisco.

Another event that showcases hip new technology, this year’s conference has not let us down.

During the kick-off, Steve Jobs opened up a standard-sized manila office envelope and slid out … a laptop.

And the audience went wild.

The ultra-thin “MacBook Air” notebook computer is between .16 and .76 inches thick depending on the configuration you choose. It is packaged with a 80-gigabyte hard drive, and the option of a 64GB flash-based solid state drive as an upgrade.

Cool!

This was followed up by confirmation that Apple IS entering the movie rental market. iTunes will have 1,000 movies for online rental by the end of February, with prices of $2.99 for older movies and $3.99 for new releases. You can choose to  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.

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Following on Tyler’s post, Steve Jobs gave himself a nice case of whiplash yesterday and announced that Apple will allow third-party development on the iPhone starting in February, 2008.

A letter has been posted on the official Apple Web site: “We are excited about creating a vibrant third-party developer community around the iPhone and enabling hundreds of new applications for our users.”

According to Yahoo’s Gadget Freak, Ben Patterson;

“It’s pretty sad that Apple took so long to decide that open development on the iPhone would be a good thing—but now that the belated announcement has arrived, I think it’s great news. The Palm, Windows Mobile, and Symbian platforms are literally swimming in great third-party apps that have added untold value to their respective handsets, and I can’t wait to see what the iPhone development community has in store.”

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