We’re going to have a look at the announcements that Apple made at their event this evening. There’s quite a few on offer, including upgrades across pretty much all of Apple’s product lines, so we’ve got a lot to cover.
Let’s get into it!
iPad Mini
The big product of the event was the iPad Mini. The Mini is a smaller, 7.9″ version of the iPad. It includes the new Lightning connector, and it’s really thin and light, making it well suited for one-handed operation. The iPad Mini is $329 in the US, or £269 in the UK – a good £110 above the Nexus 7, which Apple slammed in their presentation. The Mini comes with a 1024 x 768 (non Retina) display, an A5 dual-core processor, 16 GB of storage and Wi-Fi or LTE, including LTE in the UK. Of course, it’ll sell millions. The iPad Mini will go on pre-order on Friday, with deliveries made on the following Friday.
We’ve already got a wide range of accessories ready for the iPad Mini, including iPad Mini cases and iPad Mini chargers. We’ll be looking at five of the best later today, so stay tuned for that one.
iPad 4
Yup, here’s one we weren’t expecting – a fourth generation iPad. The iPad 4 is very close to the iPad 3, but with the new Lightning connector included as well as a faster A6X chip that should offer double the performance in both CPU and graphics – and a reason to curse your luck if you’ve bought an iPad 3 in the seven months that have passed since it was released.
We’ve got new iPad 4 cases that will fit the new port design, as well as a range of iPad 4 accessories that will make use of the new Lightning connector, including some iPad 4 chargers that’ll work in your car.
Macbook Pro Retina 13″
Probably the second biggest announcement of the night was a Retina version of the 13″ MacBook Pro. Like the 15″ Retina MacBook Pro before it, the Retina display has four times the pixels of its predecessor. On the 13″ version, that means a resolution of 2560 x 1600. The screen is also brighter, with better contrast ratios and less glare. Inside, there’s no discrete graphics card (despite it being 1 mm thicker than the 15″ variant) but there is a Core i5 or i7, Intel 4000 graphics and a 128 GB or 256 GB SSD.
Over on our sister site GearZap.com, we’ve got a range of MacBook Pro 13 Retina cases if you’re into that kind of thing.
iMac
The iMac saw an unexpected and impressive update, becoming 40% thinner than the previous generation through advanced screen technology and ditching the optical drive of the previous generation. Measuring just 5 mm thin at its far edge, the machine is indeed breathtakingly thin.
The iMac also now includes options for a 21.5″ 1920 x 1080 display or a 27″ 2560 x 1440 display – not Retina by any means, but a good resolution for a 27″ monitor. Inside, there’s a core i5 or i7 processor, fairly strong Nvidia Kepler graphics cards and a new option for ‘Fusion’ drives, which combine SSDs and mechanical hard drives in a single unit that offers an excellent blend of storage space and performance, with your most commonly used items being automatically migrated to the SSD section.
The iMac is expensive though, starting at £1,099 for the 21.5″ model and £1499 for the 27″ model.
Mac Mini
Apple’s Mac Mini line of tiny desktop computers also saw an upgrade. The outside looks the same as always with a crisp aluminium hockey puck form factor, but inside there have been fairly considerable additions. You can now get a quad-core i7 processor, double the maximum amount of RAM and additional connectivity through Thunderbolt and USB3 ports.
The Mac Mini makes a great set-top box, although it is quite a bit more expensive than even the Xbox 360. The Mini consumes 11 watts of power and costs £499 in its lowest configuration, £679 for the i7 model and £849 for the server model with 2 TB of storage space.
Conclusion
So there we have it – five new products from Apple. We expected that they had beyond “a little more” to show us, but I don’t think anyone anticipated this many upgrades across this many product lines. Great stuff – what do you think? Are you planning on picking up any of the new tech? Let us know in the comments below or on Twitter @mobilefun. Thanks for reading.