At its press event yesterday afternoon, Apple CEO Tim Cook took to the stage and unveiled a slew of new and refreshed hardware products. With the iPhone 5 and new iPod lineup announced several weeks ago, nearly all Apple devices have received refreshed specs and/or complete design overhauls.
4th Generation iPad and iPad Mini
The iPad Mini has been long rumored, so no one was surprised when Apple unveiled the new 7.9-inch iPad form factor. Essentially sporting the same specifications as the iPad 2, the Mini ships with a dual-core A5 chip at its heart, 16GB of storage, Wi-Fi, and a 1,024 x 768 IPS multitouch display. The hardware is a svelte 7.2mm thick and .68 pounds in weight, and is manufactured using similar processes to those of the iPhone 5 that give it that slick, anodized edge. Base price starts at $329, with higher-capacity and LTE models going up from there.
A new 9.7-inch iPad wasn’t expected, but Apple chose to make obsolete the current model just shy of eight months after its unveiling. The device has had mostly just an internal refresh, replacing the A5X CPU with the A6X (for roughly double the performance), adding the new Lightning connector like on the iPhone 5, and bumping up the resolution on the front-facing camera.
What wasn’t discussed is how we refer to these models without sounding stupid. Is the third-generation model now the “Old New iPad” or is the fourth-gen model the “New New iPad?” When this model is replaced, will it then be the “Old New New iPad?”
Mac Refresh
Apple milked the old 13″ Macbook Pro spec for as long as it could, but that 1,280 x 800 display was long overdue for an overhaul. The new $1,699 13″ Retina Macbook Pro ships with a 2,560 x 1,600 resolution display, twin Thunderbolt and USB 3.0 ports, and HDMI output.
Mac Mini looks the same as last year, but now ships with updated internals. It comes in two flavors with varying configurations. The base $599 model includes a 2.5GHz Core i5 dual-core Ivy Bridge CPU, 4GB of RAM, and a 500GB hard disk drive. The $999 “server” model ups the ante with a 2.3GHz quad-core i7 Ivy Bridge, 4GB of RAM, and dual 1TB HDDs on board. Both rely on Ivy Bridge graphics core.
The new iMac has gotten a ground-up refresh in both internal hardware and external design. In a move that will irk some but shouldn’t be surprising, Apple has stripped iMac of its optical drive, marking a 100 percent optical-free consumer lineup. You can buy an external one if needed, of course. The benefit to foregoing any ability to play a DVD is that the iMac profile is more svelte than ever; the edges taper to a mere 5mm thickness on both the 21.5″ and 27″ models.
Internally, it’s all Ivy Bridge, with base prices starting at $1,299 for the 21.5″ and $1,799 for the 27″. iMac is also available with Apple’s first Hybrid storage solution, dubbed “Fusion Drive.” It’s just like Intel’s SRT technology, except Apple’s uses 128GB of SSD storage and puts the OS and pre-installed apps on the SSD by default.
iBooks
On the software front, Apple announced a new version of its iBooks digital book store for iOS. Enhancements include deeper integration with Apple services such as iCloud and other social networks, as well as new authoring abilities for templates, fonts, and insertion of math equations.
