What Does Tim Have Cooking? Apple Event Round-Up

Tim Cook and his colleagues took the stage today and filled the afternoon with lots of new apple goodness. Here is the low down on everything that was announced today:

First we have the iPad Mini. A sleek, thin and light 7.9-inch tablet made of anodized aluminum and glass, Really light and thin at 0.68 pounds and 7.2 millimeters.  Models come with LTE connectivity, naturally it comes with 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi and Bluetooth. It also uses the new Lightning port too. It comes in 16GB, 32GB and 64GB. It has a FaceTime HD camera, which is better than the one in the iPad 2. The iPad has a backside illuminated sensor and also supports Face detection.

Now as for pricing, It starts at $329 for the Wi-Fi only version, with 16GB of storage. The 32GB and 64GB are $429 and $529. If you want the LTE connectivity, you will have to pay $130 more.

You can start pre-order this Friday, October 26, and receive the Wi-Fi version on Friday next week, November 2. The cellular versions will come first to the US, two weeks after that date. They will come later to the rest of the world (no announcement yet).

Next up, Fourth Generation iPad. The tablet has a new A6X chip, which runs twice as fast on both CPU and GPU functions. The screen is the same 9.7-inch 264PPI display. The new iPad also has a Lightning connector. starting at $500, and an LTE model costing $630. Other than the chip there is really no other changes to the actual iPad itself.

New iMacs! The new models are 80 percent thinner (just 5mm) and about eight pounds lighter than the previous model! Yes, you read right! Apple will offer iMacs in 21.5-inch and 27-inch versions, the latter of which has a resolution of 2560 by 1440. The screen has 75 percent less reflection, HD camera, dual microphones, and a stereo sound system that’s rumored to be better than previous models.  Quad-core i5 processors (configurable up to i7), up to 32GB of RAM, 768GB of flash storage. RAM is accessible in the 27-inch iMac, but not the smaller one. four USB 3.0 ports and two Thunderbolt, SD card, gigabit ethernet, and a now, a fusion drive (more on that below). Basically 128GB of flash storage plus 1 or 3 TB of hard drive combined into one hard drive.

The smaller model starts at $1300 and ships in November, and the 27-incher starts at $1800 and ships in December.

Now we have the Macbook Pro’s which got a small makeover. Apple has officially announced a 13-inch version with a 2560 x 1600 Retina Display. the new 13-inch MacBook Pro has the exact same layout as the previous model: an SD slot, USB 3, and HDMI on one side, and USB 3, MagSafe 2, a headphone jack, dual mics, and a pair of Thunderbolt ports on the other.

Two base model configurations priced at $1,699 and $1,999. The cheaper $1,699 model features a 2.5GHz dual-core Intel Core i5 processor, 8GB of memory, and a 128GB SSD drive. The $1,999 step-up features the same processor plus a larger 256GB SSD drive. Both models can be further upgraded with a whopping 768GB SSD and a 2.9GHz dual-core Intel Core i7 processor. They each have a 7 hours of battery life, pending use.

Both models will be available for order on the Apple website today, October 23 and are shipping.

New Mac Mini’s have arrived! The baseline $600 Mac Mini comes with a 2.3GHz dual-core i5 processor, 2GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive. You can exand the RAM up to 8GB and the hard drive up to 750GB. Mac Minis are 7.7-inch squares of aluminum just 1.4 inches thick.

The $800 Mac Mini configuration comes at a 2.5 GHz quad-core i5 processor with 4GB of RAM and a 500GB hard drive. You can alos pimp out your Mac Mini with a 2.7GHz i7 processor, 16GB of RAM, and a 256GB solid state drive for $1500 all together.

Also available 2.3GHz quad-core i7, 4GB of RAM two 1 TB hard drives for $100.

Finally we have Fusion Drive, So what is Fusion Drive. It’s a new storage system that combines SSD and HDD. Basically, the speed of a SSD with the storage space of a HDD. 128GB SSD and a 1TB or 3TB HDD that’s fused into a single volume through software. In non nerd terms, it basically makes everything extremely fast!

Source: Apple.com