Been watching the live streaming of the Oct 23rd apple event. This is the event where the iPad mini was rumored to be announced along with a refreshed ipad with retina display and a 13 inch macbook pro with retina display. For some mysterious reason, apple keeps releasing new products too often that if anybody wants to wait for a better product, he would end up waiting forever. Thats how fast they release new products. They seem to be attempting to score a record for most product launches in a year and because of the same, the difference between releases are usually not much, as was the case with the products announced today.
The venue is the California theatre and its the most amazing hall I have ever seen in person or on screen. Just before the presentation started, they were showing the exquisite detail of the walls, columns, etc and it looked really amazing. Whoever designed the hall is an amazing architect beyond any doubt.
Ever since Steve Jobs passed away, one change I see in these keynotes is that Tim actually delegates main parts of the presentation to the leads who actually led the design teams a.k.a Phil to present the product rather than presenting everything himself.
So, first off, it's the new 13 inch MacBook Pro with retina display, which looks as good as the 15 inch one released not so long ago. They are much thinner compared to previous versions and is designed to deliver stunning graphics performance in a small package. Then came the new Mac mini with upgraded configuration and a new server option for $999 which will have 2 1TB hard drives and will have the OSX server software preloaded. They claim this new Mac mini to be the most energy efficient desktop product ever.
Then came the new iMac. That was basically a disappointment as the only thing different is that these come with edge to edge glass over the display. They claim it to be 20% thinner. But I do seriously wonder how long are we going to pretend that only the thickness at the edge matters and it doesn't matter how thick the remaining part of the body is???
The funny part was that he was showing an actual new iMac and as he turned it to show the "thin" edge, the bulge tapering out away from the edges was quite clearly visible, as shown in the screenshot above(just look at where Phil's fingers are). This is how they seemingly confuses us over how "thin" their products are. Anyways, their products do work well, so I guess we can forgive them 🙂
Anyways, that's it about the mac department and Tim started moving on to talk about iPad. The usual talk on how iPad has been beneficial to everybody with a number testimonials did happen. A number of new versions of apps like iBooks, iBook author, etc was announced with "easier to use" updates. Now, they have announced the 4th generation iPad with the new A6X chip which is claimed to double performance. Now a new dedicated image processing processor is included to aid graphics performance. Cellular will still have LTE and WiFi is now twice as fast to support 802.11 a,b,g and n. This will use the new lightning port and the modified camera kit for it is out as well. This will come in both black and white and will be available for the same price as the 3rd generation iPad.
Finally, the iPad mini is revealed. This time, the iPad mini is actually thinner than other iPads. This again comes in black and white and the screen size is 7.9" diagonally. This does not have a retina display and supports the same resolution as the iPad 2. In essence, it's a shrunken iPad 2 with pretty much the same hardware except for the size. the difference is just that this has the LTE, whereas the iPad 2 cellular has just 3G.
What looked really funny is how they compared the iPad mini with what looked like a Samsung galaxy tab. But arguments are not great. They keep emphasising on larger number of pixels, which is quite obvious because the iPad mini has a slightly larger display namely 7.9" display instead of 7.2" and about how android displays multiple tabs on top and the control buttons at the bottom, while iOS doesn't do that when running apps.
The battery life is 10 hours as with other iPads since iPad 2. If you ask me about visual aspect, this time, it really looks like a stretched iPhone 4S 🙂 this will sell starting at $329 and goes up to $659. Both the two kinds of iPads will start shipping from oct 26th(I hope I heard that right). iPad 2 will continue to be available and is not being phased out as the rumours suggested.
They also introduced a new product called a Fusion Drive, which basically a storage device that uses a combination of SSD and hard-disk. The idea is that the SSD will work like a cache which will contain the most frequently accessed items so that on the overall, the seek time would be reduced during most times. Sounds intriguing but I remain skeptical because for this to work, the rearrangement of data to make sure that the frequently accessed data stays in the SSD while older/not often used stuff should goto to the hard-disk, that needs to be done on a regular basis should compromise the advantage of the mechanism. Yet, apple claims that it gives better performance. So, I'l believe it when I see it. This storage device will be available as an option for the new iMacs.
One of the things I find to be weird is how they keep saying the features of the iOS and OSX as the features of the product. So, it's like the descriptions about every different mac sounded the same as the descriptions on the different iPads, namely the new iPad and the iPad mini. This is all the talks about FaceTime, messages, safari, iTunes, photos, etc. quite frankly this is the one thing that makes apple events to be quite boring actually, since you keep hearing the same over and over again. To make matters worse, every time Tim comes on stage, he seems to be saying the exact same words again and again. However, this time, nobody uttered a single word about how "great" the new apple maps are. They kind of downplayed that part when comparing the iPad mini with the android product. The reasons for this are quite obvious since those maps aren't as good as google's or nokia's.
And that's pretty much it. Tim finally invited everybody to visit the hands-on demo area setup upstairs and the presentation came to an end.
Disclaimer: All images shown above belong to Apple. All rights to those images belong to Apple.
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