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Apple Announces iPad Air
Today Apple held a press conference to unveil its updated software and hardware products. The biggest news was the announcement of the 'iPad Air,' which has a 9.7" Retina display. It's 7.5 mm thick, which is 20% thinner than the older iPad. The weight has dropped from 1.4 lbs to 1.0 lbs, and it runs on a 64-bit A7 chip with an M7 motion coprocessor. Apple claims performance has doubled over the previous-gen iPad. The iPad Air will be available on November 1st. The iPad Mini is getting a new revision as well. The display has been upgraded to 7.9" at 2048x1536, which is the same resolution as the iPad Air. The new Mini has an A7 chip as well.
Apple also announced that the new version of Mac OS X (10.9 Mavericks) is available now and is free to all Mac OS X users. It includes better multi-monitor support, tabs in Finder, and a number of performance optimizations. The Macbook Pro is getting updates to the 13" and 15" models, which are now running on Intel Haswell processors. They both have PCIe SSDs, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, and Thunderbolt 2 support. Apple also talked about the redesigned Mac Pro line. As you may recall from WWDC, the new model takes up about about 1/8th of the volume as the old one. It's cooled by a single fan, uses 70% less power than the earlier model, and puts out 12 dB of noise when idling. It'll be available in December. On the software side, Apple has been updating a lot of their software to add 64-bit support and mesh with the new iOS 7 style of design. This includes iPhoto, iMovie, and Garageband, as well as the iLife and iWork software suites. iWork is also getting collaborative work features, and it's now free with new Macs and iOS devices.
Apple also announced that the new version of Mac OS X (10.9 Mavericks) is available now and is free to all Mac OS X users. It includes better multi-monitor support, tabs in Finder, and a number of performance optimizations. The Macbook Pro is getting updates to the 13" and 15" models, which are now running on Intel Haswell processors. They both have PCIe SSDs, 802.11ac Wi-Fi, and Thunderbolt 2 support. Apple also talked about the redesigned Mac Pro line. As you may recall from WWDC, the new model takes up about about 1/8th of the volume as the old one. It's cooled by a single fan, uses 70% less power than the earlier model, and puts out 12 dB of noise when idling. It'll be available in December. On the software side, Apple has been updating a lot of their software to add 64-bit support and mesh with the new iOS 7 style of design. This includes iPhoto, iMovie, and Garageband, as well as the iLife and iWork software suites. iWork is also getting collaborative work features, and it's now free with new Macs and iOS devices.
iWork is now free, and include collaboration features that MS Office will have a hell of a time trying to match.
-jcr
The only title of honor that a tyrant can grant is "Enemy of the State."
That's pretty impressive engineering. Think it allows Android to be installed on it? :)
The Internet King? I wonder if he could provide faster nudity.
since every new version is twice as faster as the previous one, given the fact that we see new versions in less than 18 months.
unless apple's engineers are optimizing this infamous loop:
for(i=0;i1000000000;i++);
Apple haters or not, the saddest thing to realize is that the only UNIX(R) Workstation on the market is now the Mac. As Apple is the only UNIX 03 certification holder who is still making desktops and laptops. All the other UNIX 03 hardware produced at the moment is Datacenter-only rackmounted servers.
So $2999 for a powerful UNIX(R) Workstation is a fair price.
1% APY, No fees, Online Bank https://captl1.co/2uIErYq Don't let your $$$ sit in a no-interest acct.
Not true... http://www.apple.com/ipad-mini/specs/ specifically lists the chip as: "A7 chip with 64-bit architecture and M7 motion coprocessor"
iWork is now free, and include collaboration features that MS Office will have a hell of a time trying to match.
-jcr
A major shot at other operating system, computer *and* mobile device makers. Free (as in beer) major OS update (computers) and free productivity apps (computers and mobile devices). Bundling the productivity apps with new computers and mobile devices will help Apple maintain their price points. Once again, Apple demonstrates that they are a hardware company at heart, that software is a tool to sell that hardware.
To be fair the Sony Xperia Tablet Z is only 6.9mm thick and only 1.1 pounds... The rest of the specs are also about the same, and that's been out for a month or two now.
wouldn't a better name have been "ipod hair"
The Mac Pro is intended to be a graphics/video workstation. You use external disks to hold your data because you have massive amount of data you need to deal with.
No internal drive is big enough for the workloads it is intended to be used for, you attach a external cage with a bunch of disks via thunderbolt or a SAN.
Apple makes their money primarily from selling hardware. By making OS updates free it makes moving to the Mac ecosystem that much more attractive.
The SXTZ display: 10.1". iPad Air display: 9.7"
If you won't care about the extra 128x336 pixels, I won't care about the extra 0.4 inches... Or the likely $100 price difference...
Sweet, 64-bit processor. Now I can have more than 4 billion friends on facebook!
Moving goalposts for the win!
Post a tablet priced cheaper, better specs, but 0.1 lbs heavier? The claim will be that the iPad is better because its more portable.
Post a tablet priced around the same, better weight / thickness, but not as good screen? iPad is better!
I will admit that when it comes to being exactly like an iPad, Apple does it best.
Not really true. It just needs special bootloaders to emulate Macs' EFI, and a few customized drivers, and a healthy disregard for EULAs.
Android is going to be with us forever.
Like Herpes.
If it was at least linear, I could deal with it. Buy why does upgrading from 16 GB to 32 GB (an additional 16 GB) cost $100, while upgrading from 64 GB to 128 GB (an additional 64 GB) also cost $100? $100 for 64 GB extra is almost reasonable, assuming they are using quality NAND storage chips like you find on hard drives, and not the kind of stuff you find in SD cards. But $100 for 16 GB of storage is just robbery.
Anthropic principle: We see the universe the way it is because if it were different we would not be here to see it.
Troll fail often? iPad and iPhones tend to have the top of the line internals at the time of release, CPU and GPU (they do skimp on RAM, though). If it wasn't for them maintaining screen resolution to help developers, they probably would've held on to the highest res screens title as well.
It's somewhat baffling that anyone these days would want an iPad 2.
It's not baffling and it's not about "want." Apple has signed a lot of contracts with school systems for large volume, fixed price delivery of iPads and most likely those contracts included qualifiers that Apple must deliver products which are "commercially available" at the time of delivery. Discontinuing the iPad 2 would probably require Apple to deliver the newer products which have a lower profit margin and a higher consumer demand.
Those are fairly common terms to put in when you're writing long term volume purchase agreements.
which has a 9.7" Retina display
Let me just pass that through my "marketing bullshit" remover:
which has a 9.7" display
systemd is Roko's Basilisk.
The issue is only mute if you broke the speaker and don't have headphones.
Apple laptops are not magic
but they are unix, and unlike linux, everything just works out of the box. for some of us, it's worth paying more to not have to dink around for hours on the weekend to hopefully get things running smoothly.
macs are overpriced, but not as much as some folks say. consider this MBP,
http://store.apple.com/us/buy-mac/macbook-pro
it's $1800 with no upgrades.
the most comparable thing i can find at dell.com is this,
http://www.dell.com/us/p/xps-12-9q33/pd?oc=dncwi16b&model_id=xps-12-9q33
it's $600 less, but it has 1/2 the memory, worse graphics, a slightly smaller display and lesser res, and a 128GB SSD vs. a next-gen 512GB SSD. also, it runs windows, not a unix-based OS.
how about toshiba?
http://www.toshiba.com/us/computers/laptops/kira/kirabook13/KIRAbook13-i5-touch
$300 less, but has last-gen graphics, last-gen core processor, and a last-gen SSD that's 1/2 the size. it does have a touchscreen where the MPB does not.
The vast bulk of the market has already turned it's back on this notion of "design". Once you take that away, Apple is nothing special at all.
I promised myself a long time ago to stop replying in Slashdot Apple fanboy/troll wars, but this one really got me.
Having used all modern OSes quite a bit, I can tell you plainly that if you think Apple is about fancy hardware cases and rounded corners, you don't get it. Please do not make comparisons to Windows commodity PCs solely based on hardware, because that's not what Apple is about on the desktop. Unlike almost anyone else in the industry, Apple is a software company that makes their money with hardware.
Their goal is to sell you a high-margin, high-end piece of hardware that may not be differentiated based on hardware, but is differentiated based on shipping with a UNIX-based OS that has a slick and efficient UI; integrated cloud sharing and automatic backups; bundled office apps that can match or beat MS Office/LibreOffice; iLife apps (iMovie, iPhoto, Garage Band) that have so serious free competition; and an integrated entertainment ecosystem (iTunes) that nobody else but Amazon comes close to (sorry, Google Play is nowhere near competitive for a desktop user). "I can get the equivalent hardware for cheaper with Windows or Ubuntu" is a false argument, because it's the software that makes a Mac special. I know there are "lots" of people who buy Macs and install a different OS on them, but I think that's a Slashdot-centric view of "lots" - a.k.a. "lots of people buy Raspberry Pis."
YMMV as to what that software differentiation is worth, but for those who buy Macs, the answer is clearly "it's worth a lot and still a bargain."
"95% of all Slashdot
> R&D
It's simple. Were it not for Apple and a very few other companies that do research, who take chances, who bet their lives that you want to move ahead, we would be using DOS.
R&D costs money. Dell and HP won't invest there; their money goes for marketing. Apple does real R&D and I am happy to support that.
Additionally, some foreign companies are investing increasingly in R&D. Apple (and Qualcomm, a few others) may be the only viable American company that remains.
Give your money to those who innovate, not to mass junk producers.
...omphaloskepsis often...