Apple Announces iPad Air 471
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.
Re:Major shot at Microsoft, too. (Score:5, Informative)
It has been working on any device for a while now. It's similar to O365, it's browser based but free.
Re:Mini seems to go without M7 ... (Score:5, Informative)
Not true... http://www.apple.com/ipad-mini/specs/ specifically lists the chip as: "A7 chip with 64-bit architecture and M7 motion coprocessor"
Re:Major shot at Microsoft, too. (Score:2, Informative)
Which is why it does.
Re:Why is iPad so much better than iPhone? (Score:2, Informative)
Not to bash the iPhone, but how is it that Apple seems to be so much ahead of the pack when it comes to the iPad but the iPhone seems to be just another high-end smartphone? I mean the new full-size iPad seems so much better especially in size and weight than anything else out there, while the 5s is just a nice spec bump.
Ahead of the pack in technology or sales?
None of their devices are close to the head of the pack from a technology standpoint. They can hype things up well, and they sell well, but across the boards they're middle-of-the-road hardware with typically one or two "oh, but we've got this!" upgrades that can be heavily marketed for the brief interlude before Samsung or another company makes a call on its actual value and adds it.
And, frankly, its just fine that Apple works that way.
Re:Why is iPad so much better than iPhone? (Score:2, Informative)
So far ahead of the pack? iOS still can't do the stuff that Windows Pro can, including backward compatibility, keyboard, etc.
The reason the iPhone is "just another high end phone" is because they've been behind the curve for years now. Give the market more time, and just like everything else, Apple will fall behind by sheer force of numbers. 10's and 100's of companies can make more progress than a single company - any day, all day.
Apple makes a well polished item then gets stuck in it's own success while it falls behind. Mac vs PC all over again.
I'll eat my words if Apple remains as much of a cash cow as it is for munch longer.
Re:Why is iPad so much better than iPhone? (Score:5, Informative)
To be fair the Sony Xperia Tablet Z [sonymobile.com] 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.
Re:Mac PRO starts at 3K only 256GB storage (Score:4, Informative)
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.
Re:Mavericks is free? Hmmm... (Score:4, Informative)
Re:Major shot at Microsoft, too. (Score:4, Informative)
The collaboration features will work on any device that has reasonable HTML 5 support as it is entirely browser based...including Mac, iDevices, Windows (IE, Chrome, Firefox), and a fair number of non-apple tablets...including the Surface. No license or account is needed for the collaborators.
Re:iPads seem to overcome moore's law (Score:5, Informative)
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.
Moore's Law [wikipedia.org] is an observation about transistor density, not CPU speed.
Re: install on any machine (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Major shot at Microsoft, too. (Score:5, Informative)
Office only has a native client on Windows,
I beg to differ [microsoft.com].
Re:Why is iPad so much better than iPhone? (Score:4, Informative)
Backward compatibility with what, exactly? Do you expect iOS to run Windows software?
Keyboards? You can use a bluetooth keyboard with any current iOS device and a lot of previous generations too.
Behind the curve? Only a small percentage of Android phones and tablets are using cutting-edge technology for both hardware and software. It doesn't matter if there's 10 times more Android hardware if 90% of it is brand new yet low-end stuff that cannot even run the latest software.
Re:Only 16GB (Score:5, Informative)
Re:I gotta admit (Score:5, Informative)
Except the bootloader probably isn't designed to boot 32-bit OSes, ARMv8 isn't terribly impressive in AArch32 mode, and Android isn't 64-bit native yet.
Most of the speed ups the A7 gets are from 64-bit code as it cleans up a lot of the architecture. 32-bit code works, but the speedup is minimal.
And yes, the bootloader has to be 64-bit and then switch the CPU to 32-bit mode in order to boot a 32-bit OS. Running a 32-bit OS means you can't run 64-bit code at all. When you go down the privilege levels (secure monitor, hypervisor (VM), kernel, user) you can go from 64 to 32 bit mode, but to go the other way requires going up the stack.
Re:Major shot at Microsoft, too. (Score:4, Informative)
http://www.icloud.com/ [icloud.com]
Re:Mavericks is free? Hmmm... (Score:2, Informative)
Just the same as Mavericks, only you have to enter your CREDIT CARD INFORMATION to create an Apple ID.
Re:Why is iPad so much better than iPhone? (Score:5, Informative)
The issue is only mute if you broke the speaker and don't have headphones.
Re:Major shot at Microsoft, too. (Score:5, Informative)
I went here and tried to log in with my AppleID. It said:
Set up iCloud on a device to use iCloud.com.
Your Apple ID must be used to set up iCloud on an iOS or OS X device before you can use iCloud.com.
So for Linux and windows users, no, iWork doesn't work.
Re:A shot at other OS, computer *and* device maker (Score:5, Informative)
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 [apple.com]
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 [dell.com]
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 [toshiba.com]
$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.