Competing directly with the Nexus 7 and Amazon Kindle Fire HD in the quickly expanding small but powerful, cheap but well designed tablet market, the iPad mini is most important new product to come out of the October 23rd Apple media event.
It's been an extremely busy week so far for Apple, with the announcement of the iPad mini, the 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display, an all-new line-up of iMacs and Mac minis, and the surprising introduction of the fourth-generation iPad. Not wanting to take their foot off the gas, the company has now announced their Q4 earnings of 2012, and once again, it makes extremely pleasant reading for company executives and shareholders.
If you aren't happy with just getting your hands on the perhaps unexpected fourth-generation iPad as well as the new 7.9-inch iPad mini then Apple have followed their own recent trend by releasing the technical schematic drawings of each of their new tablet releases. It was largely expected that Apple would be unveiling a new miniature iPad during their Californian press event, but it may of come as a rather large surprise to most that a new fourth-generation iPad was also on the agenda, coming just seven months after the release of the iPad 3.
Microsoft's Surface RT will hit the retail market tomorrow, and with Apple having just made quite a few changes and improvements to the iPad range yesterday, comparisons are naturally going to be drawn. While the form factor, tech specs and software have been compared on numerous occasions, one of the key aspects specific to the new Microsoft tablet is that of the multiple-user accounts support in Windows RT.
Apple threw consumers and analysts a bit of a curveball yesterday by unveiling a surprise fourth-generation iPad complete with the new Lightning dock connector and a twice as fast A6X processor. It left many people pretty annoyed - particularly those who'd recently purchased an iPad 3. If you thought grabbing the fourth-gen iPad would keep you running the very top model for at least 10-12 months however, you might well be sadly mistaken.
Apple announced a smorgasbord of new and updated products yesterday, including the 13” MacBook Pro with Retina Display, all-new iMacs, refreshed Mac mini, fourth-generation iPad and, the most important device of all, the iPad mini.
Another Apple media event has been and gone, this time bringing multiple product announcements as well as the obligatory update on how existing devices like the iPhone, Mac and iPad are faring in the marketplace. Although, most of the attention will rightly be paid to the new 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display and the release of not one, but two new iPads, we mustn't forget that a number of important accessories were also mentioned during the keynote, albeit extremely fleetingly.
Today's media event from Apple in San Jose has, by all accounts, gone pretty well. We anticipated an iPad mini, tweaked Mac mini, iMac, 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display, along with alterations to the third-gen iPad and some sort of update to iBooks, and that's pretty much what we got.
The iPad mini, announced by Apple earlier to day in front of a packed crowd in San Jose, means there are now three different iPads on the market for consumers to choose from. Whilst the scaled-down slate hasn't throw up too many surprises - tying in with the rumors and speculation of the past few months - it does now present prospective consumers with even more to consider before making a purchase, so in this particular post, we'll run down some of the key features of each.
Although today's special Apple keynote in San Jose is centered around the announcement of the iPad mini, lest we forget the Retina-displaying, 9.7-inch iPad complete with all the bells and whistles. Released back in March, the 3rd-Gen Apple slab brought a host of improvements on its predecessor such as the A5X processor for quad-core graphics, and today, in line with recent changes made by Apple, a slightly-amended version of the slate, dubbed as iPad 4th-generation has been announced today.
