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.
Whenever Apple take to the stage to hold an official media event we can always be sure that it will contain a number of purposely made videos that are either overviews of the products on show or ad campaigns that will ultimately end up on the television. Yesterday's event at the California Theatre was no different with Tim Cook and Phil Schiller proudly showing off a number of videos showing off the range of new products that were announced during the keynote speech, two of which have been uploaded to Apple's official YouTube channel.
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.
Apple really threw up a surprise today by announcing the fourth-generation iPad. We expected to see a few touch-ups to the third-gen, including a Lightning dock connector and a more efficient battery, perhaps, but we certainly didn't predict so many changes.
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.
It’s finally here, folks! Apple has just announced the all-new iPad mini at their event today. It’s (mostly) exactly what the technology blogosphere was expecting: a smaller iPad 2. Check out all the basic specifications, pricing and availability after the jump!
In the days and weeks leading up to today's event, it was widely presumed Apple would, aside from announcing the iPad mini, also announce a refresh to its iMac and Mac mini computers. The rumor mill has proven itself to be on-point once again, and both desktops have been offered a substantial spec bump in line with the MacBook Air and MacBook Pro back in June.
After the critical success of the 15-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display, Apple has announced a similarly spec’d 13-inch model at their event in Cupertino, CA. It’s one hell of a portable notebook and everything about it is awesome. We’ve got the most important specifications, pricing and availability ready for you to read after the jump!
Unlike devices like the iPhone and iPad that require software updates to push new content to the product, Apple have the ability to update the Apple TV home screens remotely and add new web-based content at will. Several keen-eyed Apple TV owners have noticed the appearance of the new Apple Events icon that is themed in similar fashion to the event invites that were distributed last week for today's press event that we suspect will be dedicated to the purported iPad Mini as well as being heavily focused on education. More on the event here.
After the successful launch of the iPhone 5 last month, attention has quickly turned to the prospect of a scaled-down iPad following closely behind, and although the initial suppositions of the blogosphere were miscalculated - we expected the event to have been and gone by now - Apple finally gave its first indication that the elusive device is in existence by announcing tomorrow's special keynote.

