Started by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, and Ronald Wayne, Apple, now Apple Computers, has expanded from computers to consumer electronics over the last 30 years – and today adds another notch on Apple’s list of achievements.
In San Jose, CA after months of rumors and anticipation, Apple officially announced it’s launch of an iPad mini – even though some thought it would be called the iPad Air or iPad Play, or iPad U (well, maybe something to consider for the future). Some of us received the news while watching a live stream directly from a dedicated channel on Apple TV, on a Safari browser .
The timing is right – announced at the very top of the holiday shopping season. iPad mini with it’s 7.9″ screen, a significantly smaller then a screen size of an iPad can cut into Amazon’s Kindle line as a content consumption device, which are now in huge demand. Some analysts have suggested that Apple could sell 10 million of iPad mini devices during holiday season.
At the unveiling, started with an announcement of announced updates to its desktop and laptop computer lines, most notably the following:
Philip W. Schiller Senior Vice President Worldwide Marketing for Apple Computers introduced the updates to the following Apple family products
- MacBook Pro 13-inch Retina with Intel dual-core i5 or i7 Ivy Bridge, rich colors, deep blacks, 29% higher contrast ration, 75% reduced reflection, IPS for 178 viewing angle. with 7-hour battery, 2560 x 1600 screen resolution, 3.57 lb, up to 768GB of Flash, and 8GB of Ram and Intel HD 4000 Graphics – and with Energy Star rating 5.2
- Mac Mini – redesigned with 7″ 2560×1440, 21.5″: 1920×1980, IPS for 178% viewing angle, and over 300 nit brightness, full lamination design, plasma deposition process, 75% less reflection, individually calibrated, , up to 768 GB flash storage, 32GB Ram,Blue tooth, NVIDIA Kepler Graphics, up to 3TB HDD; Apple Fusion Drive with 128 GB flash storage, 128GB of flash storage. And you can plug in either a 1TB or 3TB HDD. In software these show up as one drive. And it’s built into OS X Mountain Lion with promise of faster reads and writes. iMac ships at the end of December, starts at $1,299
Tim Cook, CEO Apple Computers has announced that Apple sold over 100 Million iPads.
“People love their iPads. They love the big, beautiful, multi-touch display, the fast fluid responsiveness of Apple’s hardware and software working together…” They love the front camera that is absolutely perfect for FaceTime, and rear-side camera… and the love … amazing apps that have been optimized for them to work play create and learn.” Schiller said, “iPad is showing up more and more and doing more and more thing.s In fact almost every company in F55 is either testing or deploying iPad, and we are seing similar scucss in sma business”. “How quickly ipad is embraced by so many users to do so many things”. 94 percent of Fortune 500 is testing or deploying iPad.
- iPad- “New Features at the same price” Starting at $499, fourth generation.
Schiller “What can you do with an iPad mini that you can’t do with 4th generation iPad?”
- iPad mini: 49 percent larger in portrait, and 67 percent larger in landscape mode.dual-core a5 chip, FaceTime HD, front-side camera, 5 megapixel iSight camera on the back, LTE Wireless, 802.11a/b/g/n Wi-Fi @ 5.2Ghz. , Lightning connector, and famous 10 hours battery life. Starting at $329, preorder begings on October 26th, and beginning to ship internationally in several weeks.
iPad line compared
“It is every inch an iPad”