This time Apple has brought its fanfare to Brooklyn Academy of Music, New York. CEO Tim Cook kicked off his company’s keynote and Apple unveiled its long-awaited updates to some of its most popular devices like iPad.
This event was mostly focused on Apple’s mission to make its tablet more appealing to a larger audience.
Here are some highlights of the event:
- New iPad Pros eliminate the home button and incorporate Apple’s Face ID.
- New MacBook Air comes with a 13.3-inch, edge-to-edge retina display along with Touch ID
- A new Mac mini introduced, its the first update to the smaller Mac model in four years.
New iPad Pro:
Available in two sizes:
- 11 inches starting at $799
- 12.9-inches starting at $999
The new iPad Pro is 5.9 mm thinner, that’s about 15% slimmer than its predecessor. The new device no longer features a headphone jack or Home button.
iPad Pro comes with an edge-to-edge LCD display that Apple introduced with iPhone XR. It comes with 12X bionic chip, a notch more powerful than Apple’s high-end iPhone XS and XS Max smartphones. This device will ship with up to 1TB of storage along with Face ID and USB-C port. The USB-C port will also help users connect to monitors up to 5K to turn into a workstation. You can even charge your iPhone, by turning it into your own personal power bank.
Both models are available to order Tuesday and will arrive on Nov. 7.
MacBook Air:
The new MacBook Air starts at $1,199 which is expensive than the last generation of MacBook Air, which started at $999. New MacBook Air will available to order Tuesday and will be available for pickup Nov. 7.
This new device comes with a 13.3-inch, edge-to-edge retina display along with Touch ID which will allow users to unlock the device by scanning their fingerprint. This new MacBook Air comes with 8th-generation dual-core Intel CPU along with Intel UHD Graphics and faster 2133 MHz system memory up to 16GB, 1.5TB of internal storage, a battery life of 13 hours of video playback. Apple revamped the keyboard and trackpad and now sensor sits in the keyboard and enables touch-based Apple Pay.
Apple also announced new MacBook Pro graphics options that will support Radeon Pro Vega graphics for the first time and will deliver up to 60 percent faster graphics performance for the most demanding video editing, 3D design and rendering workloads.
This new graphics configuration option for MacBook Pro will be available to order on apple.com, in Apple retail stores, and through Apple Authorized Resellers starting Wednesday, November 14.
Mac mini:
After long four years, Apple introduced new Mac mini which the first update to the smaller Mac model. The base device has an 8th-gen Intel quad-core processor, storage up to 64GB, supports 2TB SSD drives, Apple T2 chip for security. It starts with 32 gigabytes of memory but can go up to 64GB of memory and works five times faster than its predecessor, Apple said.
The device comes in space gray finish and has 4 Thunderbolt 3 ports, two USB-A ports, an HDMI port, and an Ethernet port.
It starts at $799 which has a Core i3 processor, 16GB RAM, and 128GB SSD, and it too is available to order Tuesday. It will be available for pickup Nov. 7.
Finally, on this event, Apple announced its latest operating system, iOS 12.1 is available to install for iPhone and iPad users.