Apple's fall event: iPad Air, Retina iPad mini, OS X Mavericks, and more

Every inch an iPad.

Last year, the overwhelming message of the iPad mini was simple: the iPad mini was smaller, but it was still an iPad. Tim Cook, Phil Schiller, and Jony Ive all reminded us over and over that Apple had to make hard choices to make the iPad mini — it had a lower-resolution screen and a weaker processor — but said that the iPads’ commonalities trumped their differences.

Three weeks after its announcement, the iPad mini with Retina display is now available for purchase in the online Apple Store. The release follows that of the larger iPad Air earlier in the month; both tablets feature the same 2048 x 1536 resolution and A7 processor, so the choice between the two more or less comes down to which size you prefer. Pricing starts at $399 for a 16GB Wi-Fi-only model and tops out at $829 for a 128GB unit equipped with LTE connectivity.

The iPad Air is now available in the US, China, and dozens of other countries. You can order Apple's thinner and lighter 9.7-inch tablet right now from the online Apple Store, and it'll also be at carrier stores and brick-and-mortar retailers starting at 8AM local time. The tablet is available in silver and space gray colorways; pricing starts from $499 for a Wi-Fi-only 16GB model and goes all the way up to $929 for the LTE-equipped 128GB version.

With a 2048 x 1536 resolution display and A7 processor, the iPad Air is much the same as the new iPad mini with Retina display. That device, however, has no official release date beyond "later in November," meaning that customers might face a tough decision on whether to pick up the Air today or wait for the mini's arrival.

The newest member of Apple's iPad family, the thinner and faster Air, was welcomed by the company with a new commercial shown off during Tuesday's event. The star of that one-minute spot is actually a humble pencil, with the iPad Air only making a dramatic appearance right at the end. The point, as Apple puts it, is that an "extremely simple tool" can also be "extremely powerful."

What you might not have immediately noticed is the identity of the person speaking those words — it's none other than Bryan Cranston, the actor who played the iconic Walter White in the recently concluded Breaking Bad. His soft and reassuring voiceover sounds a million miles away from the steely resolve of Mr. White — though its talk of classrooms and science labs can quickly turn sinister if interpreted to be spoken by the meth kingpin that Cranston so ably personified.

Yesterday, Apple announced two new iPads: the iPad Air and the iPad mini with Retina display. Both carry Apple's speedy new A7 processor, and both come with high-resolution screens. But when the dust settles, Apple will actually carry four different iPads you can buy — including, improbably, the two-and-a-half-year-old iPad 2.

Although Find My iPhone and iTunes Movie Trailers haven't received any headline new features, Podcasts now supports background downloading in iOS 7, with iCloud keeping your play positions in sync across Apple TV and iTunes. The updates are welcome, but that's not to say that Apple's work is over — the Remote app is yet to receive a refresh, and Find My Friends' egregious leather interface remains firmly stitched in place for now.

170 million iPads. Two new iPad models. 43 percent thinner. Four times the resolution. 64 percent running iOS 7. Free 10.9. Lots of numbers, lots of announcements. This is everything that matters from Apple's fall 2013 event, in Apple's own words — indeed, there was a lot to cover — in just over four minutes.

We just got a chance to play with Apple's new MacBook Pro with Retina display lineup, and it's very much what you'd expect: the same basic design, the same glorious display, but a whole lot faster.

The biggest changes are to the 13-inch model, which is now just 0.71 inches thick and weighs 3.46 pounds. That's slightly thinner and lighter than the outgoing model, but it's also faster — much faster. Where the old model would stutter and lag on web pages and while working with images, the new model's Haswell processor with upgraded Iris graphics was totally smooth. Obviously we didn't get to test it too harshly, but if it holds up when we review it, the 13-inch Pro just reentered the conversation in a big way — especially since the base price is now just $1,299. Unfortunately, that $1,299 doesn't buy you as much as you might hope: with just 128GB of storage paired with 4GB of RAM, you're likely to run out of space pretty quickly.

Apple's keynote announcing the iPad Air and iPad mini with Retina display is now available to stream online. Apple had quite a few things to unveil today at its event, from updated software suites to big improvements for its existing lines of devices. You can read our first impressions of the most exciting new products and follow along with all of the latest news using our Story Stream, directly to the right of this article. Otherwise you can kick back, stream the event to your favorite screen, and hear the nearly hour and a half of announcements straight from Apple's own executives.

After a year in which Apple’s product announcements have largely leaked out ahead of time, today the company delivered something of a surprise: a redesigned tablet, the iPad Air, that is the lightest full-size iPad to date at just 1 pound. Its announcement was coupled with the introduction of an iPad mini with the same Retina display as the bigger model and the A7 processor used by the iPhone 5s and iPad.

The iPad announcements followed a minor update to Apple’s Macbook Pro line of laptops and some more information on the new Mac Pro desktop computer, which is getting its first major redesign since 2006. The laptops go on sale today, with the Mac Pro arriving in December for $2,999.

Ever since Apple announced its first Retina display MacBooks last year we've been expecting the death of the company's last-generation MacBook Pros. It appears that day has finally come, but there's a notable exception. Apple has largely axed its entire line of MacBook Pros with DVD drives, but one model does remain: the 13-inch MacBook Pro, which is still available on Apple's website starting at $1,199. That's the same price it's sold for during the past year, and the model has identical specs — Apple hasn't given the old laptop Intel's latest Haswell processors.

Apple's decision to keep the outdated laptop on shelves while killing off the 15-inch model is an intriguing choice. Notably, Apple isn't even promoting the laptop on its website: the MacBook Pro product page only shows the new Retina models — you have to scroll all the way to the bottom and click "other models" to see the specifications for the older laptop. The 13-inch MacBook Pro with a DVD drive is well-known as a popular machine for high school students and incoming college freshmen, so it's possible Apple is keeping the model around for education users.

When Apple debuted the iPad mini last year, the tablet was immediately behind the curve. Sure, it had a slim body and a great build, but the tablet's display — the part of the device that you interact with nonstop — had a fairly low resolution at a time when affordable tablets like the Nexus 7 had something much better. Fast forward a year, and that difference has increased dramatically, at least until today. The iPad mini now includes one of Apple's high-resolution Retina displays, removing its most glaring shortcoming. Is that enough of a change to make the iPad mini the definitive choice for best small tablet?

One of the iPad mini's biggest strengths has been just how thin and compact it is, despite having a nearly 8-inch display. That's changed just a bit, as the tablet gained a small amount of heft and thickness in the step up to a Retina display, but the change isn't a huge one. Even at its imperceptible thicker size, the iPad mini still stays right on par with the others in its size class, namely Google's Nexus 7, Samsung's Note 8.0, and Amazon's 7-inch Kindle Fire HDX. While it's by no longer the obvious winner in size and weight, the iPad mini still does manage to build an 8-inch display into a size that its competitors use for a 7-inch display.

Until today, the iPad hadn't changed much over the past two and a half years. It got a little faster, a little thicker, and its display a little sharper, but they were all piecemeal improvements on the same iPad design. But today Apple changed that. It drastically shrunk down the 9.7-inch iPad, trimming off bezel, cutting out weight, and slimming its body to something far closer to the exceptionally small iPad mini: a change so notable that Apple is now calling it the iPad Air. It's an enticing new tablet — but as Apple slowly improved the iPad, so too did its competitors improve their own tablets. Is the iPad Air still the best large tablet out there?

We've just taken our first in-person look at Apple's new iPad mini with Retina display, and our first impression is that it's an iterative change from last year — but sometimes that's all it takes to make a great product. Although it doesn't venture far afield from what we expected, Apple has always focused at least as much on precise execution as it has on anything else — and the result of that focus is a small-sized tablet that more than holds its own against increasingly earnest competition.

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Apple's just announced the $499 iPad Air at its event today in San Francisco, and we've gotten a chance to spend a few minutes with the new device. Long story short: it looks and feels like a larger (but not that much larger) iPad mini, and that's mostly a really good thing. It's really beautiful, with cleaner bezels, a much thinner profile, and sharper, boxier edges.

The 9.7-inch, one-pound, 7.5mm-thick device feels much better in one hand than it used to, though it's certainly not as portable as the iPad mini — which now has a 2048 x 1536 screen to match the Air's as well. Along with the new A7 processor and a handful of under-the-hood improvements, this is just about the upgrade we expected, but more than ever the iPad Air feels like you're just holding a big screen full of the internet. That's probably a good thing.

With the second-generation iPad mini now official, Apple is today slashing the price of the original model. The first iPad mini will remain in the company's tablet family priced at $299, a lower cost that could help Apple combat aggressive pricing from competitors like Google and Amazon. It doesn't quite match the $229 price point of the Nexus 7, but the original iPad mini now represents the cheapest way into Apple's tablet lineup.

Announced one year ago starting at $329, the original iPad mini — along with the iPad 4 — sold three million units during its first weekend of availability. Since then, research from NPD and others has shown that the smaller-sized iPad has quickly grown just as popular, if not more so, than the larger model.

Apple's worst-kept secret and one of its most momentous announcements of the day has just been made: the iPad mini is getting upgraded with a new Retina display. The new screen's resolution is 2048 x 1536 — matching that of the latest 10-inch iPads — and the processor powering it is the same 64-bit Apple A7 chip as in the iPad Air and iPhone 5S.

Available in November for $399 with Wi-Fi or $529 with mobile data, the new mini is more expensive than its direct predecessor, but the first-gen device is being kept around as well. The 2012 iPad mini gets a price cut, now costing $299 and acting as Apple's entry-level tablet device.

Apple's finally getting ready to talk about its new iPads, and before getting to the new products Tim Cook gave an update on how the iPad got to where it is today. So far, Apple has sold 170 million iPads since it launched three and a half years ago in April 2010. That's up from the 100 million iPads Apple said it had sold just one year ago at the iPad mini introduction. To go along with it, there are 475,000 iPad apps in the App Store — nearly half of the 1 million total apps available. Time will tell just how far the brand-new iPad Air and iPad mini with Retina display can push that sales trend up over the next year.

Apple has officially announced the latest version of its iPad tablet. The newly named iPad Air features a design that's reminiscent of the iPad mini released last year. It's thinner and lighter than prior versions, and features a smaller bezel, which shrinks the footprint of the tablet down without compromising on screen size. Apple says it's 20 percent thinner at only 7.5mm thick, and weighs just 1.0 pound (28 percent less than the previous iPad). The screen remains the same; it's a 9.7-inch Retina Display with 2048 x 1536 pixel resolution. This is the first major redesign of Apple's flagship tablet since the iPad 2 was released in March 2011.

Aside from its new look, iWork for Mac has also been re-engineered from scratch, according to Apple, in 64-bit, and with iCloud syncing capability. The apps boast several new features, like content-sensitive editing panes, new transitions, interactive charts that update as you add new data, and object-based animations in Keynote. "It's about not cluttering screens with controls," said Eddy Cue, channeling Apple's motto for iOS 7 design: putting your content in the forefront. Once you're finished with a document, you can share it using a URL you can email or message to a friend. From their computer, they can open the document, and even make changes alongside you, just like you can in Google Docs.

Apple also announced that iWork will become free with the purchase of any new Mac or iOS device. Also worth noting, Apple recently made a few more of its apps free: GarageBand, iPhoto, and iMovie.

Apple is giving its iLife suite of apps for Mac and iOS a fresh coat of paint today, just in time for Mavericks and iOS 7. iPhoto, iMovie, and Garageband have all seen a visual refresh across mobile and desktop. Considering the desktop apps haven't seen a significant update in a long time, it's good news for those who rely on these apps that are bundled with OS X. All of the iOS and OS X apps are available for free today.

Eddy Cue focused on stage on how the apps now all include iCloud support, which means that saved projects across all three of the apps on mobile and desktop are accessible from anywhere, including Apple TV. Across the board the updates bring a simplified look that does away with some of the design cues prevalent in older versions of iOS and OS X, and Cue said that the apps take advantage of the performance improvements in Mavericks and iOS 7.

Apple surprised the world when it previewed the new cylindrical Mac Pro at WWDC 2013, and now the other shoe has dropped. The company has just revealed that the tiny new desktop will start at $2,999 this December.

A clip from Apple's keynote.

After updating the MacBook Air and iMac lines with Intel's latest Haswell processors, Apple today announced that the MacBook Pro with Retina display line of laptops would be getting a major refresh with the latest silicon from Intel. We saw tremendous battery life from the latest MacBook Air when we reviewed it earlier this year, and now Apple's more powerful line of laptops is getting in on the long-life fun. The new Pros will be launching with Apple OS X 10.9 Mavericks, which also promises to offer improved power consumption and extended battery life.

The new 13-inch model is thinner and lighter than before, at 0.71 inches thick and 3.46 pounds. It also has a lower price, starting at just $1,299, though Apple halved the amount of RAM in the base model to 4GB. Apple says that the new model gets 9 hours of battery life and has Wi-Fi that's three times as fast thanks to 802.11ac support.

Apple has just announced the latest version of OS X, 10.9 Mavericks, will be available as a free Mac App Store download today. In addition to the usual promise of increased speed and efficiency, the update has a number of improvements over 10.8 Mountain Lion, including a more robust notification system (which includes inline replies), better support for multiple monitors and full screen apps, a revamp of Finder, and the addition of iCloud Keychain for saving passwords.