Apple Event Roundup: iPad Mini, New iMac, & More!

“We’ve got a little more to show you.” “little” being the cardinal word in the slogan for this Apple event. It seems like recently Apple have been working away in their labs chipping away at any unnecessary hardware reducing the weight and size of their products while only making them faster and more superior to their predecessors and other competing products.

We’ve seen this throughout the year, starting with the Retina Macbook Pros which received a 25% reduction in thickness and the gorgeous display. The same goes for the iPhone 5 which has a larger screen, but it is also thinner by 30%. I think it’s fair to say we all knew roughly what to expect, but for me, this was the best Apple event of the year.

Small updates were made to iBooks, users can now share passages from a book via email, Twitter and Facebook; Korean and Japanese languages were added, as was continuous scrolling. Additions were also made to iBooks author, allowing publishers to use their own fonts their own mathematical expressions, to make the textbooks truly their own.New templates were also added, the example showed looked gorgeous.

Only a few months ago Apple released the game changing Retina Display Macbook Pro. With this only being able as a 15” model many analysts predicted the release of a smaller 13” Retina display Macbook Pro, and they were right.  The new 13” Macbook Pro is only three quarters of an inch thick making a fifth thinner than the previous model.  It also only weighs 3.5 pounds, around 1.5kg, making it the ‘lightest MacBook Pro ever’.  Just like it’s bigger brother the new 13” MacBook Pro has a MagSafe 2 charger, two USB 3 ports, two thunderbolt ports, an HDMI port, and an SDXC card slot and terms of wireless connectivity the MacBook has Bluetooth 4.0 and 802.11n Wi-Fi.

The baby of the Mac family, the Mac Mini, also received internal upgrades; you now have the option of a dual or quad core Intel Core i5 or i7 Ivy Bridge Processor.  Users are now able to upgrade the hard drive to 1TB or add a SSD of  256GB and the RAM can also be upgraded to 16GB, the same HD graphics from the retina MacBooks are used, as is the wireless connectivity.

2012 marks the 14th year of the iMac and it’s safe to say that it has dramatically changed. The USP of the new seventh generation iMac is its magnificent thinness, the iMacs edges are an outstanding 5 mm thin and the computer as a whole is a huge 80% thinner than its predecessor. The iMac comes in the same sizes and resolution as the previous model, but has an IPS for a 178 degree viewing angle, and over 300 nits of brightness. Meaning that you’ll be able to see the screen clearer at different angles, and it’s a whole lot brighter.

One of the main problems with the iMac, and the MacBooks, is the amount of reflection you get on the display. The new iMac is said to have 75% less reflection because of its laminated screen.  Apple have created a new product, Fusion Drive, it’s essentially a fusion of the flash storage and an actual hard drive. This allows both the drives to work together to make the machine around 3X faster.

To my surprise Apple actually announced a new fourth generation iPad, the only difference here would be the addition of the lighting connector and an A6X processor making the device twice as fast.  Now onto the star of the event, the much anticipated iPad Mini. In essence, its an iPad 2, but smaller and with a lightening connector. Sizing up at 7.9” It’s somewhere in-between a small and large tablet. My personal problem with the larger iPad was the screen size, I felt that the device was too big to carry around most of the time and I find it more fitting for home use.  However with the iPad Mini I can see myself using it on public transport to read books, and as a portable companion along side my MacBook Pro and iPhone.

The iPad Mini weighs in at a minuscule 308g and is 7.2mm thin, about the same width of a pencil. The only flaw I see with this iPad mini would be that it doesn’t have a retina display, which Apple are likely to install on the next iPad Mini. It shares the same dimensions as the iPad 2, but because it’s smaller it has 31 more pixels per inch. Both front and back cameras are exactly the same as on the retina display iPad, as are the cellular capabilities and battery life.

Apple didn’t mention during the event that the iPad Mini has Siri but now that the details are up on the website it is confirmed to have Siri. I think that at £269 the 16GB WiFi iPad Mini model is perhaps the most reasonably priced Apple product in their current line up, and the price alone tempts me to go pick one up. If you’re looking for something small, portable, diverse, and you already have an iPhone or Mac the iPad Mini is the tablet for you.

Thanks to Osama Rahman for the Apple event roundup, anything missed out? please leave a comment below or you can follow Osama on twitter also and ask any questions.