Apple Announces Apple Announces iPad mini, 4th gen iPad, new iMac, 13-inch MBP with Retina Display and more !

  • Few Minutes left ! Our Live Blog has started ! Enjoy 🙂
  • The theater is filling up fast — a ton of media are there!
  • Grizzly Bear on the sound system.
  • A lot of app developers and partners in the crowd, it seems.
  • “Ladies and gentlemen, please switch devices to silent mode.”
  • And it has begun! Tim Cook is now on stage, ready to discuss the great success of Apple.
  • Tim is out and talked about the success of the iPhone 5. Now we’re watching a video about the launch. People are cheering. And running. And the song is about running.
  • Running towards an iPhone.
  • Then the iPhone kisses you.
  • And you get married.
  • High fives all around for iPhone 5 buyers.
  • Look, people bought the iPhone all over the world.
  • And Tim is back out.
  • “Our team works incredibly hard to deliver products like the iPhone 5, and that reminds us why we do it.”
  • “Last month we announced the iPhone and incredible new iPods. An amazingly thin iPod touch, with the same Retina display we have on iPhone 5.”
  • “All of our iOS devices are powered by iOS 6, our latest version of the world’s most advanced mobile operating system.”
  • “We work hard to make sure all of our products are upgradable to the latest operating system. After just 1 month, we have 200 million devices running iOS 6.”
  • “This is phenomenal. It’s the fastest upgrade rate of any software in history that we’re aware of.”
  • “iOS 6 and Mountain Lion are designed to make our systems work seamlessly.”
  • “We’ve been working on new features that make your life easier, like documents in the cloud.”
  • “Customers have now placed 125m documents in the cloud, just over the last year.”
  • “Features like iMessage, it’s of course the best way to send anyone a message on a Mac or iPod touch or iPad, you can see all your messages on all devices.”
  • “Already in just last year, customers have sent 300 billion messages.”
  • Cheers for that from the crowd. And some whistles.
  • “You’re sending them at 28k per second. Maybe more right now.”
  • “And features like Game Center, the best way to play games with a friend. We now have over 160m game players.”
  • “And finally shared photo streams — the best way to share what you want with the people you want.”
  • “Customers have already shared over 70m photos with friends and family.”
  • “So you can see there are some great ways for your iOS devices and Macs to work together seamlessly.”
  • “These are not stretched out iPhone apps.”
  • “We’ve reached another milestone — customers have downloaded 35 billion apps from the store. This is jaw dropping.”
  • “Now, this is great for customers. They get the choice of fantastic apps. But it’s also great for devs. We’ve now paid out $6.5 billion to developers.”
  • “Now one of the most popular apps on the store is iBooks.”
  • “One tap and you get to the iBookstore.”
  • 400 books downloaded since the launch of the store. That’s a lot of books.
  • “And iBooks includes great options like this sepia theme, or night theme.”
  • “Today we’re introducing a new version with a new feature — continuous scrolling — just flick.”
  • “There’s also some new ways to share — tap on a passage and share on Facebook or Twitter.”
  • New languages, Korean, Japanese.
  • “Now I’d like to talk about the Mac.”
  • “The Mac has been outgrowing the PC market for 6 years straight.”
  • “That’s because it’s #1 in customer reliability.”
  • “This has led to the Mac being the #1 desktop and #1 notebook in the US.”
  • “Now we’re really pleased with all of the momentum of the Mac. But we are not standing still.”
  • “We’re going to continue innovating with the Mac. We’ve got some great stuff to show you this morning.”
  • Phil Schiller is out! .. BIG CHEERS
  • “Today is a big day for the Mac. It starts with MacBook.”
  • “Just a few months ago we introduced perhaps the best we’ve ever created the best ever.”
  • Phil is listing off great reviews of the MacBook with Retina display.
  • “You might not know that our best selling notebook is the 13 inch MacBook Pro.”
  • “Customers love it. It’s perfect for so many uses. So in typical Apple fashion, we’re going to take our best product, and introduce something better.”
  • “I’m proud to introduce the brand new 13-inch MacBook Pro.”
  • “It is incredibly thin. Just .75 thick.”
  • “A full 1/5th thinner than the old model.”
  • “It weighs just 3.5 pounds. Our lightest MacBook Pro ever.”
  • No optical drive. Go figure!
  • Retina display!
  • “Everything on it looks absolutely gorgeous.”
  • “Your apps look fantastic on it. Reading email the text is so beautiful you can’t see the pixels.”
  • “iLife apps are great too.”
  • “There’s never been a small notebook that gave pro photographers this capability.”
  • “If you’re looking for Retina apps, just go to our App Store. There’s a lot of great software to support the display.”
  • “So that alone is a great new feature. But there’s more.”
  • FaceTime HD camera, dual mics, stereo speakers.
  • “Let’s take the bottom off and take a look inside.”
  • “We use asymmetric li-ion batteries.”
  • Core i5 or i7.
  • Standard 8GB of RAM.
  • Up to 768GB of storage — SSD of course.
  • Phil is listing off some of the features of Mountain Lion and iCloud.
  • Because you know, this computer has Mountain Lion on it.
  • “This is a great new MacBook Pro. It starts at 8GB of RAM and 128GB of flash storage for $1699.”
  • With a 2.5GHz CPU.
  • “It starts shipping today.”
  • “Like all of our products, the team works hard on making these eco-friendly.”
  • “We’re so excited to show this to customers, we’ve created an ad. Let’s show that.” Ah ha, an ad.
  • “For the pro in all of us” says the ad.
  • Phil is showing off the full lineup of MacBooks — and prices.
  • “Next, Mac mini. You knew there’d be something called mini in this presentation, didn’t you?”
  • “The Mac mini is packed with great features. But the action on this product and the update is on the inside.”
  • Wow Phil is rushing through the Mac mini…
  • New mini starts shipping today. And it’s also eco-friendly.
  • “We said this is a big day for the Mac, and I have one more I’d like to talk about. And that’s the iMac.”
  • “It’s the #1 desktop model in the US.”
  • “It’s a great design. One that’s evolved over many years. Many people think of it as the flagship of the Mac line.”
  • Phil is going through the history of the iMac. “We’ve had 7 generations of the iMac, all better than the last.”
  • People are oohing, literally.
  • Super thin display.
  • “We have one here. Want to see one?”
  • “There’s an entire computer in here.” Laughs for that.
  • 80% thinner than the previous generation.
  • “That edge is 5mm thin.”
  • “We lovingly call this the chin.”
  • “This is so thin we wanted to do something even more with it — the way this is welded is called friction stir welding.”
  • “Let me bring up the old generation — isn’t it incredible how something new can make something else look so old?”
  • Phil is explaining the process of making the iMac thinner than the previous version.
  • “Let’s talk a little bit more about this display. It comes in two sizes, 27 inch and 21.5 inch.”
  • “We said it’s fully laminated. That delivers another benefit. Text and graphics will look like they’re sitting right on top of the glass.”
  • “We want to make it even purer, even thinner.”
  • 75% less reflection than the previous version.
  • “It’s very very cool.”
  • FaceTime HD camera, stereo sound “That sounds better than the previous generation.”
  • “Pretty remarkable. And of course, a lot of the work has been done on the inside.”
  • Up to 3TB of storage, Core i5 or i7…
  • Four USB 3.0 ports.
  • “I want to talk about storage a little bit more. Customers can choose what they want, a hard drive for storage, or an SSD for speed. But we have a new option. It’s called the Apple Fusion Drive.”
  • “What’s the Fusion Drive?”
  • “You order it and get a single drive.”
  • Core applications and OS stays on the SSD, documents stay on the HDD.
  • Apple has some logic which figures out which apps you use the most and will shift those to the SSD.
  • Performance is nearly that of a standard SSD. Very, very interesting.
  • “The iMac comes with a wireless keyboard and a mouse, of course you can get a Magic Trackpad. And for those of you still stuck in the past, you can get an optical drive.”
  • “We start shipping next month, in November.”
  • “This uses up to 50% less power when idling.”
  • “So that’s the new iMac. Perhaps the boldest new design we’ve done.”
  • And Tim is back out.
  • “These products are really cool.”
  • “Next I’d like to talk about iPad.”
  • “It seems like every time we get together, there are some new numbers to talk about the growth of this product.”
  • “We’ve now sold over 100 million iPads.” Huge applause for that.
  • “We sold more products in the June quarter than any PC manufacturer sold in their entire PC line.”
  • “This has attracted a lot of attention. A lot of other tablets are shipping. But the numbers tell a different story. The iPad accounts for 91% of tablet web traffic.”
  • “Why is the iPad so popular? Well it turns out there’s a simple reason: people love their iPads!” Laughs.
  • “They love the display. They love the camera for FaceTime. They love that they can connect anywhere they go on Wi-Fi or cellular. They love iPad’s legendary all day battery life. And they love all of the amazing apps optimized for iPad.”
  • “One of the things that is so rewarding is how quickly iPad has been embraced in education.”
  • “A teacher in Texas said ‘the iPad has been a game changer in education’.”
  • “We really believe in this. And we saw it early on. Earlier this year we introduced iBooks author to create textbooks. And iBooks textbooks are now available for 80% of the US high school curriculum.”
  • “There are now 2500 classrooms in the US with iBooks textbooks.”
  • “Today we’re announcing the latest iBooks Author. It includes some great new templates.”
  • Portrait templates, you’re able to use your own fonts… mathematical expressions dropped into books. Multitouch widgets.
  • “Publishers can update their books.”
  • This is available today.
  • “In addition to education, iPad is taking the business world by storm too.”
  • “It’s showing up and doing more and more things.”
  • 94% of Fortune 500 companies are testing or deploying the iPad.
  • “We couldn’t be more thrilled with how quickly iPad has been embraced by users.”
  • “But we know we are just getting started.”
  • “Earlier this year we announced an iPad with a Retina display. It’s the top selling tablet in the world.”
  • “But we’re not taking our foot off the gas. We’ve got some cool stuff to show you. I’d like to invite Phil back to the stage.”
  • “Thank you.”
  • “So just half a year ago we introduced the 3rd generation iPad with Retina display. So it’s more incredible that we’re sitting here to talk about the 4th generation iPad.”
  • “It’s amazing the pace the team is working at.”
  • “This 4th generation is a powerhouse. What’s inside it? A new chip, the A6X. It doubles the performance of CPU tasks.”
  • “It also doubles the graphics performance. The competition wasn’t even close to us, and now we’re just blowing past them some more.”
  • “We’re updating the camera, the cellular version has expanded LTE.”
  • Faster Wi-Fi, Lightning connector.
  • “We’ve added some new cables. Lightning to USB and Lightning to an SD card reader.”
  • “It comes in both black and white.”
  • Same configs of the last generation.
  • $499, with cellular, $629.
  • “So what else can we do to help customers to find more uses for iPad?”
  • Whoa. A smaller iPad just appeared on the screen.
  • “What can you do with this that you can’t do with the big iPad? Well this. Hold it with one hand.”
  • “This isn’t just a shrunken down iPad. There’s nothing as amazing as this.”
  • “It’s incredibly thin and beautiful. Incredibly thin and light. Want to see one in person?”
  • “This is iPad mini.”
  • For mini, it still looks kind of big!
  • Black and white — a treatment more like the iPhone 5.
  • “What screen size is it?”
  • 7.9 inch display
  • “All the software made for the iPad works on the mini with no change.”
  • “So it’s great for reading your email, surfing the web, managing your photos.”
  • “For kicking back and reading a magazine or a book.”
  • “It’s great for all of your iWork apps.”
  • Phil is really running through all of the apps you can run on this thing. Hint: it’s all of them!
  • “You’re gonna love Facebook on the new iPad.”
  • “If you love playing games, like Real Racing 2. Incredible.”
  • “I could do 275k examples! But we don’t have time.”
  • “It all works. And no one else can say that.”
  • “Here we have iPad mini on the right, and the new Android tablet on the left.”
  • “Let’s compare them.”
  • “There’s is made of plastic, it’s thicker and heavier.”
  • “Let’s look at those displays. Theirs is 7 inch, our is 7.9.”
  • “The iPad mini has a third larger display area.”
  • “And it doesn’t stop there. What’s the #1 thing people do on their iPads? Surf the web.”
  • “Let’s look at a webpage side by side.”
  • “The iPad mini is about 50% larger display area in the browser.”
  • “Customers love the ones written for the iPad.”
  • “What does the other one have? Phone applications scaled up.”
  • Phil is comparing app versions. Yelp, eBay, Pandora, TripAdvisor.
  • Pretty bad burns on Android — the platform looks weak on apps, as usual, for tablets.
  • “There’s an amazing set of technology that makes this a great iPad.”
  • A5, LTE versions, FaceTime HD camera, 5MP iSight camera around back.
  • Lightning connector, of course.
  • “All of this technology in such a thin and light device… the team has worked to get the same battery life. 10 hours.”
  • “You can see this is every inch an iPad. We’ve created a video to tell you a lot more about it.”
  • Jony Ive… is talking… about design.
  • If Apple can hit a killer price point on this, it’s game over for smaller tablets on the market.
  • “When we decided to make the iPad mini, we wanted to keep the things that make the iPad so magical.”
  • The iPad mini has the thinnest single cell battery we’ve ever designed.”
  • I wonder how the smaller bezel will impact reading…
  • And Phil is back out!
  • “This is every inch an iPad. As you see it comes with a great line of accessories.”
  • “It starts with a 16GB of storage, and will be priced at $329.”
  • That’s the lowest price yet for an iPad.”
  • Pre orders start this Friday. Wi-Fi versions shipping November 2nd.
  • “We have a TV ad we’re going to run.”
  • Oh this is cute. The big iPad is playing Heart and Soul. And the smaller one joins in.
  • Tears of joy.
  • Huge Applause !
  • HUGE
  • “Let me turn it back to Tim.”
  • “We told you earlier this year that you would see incredible innovation, and I think we kept our promise.”
  • Tim is listing off all that Apple has done this year.
  • … “Yes, it has been an incredible year.”
  • “We hope you love these products as much as we love creating them.”
  • “I’d personally like to thank all of the teams at Apple for dedicating their lives to making the best products on Earth.”
  • And that’s a wrap! Thank You For visiting Elie Chahine’s blog ! Subscribe to Stay Up To Date with our Latest Posts! Check The Full Review of The new iPad mini !

Watch The iPad mini keynote in less than 4 minutes:

Samsung to unveil new Galaxy device on August 15th

All eyes are on Apple this fall, as rumors of a revamped iPhone and an all-new iPad persist. If the speculation materializes, this October could bring one of the company’s biggest media events in recent memory.

And between now and then, don’t be surprised if the competition manages to steal the spotlight away with new produce releases and announcements. Samsung, in fact, is already making a move in that direction…

Engadget reports:

“We just received a “save the date” email from a Samsung US representative that revealed a new Galaxy device will be seeing the light of day on August 15th. We didn’t receive any details on what it could be, though this is most likely a US-bound device — the email says “please join Samsung Electronics America for a major announcement and unveiling of the new Galaxy device.”

The media invite doesn’t give away much information regarding the device, but the word “major” made our ears perk up. What could this be? A new phone? A new tablet?

A new handset is a possibility, though you’d think it unlikely considering that it’s only been a few months since Samsung unveiled its flagship Galaxy S III. And even the latest Nexus isn’t quite a year old.

The more likely scenario is that it’s a new tablet. Samsung doesn’t enjoy the same marketshare in tablets that it does in smartphones, and it’s undoubtedly looking to change that.

The question is, will it be a new 10-inch tablet, built to take the iPad head on? Or will it be of the 7-inch variety, aimed more at the Kindle Fire/Nexus 7 crowd? Honestly, either one of these scenarios makes sense.

Apple was already facing some pretty tough competition this fall, with new hardware expected from Windows Phone manufacturers, Motorola and HTC. Mix in this new device from Samsung, and that’s a lot of pressure for the company to deliver a hit.