[Editor's note: You can preorder the iPad Air 2, the iPad mini 3 now at Future Shop. The new iMac should be available within a week. I will post an update with the links as soon as more information is available.]
Cupertino - Apple today hosted a special event in their campus where they unveiled the iPad Air 2, the iPad mini 3, updated OS X Yosemite and iOS 8.1 as well as new Mac mini and an iMac with 5k Retina Display to round off this year's product offerings.
A year after they released the thin and light iPad Air, Apple improved on their 9.7-inch tablet with a model that's even 18 per cent thinner and which has improved display technology as well as the inclusion of Touch ID and a new gold colour variant.
The new iPad Air 2 also weighs less than a pound, and at just 6.1 mm, "is the thinnest tablet in the world,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “iPad Air 2 has a new Retina display with anti-reflective coating, second generation 64-bit A8X chip, all-new iSight and FaceTime HD cameras, faster Wi-Fi and LTE wireless, and includes the revolutionary Touch ID fingerprint identity sensor.” While the Touch ID will help users with authorization, the new iPad Air does not include an NFC chip for the Apple Pay function.
The new iPad Air sports an Apple A8X chip, which the company says delivers a 40 percent improvement in CPU performance and 2.5 times the graphics performance of iPad Air, and still delivers the up to 10-hour battery life. Also new are an 8MP sensor and advanced optics in the iSight camera.
Also updated was the iPad mini 3 with Retina Display which now features Touch ID functionality although many of the specs and features will be identical to the exisiting iPad mini models. A new gold colour variant was added to the mix while the 16GB, 64 GB and 128 GB capacities are being offered for the WiFi and WiFi plus LTE versions.
Also unveiled here today were new Macs, namely a new Mac mini with newer Haswell processors, Thunderbolt capability and a lower starting price point. The big reveal, however, was the new iMac with a 5K Retina Display, the first iMac to feature an Ultra HD display.
The new iMac is also the most powerful one ever shipped with 3.5GHz up to 4.0GHz Intel Core i7 quad-core processors, Hybrid Fusion Drives which merge an SSD with a Hard Drive and improved graphics. Ideal for photographers dealing with large images or video editors working on up to 4K video, the new iMac allows editing in full-resolution without the latency and wait times usually experienced in pushing that many pixels.
More than just the hardware, Apple demoed many of the features coming to iOS 8 as well as OS X Yosemite. The Continuity and Handoff features include routing voice calls, text messages and file transfers from desktop to mobile as well as automatic tethering to mobile hotspots.
Many of these features will work for existing users updating to Mac OS Yosemite (available today) as well as iOS 8.1 coming on Monday.
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