3 Biggest Announcements from Apple’s iPad and MacBook Event

Yesterday, at the Brooklyn Academy of Music, we were at Apple’s keynote where Tim Cook and co announced three new products: a new Mac Mini, a new MacBook Air, and two new iPad Pros. Apple has been on a hardware spree this fall, releasing the iPhone XS and iPhone XR just this past September, so if you could be forgiven if you haven’t been able to keep track of it all. Below you’ll find a recap of yesterday’s event as well as links to more-tailed stories of each product.

The new Mac Mini, a MacBook Air, and the two new iPad Pros are all available for pre-order, with an expected delivery date of early November.

Apple Releases First New Mac Mini in 4 Years

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This release has been a long time coming for Mac power users who need more than a laptop can provide but don’t want to be tethered, necessarily, to the display on an iMac. While the new Mini will retain a lot of the form factors of its predecessor — there’s not anything wrong with that — it’s going to carry up to 64GB of RAM, and work five times as quickly as the old model.

The Mac Mini is available to order starting today and for delivery or pickup starting on November 7, will start at $799.

The New MacBook Air Gets a Retina Display and Touch ID

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Apple something else that its fans have been praying for: a new MacBook Air. The 2018 edition is a 13.3-inch MacBook Air with a Retina Display that has 50 percent thinner bezels and 48 percent more color than the previous generation. It’s 10 percent thinner and a quarter pound lighter (2.75 pounds) too, while packing in Touch ID, a bigger Force Touch trackpad, 25 percent louder stereo speakers, a three-mic array and a third generation keyboard. It also features two USB-C/Thunderbolt 3 ports, one of which can be used to power a 5K external monitor or connect to an eGPU external graphics enclosure.

The 2018 MacBook Air is available to order right now and is expected to be delivered by November 7. It starts at $1,199.

The All-Screen iPad Pro Is a Creative Powerhouse

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The new iPros are way faster, brighter and generally more beautiful than predecessors, but this time around Apple gave the iPad Pro a new hardware redesign with many iPhone XS-esque features. Both new models have a full edge-to-edge display with slimmer bezels (50-percent narrower) and a TrueDepth front-facing camera – no notch, though – so you can unlock the new iPad Pro with Face ID. As for sizes, there are still two. The old 10.5-inch iPad Pro has been upgraded to have an 11-inch screen, but it’s housed in the same size body. And there’s a new 12.9-inch iPad Pro, but it has a smaller body and overall form factor than the previous 12.9-inch iPad Pro; Apple says that the new 12.9-inch iPad Pro is essentially same size as an 8×11 piece of paper. Another big upgrade comes in the form a new USB-C port (no Lightning port), meaning you’re easily able to hook it up directly to a DSLR to upload photos, or you can hook the iPad Pro to a 5K external monitor, too.

The new iPad Pros are available to pre-order today. You can expect them to ship and be in stores starting November 7.

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