Bits: Updates From Apple's Product Event

Jim Wilson/The New York Times Philip W. Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, introduced the new iPad Mini.

Apple unveiled a smaller iPad, a new iMac and other revamped products on Tuesday at an event at the California Theater in San Jose, Calif. I filed updates from the event, and my colleagues Brian X. Chen and Nick Bilton in San Jose, and Nick Wingfield in New York, pitched in with commentary.
Jim Wilson/The New York Times

The big question around the iPad Mini is, will people pay an extra $130 for a device that is roughly the same size as its competitors? Apple is hoping its iOS 6, hundreds of thousands of apps, and of course, the lovely little Apple logo will be enough to entice them. But $130 might be enough to push customers in another, less expensive direction. People will decide with their dollars.

(Update: Dropping reference to retina display in the Mini, as there is none.)

— Nick Bilton

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

And we’re done here. While everyone expected to meet the new iPad Mini, today’s biggest surprises were a new iPad and the skinny new iMac. Watch for our full story on the announcements, coming soon.

At a starting price of $329, the iPad Mini is only $30 more than the much smaller, redesigned iPod Touch. That could make the iPod Touch a tougher sell.

— Nick Wingfield

Apple’s new iPad Mini ad features someone playing “Heart and Soul” on their iPad Mini piano. Everyone is cooing thinking about that scene from “Big” with Tom Hanks at FAO Schwarz and how far we’ve come.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

The new iPad Mini will sell for $329, quite a markup from Google’s $200 7-inch Nexus 7 tablet, and Amazon’s latest 7-inch tablet which sells for $160.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

The iPad Mini has a better camera than the iPad 2 for high-definition videochat, “ultrafast wireless” and the new, smaller Lightning connector that is in the iPhone 5. The battery life, sigh, is still 10 hours. A video featuring Jonathan Ive, Apple’s head designer, features Mr. Ive saying: “There is inherent loss in just reducing a product in size. We went back to the very beginning to design a concentration, not a reduction, of the original.” Cue the applause.

A reader, Nick in Los Angeles, notes that the welded-togetherness of the new iMac means it is not likely to be possible to upgrade its hard drive on your own, which was still possible with the last-generation iMac. It looks like the locked-up hardware of the iPhone and iPad is now seeping into the Mac line too.

— Nick Bilton

Apple is showing its typical video featuring its executives discussing the iPad Mini. Jony Ive is wearing a grey T-shirt, rather than his usual black V-neck. My mind is blown.

— Nick Bilton

Mr. Schiller is taking a few digs at Google with a side-by-side comparison of the iPad Mini versus the Android-powered Nexus. The iPad Mini’s screen is 7.9 inches diagonally, compared to 7 inches for the Nexus, but the display surface is 35 percent larger. The biggest differentiator, Mr. Schiller says, are the apps. “They have phone applications stretched out, not tablet applications,” Mr. Schiller says of Android apps. He is talking up the fact that Apple now has 275,000 apps customized for the iPad.

Phil Schiller is showing the iPad Mini next to the Google Nexus tablet. Reminds me of when he was in court for the Samsung patent trial, showing the iPad next to Samsung tablets.

— Nick Bilton

The new iPad Mini is “light as a pad of paper,” says Mr. Schiller. It features a 7.9-inch screen, compared to its 9.7-inch big brother.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Mr. Schiller is showing off the new iPad Mini, which fits in one hand. Steve Jobs once said that smaller tablets made by its competitors would never sell. He called them “tweeners.” Times change.

Mr. Schiller returned to debut the fourth-generation iPad. Inside is a new chip that offers faster performance. Of the iPad’s competition, Mr. Schiller says, “I can’t even see them in the rear-view mirror.” The new iPad has twice the graphics- and image-processing power of the previous generation, and still has 10 hours battery life. It’s getting the Lightning connector that is in the new iPhone. It sells for the same price, $499, as the previous iPad.

This is a surprise — a fourth-generation iPad is being introduced. Nobody saw this coming. Everybody was expecting the smaller iPad to be the only new iPad introduced today. The third-generation iPad has only been on the market for seven months, so this is unusual.

— Brian X. Chen

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Mr. Cook says 94 percent of companies in the Fortune 500 are now developing applications for the iPad.

Tim Cook is talking a lot about the importance of the iPad in education. The education market is a priority for e-reader makers because schools are now buying the devices for students.

— Nick Bilton

Steve Jobs’s widow, Laurene Powell Jobs, is in the audience.

— Nick Wingfield

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Mr. Cook says Apple did not expect the iPad to be a game-changer in education. The company announced iBooks Author earlier this year to encourage the development of textbooks for the iPad. Today, Mr. Cook says iBooks textbooks are now available for 80 percent of American high school core curricula and are available in 2,500 schools in the United States.

The new iMac, which is 5 millimeters thick, looks awfully similar to those things we call televisions. It looks like it’s just a matter of time before Apple takes this flat screen and sticks it on a wall.

— Nick Bilton

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Mr. Cook says the iPad hit the 100 million mark two weeks ago. “This is unprecedented for a new product in a new category,” he says. Apple sold more iPads in the June quarter than any other PC maker sold PCs, Mr. Cook says.

Mr. Cook is back and says Apple has sold 100 million iPads in 2.5 years. (Compare that to the 15 million 7-inch tablets that Amazon, Barnes & Noble and Google have sold combined.)

— Brian X. Chen

The 21.5-inch iMac will sell for $1,299. The 27 inch version will sell for $1,799. People are clapping. Mr. Schiller keeps talking up how “environmentally friendly” these new versions are. Both use 50 percent less power than previous versions.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Phil Schiller is boasting about the “Fusion” drive in the new iMac. Basically the operating system is installed on a flash drive for faster performance, and files are on the hard drive. Last I checked this was called a hybrid drive, which has been around for a while.

— Brian X. Chen

The new iMac is 80 percent thinner and eight pounds lighter that the previous generation. It features something called “friction stir welding” that sounds like voodoo, but really just means the entire hardware has been welded into one piece. The display comes in two sizes: 27 inches and 21.5 inches. Apple added an anti-reflective coating to reduce glare by 75 percent, Mr. Schiller says.

The iMac, which is now in its eighth generation, was the comeback computer for Apple when it was introduced 12 years ago. Back then, it was a blue bubble with a handle on the back that was added to help customers feel less intimated by computers.

— Nick Bilton

This is a pretty significant upgrade for the iMac, but it has been about 540 days since Apple last upgraded its all-in-one desktop.

— Brian X. Chen

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

The new iMac is much thinner than the last one. A lot of people in the audience are clapping — I suspect many of them are Apple employees.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

— Brian X. Chen

Apple just debuted the new iMac, a sleeker, smaller, slighter version of the previous generation. It’s eliciting roaring applause from the audience. The computer is “the most beautiful iMac we have ever made,” says Mr. Schiller. The screen looks about as thick as a file folder.

Phil Schiller is talking a lot about gigahertz, terabytes, megapixels, SSDs and a number of other things that most consumers no long think about thanks to the iPhone and iPad.

— Nick Bilton

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Mr. Schiller is showing off the new Mac Mini. It has Bluetooth and Wi-Fi, costs $599 and will start shipping today.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Apple’s live webcast of the event keeps cutting away to a shot that shows Bertrand Serlet, the former head of Mac development at Apple, in the audience.

— Nick Wingfield

Mr. Schiller is showing Apple’s new MacBook Pro ad, which talks up the retina display. The ad features cute pictures of kids, and people are getting emotional.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

A starting price of $1,700 for the new 13-inch MacBook Pro with retina display. That’s a bit more expensive than the 13-inch MacBook Pro was previously. But Apple is still selling a non-retina version of the MacBook Pro for $1,200.

— Brian X. Chen

The new 13-inch MacBook Pro is now almost as light as the 13-inch MacBook AIr, which weighs three pounds. Maybe they should have called it the Airy MacBook Pro.

— Nick Bilton

The new MacBook Pro features a high-definition camera for FaceTime videoconferencing camera and dual microphones. The most exciting thing, Mr. Schiller says, is what’s inside: “Everything has been reengineered from scratch.” He says the new MacBook Pro has an Intel dual-core processor and 7-hour battery life. It also “power naps” — while it’s sleeping it automatically runs software updates and backs up contacts. It will cost $1,699.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

The 13-inch MacBook Pro gets a retina display, following the iPhone, iPad and 15-inch MacBook Pro. Will we see a retina display on the smaller iPad today?

— Brian X. Chen

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, just took the stage to introduce the new 13-inch MacBook Pro. It’s 0.75 inches thick, 20 percent thinner than the previous version, and is a pound lighter, making it “the lightest MacBook Pro ever,” Mr. Schiller says. The computer features Apple’s “retina” display and has four times as many pixels as the previous version.

The Mac has been outgrowing the PC market for the last six years, Mr. Cook says: “The Mac is the No. 1 desktop in the U.S. and the No. 1 notebook in the U.S.”

With the introduction of continuous scrolling in iBooks, the book reading software will now feel similar to reading on the Web and in most of the offline reading apps available for the iPad.

— Nick Bilton

There are now 1.5 billion books in Apple’s bookstore, Mr. Cook says. The company is announcing a new reading option that has continuous scrolling — no more flipping page by page. This elicits “oohs” and “aahs” from the audience.

Mr. Cook says people have downloaded 35 billion apps for iOS devices, and Apple has paid $6.5 billion to developers. There are now 275,000 apps that have been custom-designed for the iPad.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

There are 200 million devices running iOS 6 — by comparison the latest version of Google’s Android is only running on 1.8 percent of all Android devices. Despite Apple’s new Maps app, people are upgrading to iOS 6 extremely fast.

— Brian X. Chen

Mr. Cook says there are now 200 million devices powered by iOS 6. In the last year people have sent 300 billion messages through Apple’s messaging system, or 28,000 a second.

Jim Wilson/The New York Times

Tim Cook just took the stage and is talking about the iPhone 5, showing a video of people standing in line for the phone all over the world.

We’re seated and getting ready to go. It’s a packed auditorium. Looks like an old cinema.

— Brian X. Chen