New iPads
For the past two years, Apple has used an October event to introduce new tablets, and today should be no different. This year’s new iPads isn't much different than last year’s models. Think faster, perhaps better cameras, and “Touch ID” fingerprint readers, which were previously only on iPhones.
The Apple iPad Air 2 starts at £399 ($499, AU$572), finally includes Apple's TouchID fingerprint sensor and at 6.1 millimeters thick, is -- according to Apple -- currently the world's thinnest tablet. The tablet weighs in at 0.96 pound -- 0.98 for cellular -- about 0.07 pound lighter than the original iPad Air.
Preorders start Friday, October 17 and the tablet starts shipping the following Friday, October 24. Wi-fi model pricing looks like this: £399 for 16GB; £479 for 64GB; £559 for 128GB. Cellular models are expectedly more expensive: £499 for 16GB; £579 for 64GB; £659 for 128GB.
The Air 2 gets a huge upgrade in potential graphics performance thanks to the new A8X CPU, custom made for the tablet. According to Apple, the new chip has a second-generation 64-bit architecture, houses 3 billion transistors and compared to the iPhone 6's A8 chip, has a 40 percent fast CPU and its GPU is 2.5 times faster. As a gamer finding himself gaming more and more on a tablet, those details excite me the most.
Don't expect people to stop using their iPads to take picture anytime soon. The iSight camera is now an 8-megapixel shooter -- up from 5-megapixel on the Air -- with a burst mode for taking a bunch of photos in succession. The rear camera also support timelapse, slow motion, and 1080p video recording.
The new Facetime camera hasn't been left out upgrade goodies. It now does burst selfies and has improved face detection.
iPad mini 3 was also announced with minor spec bumps.
OS X Yosemite
OS X Yosemite, the new OS for Mac devices was announced back in June this year and was opened for public beta. Apple today released the new improved OS for free and is available to download from the Mac app store. Unlike the previous releases of Mac OS X, OS X Yosemite has gone through a complete overhaul to make it go with the iOS 8 design and to make the design of their OSs look similar across devices.
iCloude Drive
iCloud, Apple's cloud storage service, is now similar to something like Dropbox. You can access your files in a folder view, upload anything you want, and access it on all your other devices easily.
Handoff, Continuity, and AirDrop
Handoff is the really big new feature here. Essentially, you can now easily send content from your iOS device to your Mac or vice versa. You can also accept calls on your Mac and reply to SMS messages.
Airdrop also now works between iOS devices and your Mac. So if you need to quickly send something over to your phone you just need to open up AirDrop on both devices and send away.
iMac
Apple announced the new Retina display 27 inch iMac which is a long waited upgrade from Apple since the new iMac was released in 2011.
The new iMac brings the high resolution retina display – first introduced on the iPhone and iPad, then the MacBook Pro in 2012 – to the desktop. The “retina 5K” display will have a native resolution of 5120x2880 pixels, leading to a 14.7 megapixel display.
That boosts the resolution and pixel density, but in keeping with Apple’s approach to mobile devices, it uses it to make text, icons and pictures sharper and easier to read, rather than simply making everything much smaller and adding more screen real estate.
The new iMac maintains the slim all-aluminium design, introduced in 2011 along with Apple’s Thunderbolt port for fast external connections, while the internals are upgraded with a 3.5Ghz quad-core Intel i7 and an AMD Radeon R9 M290X graphics card.
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