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Tuesday, October 23, 2012

Tech Lots of New Toys from Apple

Posted by Goldy on Tue, Oct 23, 2012 at 11:29 AM

I'm slogging from home this morning so I thought I'd stream today's Apple event on my Apple TV, just because I could. Forget all the marketing fluff about Apple's past success, here's the news on new products:

New version of iBooks, featuring continuous scrolling.

New 13-inch MacBook Pro with "Retina Display." Also, 20 percent thinner, flash drives.

New souped up Mac Mini starting at $599. Fusion drive option.

New, much thinner, iMac. Fusion drive option. No built-in optical drive.

Apple Fusion Drive: 128GB Flash plus 1 or 3 TB hard drive. OS X automatically transfers most commonly used apps and data to faster Flash drive. Cool.

New iBooks Author with tons of new features for text book publishers.

4th Generation iPad. Faster A6X processer, doubles CPU and GPU performance. Facetime HD. Faster WiFi. LTE. Same pricing. iPad 2 remains at $399.

Surprise: 7.9-inch iPad Mini. 7.2mm thin, 0.68 lbs. Same 1024x768 resolution as iPad 2. Equal to or better specs than iPad2. Facetime HD. 10-hour battery life. Starts at $329.

I know. I know. I'm an Apple fanboy who owns a few shares in my IRA. So don't trust anything I say. But I think there were some pretty significant product announcements today that should have the competition somewhat worried.

I expect the press to focus on the new iPad mini, and whether or not the $329 price is aggressive enough to compete with cheaper Amazon and Android alternatives. Maybe. Maybe not. But I think the accelerated update cycle on the iPad is just as important. The updated iPad keeps it out ahead of the rest of the pack, and should bump up sales through Christmas. If you really want Windows 8 RT, I guess you'll go with the Microsoft Surface. But there's no compelling reason other than OS preference.

Also, the slew of Mac announcements should help Apple to continue to chip away at PC market share. I'm particularly impressed with the Fusion Drive, which if it works as advertised, is a great feature. And those new iMacs look gorgeous.

As for the iPad mini, the star of this morning's show, it's essentially an iPad 2 in a smaller package, at a $70 discount. It looks to me that Apple is making a play for customers who are attracted more to a smaller form factor rather than going after those coveting a smaller price. Apple clearly could have sacrificed a little margin to hit the $299 price point, but it didn't. Though it wouldn't surprise me if there was a steeper than usual discount for bulk educational sales.

Apple and Amazon just don't seem to be playing in the same market at the moment, so I'm not sure this will have much of an impact on Kindle sales. But I'm pretty sure Microsoft's hurdles just got a little higher today.

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It went better than I thought it would. The big question will be if Apple can deal with supply issues with the new iPad mini than they have with the new iPhone that is still a wait of three to four weeks to get one.

Posted by Cato the Younger Younger on October 23, 2012 at 11:35 AM

The fusion drive sounds a lot like a drive Seagate (and probably others) already did. I replaced a stock Apple drive with one to good effect...the drive had enough smarts to cache boot and common apps into flash on its own and was $50 more than a conventional drive. Significantly faster than a conventional drive for common tasks but same capacity and form factor.

Microsoft tried something similar in Vista but the hardware wasn't quite ready at the time.

That said: it's a really good idea and glad it, or something equivalent, is the stock part now.

Posted by david on October 23, 2012 at 11:53 AM

Meanwhile, Zynga games just let go 200 employees in the US, hoping nobody would cover it due to the Apple releases we've known about for ages.

@1 depends on how active the China-US trade war gets, or other disruptions from the China-Japan and China-Vietnam trade wars, quite frankly.

Posted by Will in Seattle

on October 23, 2012 at 11:55 AM

iPad mini is trying to compete with Samsung Note. Yawn..

Posted by JaxBriggs on October 23, 2012 at 11:56 AM

Little mentioned thus far, but for me one of the most exciting new features is a tiny thing now available in iBooks.

Up until now, we were not allowed to highlight and copy/paste from a book. Now we can.

This is a huge benefit for my reading/research/writing. And, it's a clear feature benefit for reading on the iPad over traditional physical media.

This won't get much play, but it improves my iPad experience exponentially. :-)

Posted by Timothy

on October 23, 2012 at 11:58 AM

Jax…It's a stretch to say that the iPad is "trying" to compete with any other tablet on the market. ;-)

Posted by Timothy

on October 23, 2012 at 12:00 PM

@jax, the appropriate device would really be the kindle fire. The Note (while big) is still considered a phone/hybrid and not a tablet.

Posted by Akbar Fazil on October 23, 2012 at 12:03 PM

Everybody's making fun of the iPad mini, but it's the first Apple product in a decade that actually interests me. It's just about exactly the size of a trade paperback, which is good -- I wish it was a tad smaller, the size of a mass-market paperback, but this is good. I think the Kindle Fire form factor is still better, but it's not an iPad inside.

Posted by Fnarf

on October 23, 2012 at 12:06 PM

@8, I'm with you. I held off on buying a replacement for my 2nd gen Kindle to see if what the iPad mini would turn out to be and I will at least check one out and may get one

Posted by Last of the Time Lords on October 23, 2012 at 12:10 PM

The Fusion drive is a clever implementation, but economically speaking it's a short-term hack to deliver solid-state performance at spinning platter cost, while the industry waits for solid-state storage tech prices to return to earth.

Posted by Eric Arrr on October 23, 2012 at 12:13 PM

See, even Fnarf is interested.

The main problem with the iPad has been it's the size of a seminar notebook, but the iPad mini fits into a male adult hand.

Posted by Will in Seattle

on October 23, 2012 at 12:16 PM

Just bought a new 13" Macbook last week, now I have to decide whether to return it and sign up for one of these retina models. Honestly though, given the price difference, the paltry 128gb, non-upgradable hard drive and non-upgradable RAM, I doubt I'll do it. I was already planning on replacing the DVD drive with a flash drive on mine anyway and keeping the stock 500gb HD for mass storage.

Honestly, if Apple is moving away from user-upgradable hardware throughout their product line, I might have to stick with my current computer for a long while. I've been willing to put up with most of Apple's bullshit over the years, but with their mindless war against jailbreaking and the ridiculous charges for doing simple RAM and hard drive upgrades, they're starting to lose me.

Posted by MRM on October 23, 2012 at 12:19 PM

@10, I don't know that the Fusion drive is "short-term." If you're in the market for a 3 TB drive, you're not likely to be moving toward an all Flash solution anytime soon.

Posted by Goldy on October 23, 2012 at 12:22 PM

MRM always check here before you buy Apple hardware:
http://buyersguide.macrumors.com/

Posted by ejamadoodle on October 23, 2012 at 12:25 PM

Still prefer my Nexus 7 to the iPad mini. Best value in the tablet market.

Posted by Umm on October 23, 2012 at 12:41 PM

I'm feeling too lazy to research for myself. Anyone know offhand when the new update to the iBooks app will be?

Posted by evilvolus on October 23, 2012 at 12:51 PM

@10 - That is a good point, and a decent solution for those looking to juice up a single-drive machine. There's been a lot of negative reviews of previous attempts at using HDD w/SDD buffer in the past, though, and I'd like to hear how Apples version differs from those. If physical space isn't an issue, a more reasonably priced SDD (for OS/aps) with a secondary HDD for storage would be very welcome.

I wish they'd put some attention into their towers now. The storied "Apple tax" is the most obscene in this area (Dell and HP do it to, but not quite like Apple).

Posted by Dougsf on October 23, 2012 at 12:53 PM

I wanna love the products more, but the iPhone 5 seems too thin and the iPad mini seems too fat.

Posted by stinkbug on October 23, 2012 at 1:00 PM

@Fnarf, check out the 8.9 inch Kindle. That's been making me pretty excited.

Posted by Joe Szilagyi

on October 23, 2012 at 1:23 PM

sorry, I meant @13

Posted by Dougsf on October 23, 2012 at 1:35 PM

@18 is that based on published dimensions or actual tactile feedback of the actual device?

Posted by Will in Seattle

on October 23, 2012 at 1:40 PM

@16 The new iBooks app is available now.

Posted by Goldy on October 23, 2012 at 1:55 PM

@19, that's way too big. The Paperwhite is more like it, especially since I don't really care about video for the most part. It's 6.7" x 4.6", compared to 6.9" x 4.2" for a mass-market paperback. That's narrower than the iPad mini, regular Fire, Galaxy, and Nexus, and shorter than all of them too. I wish a real tablet would hit that form factor.

Posted by Fnarf

on October 23, 2012 at 2:05 PM

Enjoy your shitty walled off operating system, non user serviceable hardware and 300% inflated prices. I don't understand the cult like devotion to one of the shittiest, and most corrupt corporations to ever exist, especially among leftist.

Thanks Goldstein,you have once again proved that you are an idiot.

Posted by Cascadian Bacon on October 23, 2012 at 3:49 PM