Posts in news

The New 11” and 12.9” iPad Pros: My First Impressions and Hands-On

I just came back from the media event Apple held this morning in Brooklyn, during which the company announced major updates for the MacBook Air, Mac mini, and iPad Pro. Personally speaking, the star of the show was – unsurprisingly – the new iPad Pro line, with two new models featuring a stunning edge-to-edge display, an iPhone X-like gesture-driven interface, more powerful CPUs, and a more compact form factor.

We’re sharing more details about specs, new features, and prices in our dedicated overviews (you can find the iPad Pro, Mac mini, and MacBook Air overviews here, here, and here, respectively). In this post, I’m going to be sharing some quick first impressions about the new iPad Pros along with some notes and pictures I took at the hands-on area Apple set up after the event. Obviously, I will be sharing a lot more about the new iPad Pros over the next few days and weeks both on MacStories and AppStories.

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New Graphics Options Coming to the 15-inch MacBook Pro→

Apple quietly updated its site to announce that new GPU options are coming to the MacBook Pro. In late November, the high-end 15-inch MacBook Pros will be available with the Radeon Pro Vega GPU, the same AMD GPU graphics architecture used in the iMac Pro. The new GPU features High Bandwidth Memory, which doubles the memory bandwidth at lower power and results is faster graphics performance that Apple says is up to 60% faster than the AMD Radeon Pro 560X.

According to Apple’s MacBook Pro webpage, the Radeon Pro Vega 16 and 20, each with 4GB of HBM2 memory, will be available in late November as part of the MacBook that comes configured with a 2.66GHz 6-core CPU and 512GB of SSD storage.

You can also follow all of our Apple event coverage through our October 30, 2018 hub, or subscribe to the dedicated October 30, 2018 RSS feed.

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The New MacBook Air: The MacStories Overview

This morning Tim Cook took the stage at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Howard Gilman Opera House to announce a brand new revision of the MacBook Air. This is the first significant redesign in years for Apple’s most popular line of Macs, and features huge improvements across the board.

The new machine marks the debut of a Retina display on the MacBook Air, which Cook said has been the most requested feature by far. Among other changes, the size and weight of the enclosure have also been decreased, two Thunderbolt 3 ports line one edge, screen bezels have been reduced, and new color options are available.

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The New 12.9- and 11-inch iPad Pros: The MacStories Overview

Today during its keynote event in Brooklyn, Apple took the wraps off the most radical change to iPad hardware since the first iPad Pro launched in late 2015. The new 12.9-inch and 11-inch iPad Pro models represent the iPad’s ‘iPhone X moment,’ bringing drastic changes to Apple’s tablet platform aimed at making the iPad an even more valuable tool for creation and productivity. While many of these iPad Pro changes are directly inspired by Apple’s iPhone efforts over the last 12 months, some represent new innovations entirely.

“The new iPad Pro is a huge step forward for powerful, creative, mobile computing; it has an all-new thinner design, speeds through projects with the super-fast A12X Bionic chip and unlocks with a glance using Face ID in any orientation — while you’re sitting or standing, with iPad Pro on your desk or lap, with the new Smart Keyboard Folio and new Apple Pencil,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing. “There has never been a mobile device anything like the new iPad Pro; it has a gorgeous edge-to-edge Liquid Retina display that curves into the corners, breakthrough performance that outperforms most laptops, Face ID, support for the new Smart Keyboard Folio and new Apple Pencil, advanced new cameras and sensors for the best AR experiences ever in any device, a high-speed USB-C connector, louder speakers, faster wireless and more, all packed into a thinner device that has all-day battery life and is 25 percent smaller in volume.”

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Mac mini: The MacStories Overview

Tim Cook introduced the new Mac mini at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Howard Gilman Opera House by gesturing to the sky. What followed was a video titled ‘The Arrival’ depicting a Mac mini descending like a UFO from the nighttime sky into the desert, which turned out to be a nighttime wallpaper from Mojave, Apple’s latest macOS update. It was a fun introduction to a computer that was last updated in 2014, and many Mac users had predicted would be discontinued.

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Apple Announces Release Dates for New iPad Pros, Macs, and iOS 12.1

Apple announced release dates for the new hardware unveiled during the keynote held at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Howard Gilman Opera House today and iOS 12.1. Here are the dates for each:

iPad Pros:

Pre-Order Date: Today
Ship Date and in stores: November 7th

iOS 12.1

Release Date: Today

MacBook Air

Pre-Order Date: Today
Ship Date and in stores: November 7th

Mac mini

Pre-Order Date: Today
Ship Date and in stores: November 7th

You can also follow all of our Apple event coverage through our October 30, 2018 hub, or subscribe to the dedicated October 30, 2018 RSS feed.

Replay Apple’s October 30, 2018 Keynote and New Product Videos

If you didn’t follow the live stream or announcements as they unfolded at the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Howard Gilman Opera House today, you will be able to replay it on Apple’s Events site soon. You can also catch all the product videos on YouTube.

The keynote video will be streamed here and on the Apple TV using the Apple Events app. Also, a higher quality version should be made available soon through iTunes on the Apple Keynotes podcast.

Apple has posted new videos, including its product-reveals for the new iPad Pro, MacBook Air, and Mac mini on its YouTube channel too. You can find all those videos below after the break.

You can also follow all of our Apple event coverage through our October 30, 2018 hub, or subscribe to the dedicated October 30, 2018 RSS feed.

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