What was announced
New MacBook Air
The MacBook Air sees its first significant update since 2015, adding a 13.3in Retina Display with thinner bezels all round, as well as a thinner and lighter body made from 100% recycled aluminium.
The new laptop has Apple’s Touch ID fingerprint scanner, Force Touch trackpad, new keyboard from the MacBook Pro and two Thunderbolt 3 ports for power and connectivity. It ships with an eight-generation dual-core Intel Core i5 processor and is Apple’s new entry-level laptop.
New Mac Mini
Apple’s smallest desktop was updated for the first time since 2014. It has 4 and 6-core eighth-generation Intel processors, up to 64GB of RAM and four Thunderbolt 3 ports bringing it up to parity with Apple’s other laptops and iMacs.
New iPad Pros
The iPad Pro has seen its most significant update since 2015, with a new all-screen display.
The new 11in version fits a larger screen in the same sized body as the previous 10.5in iPad Pro, while the 12.9in version has shrunk in size around the same screen dimensions.
Both tablets have Apple’s Face ID face recognition system, USB-C ports instead of Lightning ports and support a new Apple Pencil stylus and folio keyboard accessory.
Both tablets have Apple’s new A12X Bionic chip, which the company says is up to 90% faster than the last version, and faster than 92% of mobile PCs sold in the last year.
That’s it! Cook runs down the updates, and says goodbye. But first: “We’ve always believed deeply in the power of creativity to change things … what better way to celebrate that creativity, than with an amazing musical performance.”
No U2 here: Cook introduces Lana Del Ray to do a couple of piano numbers. Because Apple are prudes, she’s banned from naming her new album, “Norman Fucking Rockwell”, onstage.
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And finally, Apple has confirmed it’s shipping iOS 12.1 today, introducing pre-announced features including group Facetime, dual SIM support with eSIMs, and more emoji.
Price: The 11 inch iPad pro starts at $799 for 64GB of space, with the 12.9 inch model starting at $999 for the same storage.
The current 10.5 inch Pro also sees a price cut to $649.
John ends the session with video number seven, another advert for the iPad Pro.
Sian, who is in charge of developer relations, comes on stage to show some of the apps that developers are making.
AutoCAD is bringing its desktop class rendering engine to the iPad; DJay Pro can now mix up to five times the video clips; and there’s an Assassins Creed mobile game that’s running at 120fps.
We get more detail from 2K Games, as Greg Thomas comes up and announces NBA 2K Mobile for the iPad Pro. It’s a basketball game.
And Adobe’s Jamie Myrold re-announces the iPad version of Photoshop, and shows an augmented reality design tool, Project Arrow.
Now we get the standard bit where Apple pretends that people use Augmented Reality. The iPad is good for Augmented Reality, apparently.
There’s also a new Apple Pencil, which connects to the side of the iPad Pro with a magnet, charges wirelessly from it, and pairs automatically. It’s also got a button, of sorts – tapping twice on the side of the pencil changes modes.
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Get ready to buy new cables: the new iPad Pros have USB-C replacing the lightning connector. That makes it more capable as a computer – and even lets it charge an iPhone – but no-one likes having to replace all their plugs if they just use it as a charging cable.
It can handle up to 1TB in storage capacity, apparently.
The new iPad Pros have a new chip at their heart: the A12X Bionic, a tablet-class bump to the iPhone XS’s A12. It’s got 10bn transistors. That sounds like a lot of transistors!
“These iPad Pros are faster than 92% of all portable PCs sold in the last 12 months,” John says. That’s an impressive claim.
The graphics performance has doubled compared to the last generation – apparently delivering “Xbox One S-class graphics performance”, matching Microsoft’s console.
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Of course, with no home button, the new iPad Pro has FaceID, replacing TouchID. Unlike on the iPhone, it works in portrait and landscape mode, though, which is nice.
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The new iPad Pro
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The hard edges make it look a bit like the first-generation iPad, which is a nice call back, but everything else is different.
The screen, as with the iPhone XR, is now branded as the “liquid retina” display. But on the smaller model, the 10.5in screen is now 11in, thanks to the loss of the home button.
On the larger iPad Pro, the 12.9in screen stays the same, with the device itself shrinking.
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The new iPad Pro! It’s got hard edges, no home button, thin bezels all around, and still features a camera nubbin making it hard to place on a flat surface.
Tim introduces John, from the iPad division.
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The iPad Pro is first up. “Today we’re announcing an all-new iPad Pro, and it’s going to push what you can do on [an] iPad or on any computer even further.”
Cue video six, showing the new iPad Pro.
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Right, back to the expensive stuff: iPads.
“A magical piece of glass that transforms instantly to whatever you want it to be,” Cook says. “But you might not know that we’ve sold more iPads in the last year than the entire notebook line-up of all of the biggest notebook manufacturers,” he adds. “This makes iPad the most popular computer in the world.” I… guess?
Apple holds classes and talks in its stores, and has nice looking shops in cool places, we learn from Ahrendts. There’s another 60 classes that the company is launching today, she says, like a video creation class and a kids photography lesson.
They also run on 100% renewable energy, which I think we knew before, but is good. Back to Tim.
Tim’s back, and now he’s talking about Apple’s stores. So we get a rare appearance from Angela Ahrendts, head of retail, to talk about them.
Base config is $799, with an Intel Core i3, 8GB memory and 128GB storage. (So, I was wrong about the lack of Intel.) It’s also available from November 7, and also 100% recycled aluminium on the outside.
On memory, the Mac Mini can be specced up to 64GB of RAM, and they all begin with all-flash storage, supporting up to 2TB at max.
They also come with the T2 security chip, which enables the same Apple Pay and video encoding as the laptops – no TouchID though, for fairly obvious reasons.
Outputs: 2x USB-A, 4x USB-C, HDMI, Ethernet and power.
This is a small, fast, desktop, that’s being sold as a modular addition to any work flow – Apple even suggests stacking three or more together to achieve really intensive tasks.
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Apple’s smallest and cheapest computer, the Mac mini was considered dead by some, but no. Tom Boger, the head of Mac product marketing, comes out to talk about the new version.
It’s “space grey”. It starts with a 4 core processor, and can be upgraded to a 6 core processor. Interestingly, Apple hasn’t said the word “Intel” in this section, which is unusual and suggests that we may not be seeing normal Intel chips here.
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And Tim is back, introducing video number five, and the second Mac to be bumped today: the Mac Mini.
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Specs and price! 8GB memory, an Intel i5 clocked at 1.6GHz and 128GB of internal storage, from $1199, on sale today and shipping 7 November.
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And now video number four, repeating what we already knew.
The three finishes – black, grey and gold – do look quite pretty next to each other though.
Recycling! All the tin on the motherboard is from recycled material, and 35% of the plastic is post-consumer. And, now, the aluminium alloy in the shell is also made from 100% recycled aluminium.
That, apparently, reduces the carbon footprint by 50% and makes it “the greenest Mac ever”.
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The USB-C ports are, Grove says, Thunderbolt compatible, unlike the MacBook.
On battery life, the company is promising “12 hours of wireless web browsing” and “13 hours of iTunes Movie playback”.
And on size, the new machine is 17% smaller by volume than its predecessor, 10% thinner and weighs 2.75lb, compared to the previous model’s 3lb.
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Bad news for some, though, as Grove reveals that the MBA has the same third-generation keyboard as the current generation MacBook Pros do – one which with serious questions over its long-term reliability that still haven’t been answered.
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Another major update: the new MBA has TouchID, and Apple’s secure computing chip, the T2.
And the trackpad is replaced with the newish Force Touch pad, which dispenses with physical motion in favour of haptic feedback.
Cook introduces Laura Grove to talk about the new model in more detail.
“We’ve made the display better in every way. The familiar aluminum bezel… is gone. The new sleek design takes the screen glass to the edge of the border.”
The 13.3” screen has more than 4 million pixels, Grove says, with 48% more colour. It’s a straight 4x update to the older screen in terms of pixel density.
There’s still a webcam at the top of the screen, she adds, a side-swipe at the PC laptops that have moved it to the bottom for space reasons.
The new MacBook Air … looks a lot like the old MacBook Air. Two USB-C ports on the left, one headphone jack on the right, and a retina screen are the only visible differences from the previous version.
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“Now, it’s time for a new MacBook Air. One that takes the MacBook Air experience even further in the ways that mean the most to our customers. And of course, what we all want in a MacBook Air is a retina display.
“And I’m incredibly excited today to introduce a whole new MacBook Air, with a retina display and a whole lot more.”
Cue video number three …
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The Mac is doing well, Cook says. There’s 100m Macs out there being used, and 51% of Mac buyers are buying their first one – rising to 76% in China.
Cook is also proud of macOS, “the soul of the Mac”. He shows off macOS Mojave, the latest version of the software.
“Customers love their Macs,” he says, “and they especially love one Mac in particular… the MacBook Air.”
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“The Mac has become one of the world’s most essential creative tools,” Cook says, before introducing another video of people, including Lin-Manuel Miranda, Anna Wintour, and Kermit the Frog*, using Apple products. Lots of videos today.
*not technically a person?
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And we’re off, with a quick video showing a lot of New Yorkers using Apple product giving way to Tim Cook and a banner reading “❤️NY” – and a lot of applause, seemingly more for New York than Apple itself.
“We’re here today to talk about our most creative products,” Cook says, “and of course, that all starts with the Mac.”
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For the iPad Pro the change will be significant, as Apple attempts to dance the line between thin-and-light tablet and computer replacement without merging its iOS mobile operating system with its macOS desktop operating system.
Embracing USB-C will be key, as the Guardian’s Samuel Gibbs said:
Apple will hope the that refreshed iPad Pro with greater PC-like capabilities, including the versatility of the USB-C connector, will boost sales of the tablet against growing competition from Windows 10 2-in-1 hybrids such as Microsoft’s Surface Pro and Lenovo’s ThinkPad X1 tablet that aim to perform both tablet and laptop duties.
But in many ways an update to the long-favourite MacBook Air is more crucial. The Apple laptop has become the default purchase for many Apple-using businesses, but is now long in the tooth. Although not as ancient as the Mac Mini, which is still using components from 2014.
As Gibbs said:
Despite its popularity, the MacBook Air was last updated in early 2015 with fifth-generation Intel Core chips with 8GB of RAM made standard in 2017, and is still on sale with those old components.
Ever since the introduction of the new 12in MacBook in 2015, Apple has been expected to either drop the MacBook Air from sale or update it.
Rumours predict that the MacBook Air will see a redesign with an improved screen and newer seventh or eighth-generation Intel Core chips bringing it into line with Apple’s other computers.
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What to expect
Definitely happening
At least one new iPad Pro with a new design featuring:
- Slimmer bezels all round
- Face ID
- USB-C ports
- Derivative of the A12 Bionic chip from the iPhone XS
- No home button
This will likely be the biggest change to the iPad since the introduction of the 12.9in iPad Pro in 2015.
iOS 12.1 released
- A fix for the soft detail selfies
- Real-time depth effect (bokeh) preview in the camera app as you shoot
- eSim activation in the iPhone XS, XS Max and XR
- Group FaceTime calls
- 70 new emoji (because you can never have enough)
Probably happening
At least one update to Apple’s Mac computer line including some or all of the following: MacBook, iMac, Mac Pro and iMac Pro.
- Spec bumps to Intel’s eighth-generation Core i chips following their introduction to the MacBook Pro with TouchBar in July
Possibly happening
Replacement for the MacBook Air, that may or may not be called the MacBook Air, which hasn’t seen a significant update since 2015.
- New higher resolution screen
- Eighth-generation Intel Core i chips
- cheaper than a MacBook
- USB-C
Replacement for the Mac Mini which hasn’t been updated at all since 2014.
- Eighth-generation Intel Core i chips
Hello, and welcome to another Apple launch event.
This time round it’s the iPad and the Mac’s time to try and shine.
At 2pm UK time (10am New York or 7am San Francisco), Tim Cook will take to the stage in the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City.
We’ll be live-blogging the event here, or, if you’re so inclined you can watch the whole thing live on Apple’s website, or on Twitter.
