Apple Annouce iPad Air

Apple has announced the iPad Air, the latest generation of its tablet that features a 9.7-inch Retina display in a new thinner and lighter design. Weighing less than half a kilogram, the iPad Air is 20 percent thinner and 28 percent lighter than the fourth generation iPad, and with a narrower bezel..

Apple has announced the iPad Air, the latest generation of its tablet that features a 9.7-inch Retina display in a new thinner and lighter design. Weighing less than half a kilogram, the iPad Air is 20 percent thinner and 28 percent lighter than the fourth generation iPad, and with a narrower bezel. Apple today also announced iPad mini with Retina display, bringing all the pixels from the 9.7-inch iPad to its 7.9-inch screen. The new iPads feature the Apple-designed A7 chip with 64-bit desktop-class architecture, fast wireless with built-in wifi and expanded 4G LTE cellular connectivity, and the newly-designed iOS 7 featuring hundreds of new features.

Weighing less than half a kilogram, the iPad Air is 20 percent thinner and 28 percent lighter than the fourth generation iPad, and with a 43 percent narrower bezel the borders of iPad Air are dramatically thinner. iPad Air’s Retina display makes web pages, text, images and video look sharp and realistic, and the new power-efficient A7 chip allows the battery to be smaller, helping reduce the overall volume by 24 percent from the previous generation while doubling its performance and maintaining its up to 10-hour battery life.

The new iPad mini with Retina display packs all the 3.1 million pixels (2048-by-1536 resolution) of iPad Air into its 7.9-inch Multi-Touch display, for a pixel density of 326 pixels per inch. The 7.9-inch Retina display of iPad mini is 35 percent larger than screens on 7-inch tablets. Images are crisp, movies play at full 1080p HD-resolution and the 475,000 apps designed specifically for iPad work automatically.

The A7 chip in iPad Air and iPad mini with Retina display offers 64-bit desktop-class architecture, advanced graphics and improved image signal processing from previous generations. With up to twice the CPU and graphics performance on iPad Air, and up to four times the CPU and eight times the graphics performance on iPad mini with Retina display, almost everything you do is faster – from launching apps and editing photos to playing graphic-intensive games. The A7 chip’s 64-bit architecture and support for OpenGL ES version 3.0 unlocks game console-like visual effects. The new iPads also feature the M7 motion coprocessor that gathers data from the accelerometer, gyroscope and compass to offload work from the A7 for improved power efficiency.

Both new iPads feature two antennas to support Multiple-In-Multiple-Out (MIMO) technology, bringing twice the wifi performance to iPad Air and iPad mini with Retina display at a data rate up to 300Mbps. Cellular models also come with expanded 4G LTE coverage to accommodate even 4G LTE networks worldwide.

iPad Air and iPad mini with Retina display now have a next generation FaceTime HD camera with backside illumination sensors featuring larger pixels for low-light performance. The iSight camera with five megapixel sensor and advanced optics, combined with iOS 7 and the image signal processing of A7, further improves still image and video capture on iPad bringing faster auto-focus, up to three times video zoom, five times still zoom, better dynamic range and automatic image and video stabilisation.

The new iPads come with iOS 7, featuring a new user interface, redesigned with an elegant colour palette, distinct, functional layers and subtle motion that make it feel more alive, claims Apple. iOS 7 has hundreds of new features, including Control Center, Notification Center, improved Multitasking, AirDrop, enhanced Photos, Safari and Siri.

iPad customers have access to the App Store, which now offers more than one million apps to iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users in 155 countries around the world, and more than 475,000 apps are designed for iPad. More than 60 billion apps have been downloaded from the App Store, which offers customers an range of apps in 24 categories, including newspapers and magazines in Newsstand, games and entertainment, kids, education, business, news, sports, health and fitness and travel.

The iLife suite of creative apps, including iPhoto, iMovie and GarageBand, and the iWork suite of productivity apps, including Pages, Numbers and Keynote are now free with every new iOS device running iOS 7, and are also available as free updates for existing users. All apps have been redesigned to match the look and feel of iOS 7, have been optimised to support 64-bit technology and include hundreds of new features.

RRP
iPad Air with wifi
16GB $598 
32GB $699
64GB $799
128GB $899
 

iPad Air with Wi-Fi + Cellular
16GB $749
32GB $849
64GB $949
128GB $1,049

iPad mini with Retina Display and wifi
16GB $479
32GB $598 
64GB $699
128GB $799

iPad mini with Retina display Wi-Fi + Cellular
16GB $629
32GB $749
64GB $849
128GB $949

Apple iPad Air arrives in Australian stores on Friday November 1st, 2013.