Apple may have announced a whole slew of new hardware in September but the Cupertino company wasn’t finished. Unlike previous events, it took over the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York City on Tuesday October 30, where CEO Tim Cook announced new iPad Pros, an updated MacBook Air and Mac mini. With so much tech ripe for the picking, we’ve produced a round-up of all the gadgets you can spend your money on.
MacBook Air
“The Mac has become one of the world’s most essential creative tools,” Cook said, adding that there’s 100 million Macs being used, of which 51% are bought by first-time buyers.
The all new MacBook Air laptop measures at 15.6mm thin and weighs 1.25kg – the lightest it has been. The aluminium bezel around the 13.3-inch screen has been reduced by 50% with four million pixels on the new Retina display, which means 48% more colour than the previous generation where images are more vivid. It also includes a built-in FaceTime HD camera at the top.
The new laptop has Apple’s Touch ID fingerprint scanner. This means that you can now use your fingerprint to unlock the device and to log in to apps that support biometric authentication while making payments securely. It also has a Force Touch trackpad, new keyboard from the MacBook Pro and two Thunderbolt 3 ports for power and connectivity. The latest addition to the MacBook family ships with an eight-generation CPU making it faster.
Available in silver, space grey and gold, it has storage of up to 1.5TB. And earning itself the title of “the greenest Mac ever,” Apple has made an alloy from 100% recycled aluminium, which reduces the carbon footprint by almost half.
The MacBook Air is available to pre-order and starts at £1,199. It will be shipped and in stores from Wednesday November 7.
iPad Pro
The main star of Tuesday’s event was the new iPad Pro, which got completely overhauled with a new design. It’s the iPad equivalent of the jump Apple made with the iPhone X last year.
“A magical piece of glass that transforms instantly to whatever you want it to be,” Cook said during the tablet during the launch. “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. This makes iPad the most popular computer in the world.”
The all-new iPad Pro comes in two sizes – 11-inch and 12.9-inch – and with a depth of just 5.9mm, the latest model is the thinnest one Apple offers. In addition, its Retina Display stretches from edge to edge, which means that its screen is bigger.
Similar to the new phones, Apple removed the home button in favour of swiping gesture for navigation and a Face ID scanner. The tech giant also swapped out the lightning slots for USB-C ports, a move that would let the new iPad Pros share chargers and accessories with Apple’s laptop, allowing you to charge your phone from an iPad.
Along with the bigger hardware changes, Apple has upgraded the processor to a new variant of the recently released A12 Bionic chipset which the company says is up to 90% faster than the last version and more rapid than 92% of mobile PCs sold in the last year. With its large viewfinder and revamped sensors, the company claims this is the best device ever for AR.
Connect the iPad Pro to the new Apple Pencil and Smart Keyboard Folio and you’ve got yourself a computer. And like the iPad, you can opt to buy one with cellular capability. The iPad Pro boasts a ten-hour battery life, according to Apple, while both models are available with 64GB, 256GB, 512GB or 1TB storage.
The new iPad Pro starts at £769 for the 11-inch device and £969 for 12.9-inch with just Wi-Fi.
Mac mini
The Mac mini, Apple’s box-sized computer that can be hooked up to external monitors as a desktop PC, made its return today. It can have up to 64GB of memory while it’s even possible to have up to 2TB of SSD storage inside, which makes it faster and powerful. In a bid to boost sales, Apple suggested stacking three or more together to achieve really intensive tasks.
Updated for the first time since 2014, this mini computer has four Thunderbolt 3 ports, bringing it up to parity with Apple’s other laptops and iMacs. And like the MacBook Air, its casing is also made of recycled aluminium.
Commenting on the new update of the Mac mini, Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing, said: “Mac mini is loved by customers for its ability to be used in incredibly diverse environments — from casual desktop use, to live professional performances, to multiple Mac mini computers powering through video renderings and compiling software code, to racks of thousands in giant app build farms — anywhere a small-but-mighty Mac is needed to get the job done.”
It’s all housed in a new sleek black box that is available to order today and goes on sale on Wednesday November 7, with prices starting at £799. 
