They’re here! iPad mini preorders have just gone live. We used the Apple Store app to get our order in, but the Apple.com store is now up as well. Go get your order in, because iPad mini supply isn’t going to last, then come into the comments and tell us which one you got. Me? I followed my own advice and picked up a 16GB iPad mini with Wi-Fi for $329, but I already have a 64GB third-gen iPad with Wi-Fi + LTE. What about you.
Back in 2010, Steve Jobs famously compared the 7-inch tablet form factor to the practicality of sanding down someone’s fingers. To Jobs, the average human finger would have to be shrunk by about 25% in order to properly interact with 7-inch tablet apps. “This is one of the key reasons we think the 10-inch screen size is the minimum size required to create great tablet apps,” said Jobs. It was one of those classic moments that showed his intense commitment to Apple’s idea of the ultimate user experience.
Fast forward to today, and Apple still has a thing or two to say about 7-inch tablets. Don’t let the smallness of the iPad mini fool you, Apple is firmly against 7-inch tablets because they are vastly inferior to 8-inch tablets. Apparently one inch makes all the difference.
“We’re very proud to end a fantastic fiscal year with record September quarter results,” said Apple CEO Tim Cook in today’s fourth quarter earnings report. “We’re entering this holiday season with the best iPhone, iPad, Mac and iPod products ever, and we remain very confident in our new product pipeline.”
While Apple didn’t see a ‘blowout’ quarter this time around, things are still looking very good for the Cupertino company. Apple is still the most valuable company on earth, and its flagship products are seeing crazy growth in sales. We’ve collected all of the big numbers from today’s earnings call:
Apple just announced its earnings for the fourth quarter of 2012 ahead of its conferenced call in 30 minutes. The company has reported $36 billion in revenue and $8.2 billion in profit. 29.9 million iPhones 14 million iPads and 4.9 million Macs were sold.
Apple expected to earn $34 billion in revenue, so it beat its own estimate met Wall Street’s average estimate of $35-$37 billion. All of Apple’s product sales are up when compared to Q4 of last year, but the Mac only grew 1%. iPad sales also suffered because everyone has been anticipating the iPad mini that was announced earlier this week.
Looking ahead to its next quarter, Apple expects a staggering $52 billion in revenue due to the holiday season.
Official press release from Apple:
Word on the street has been that Apple is preparing to launch its own Spotify/Pandora-killer in the near future, and a new report today from Bloomberg claims that the rumored internet radio service will launch in early 2013.
Apple has reportedly been in talks with many of the major music labels for quite some time, and deals will hopefully be reached by mid-November. The details of the upcoming service remain a mystery, but it looks like Apple isn’t settling for the status quo.
After over a year of rumor and speculation, we’re less than a day away fr0m the iPad mini finally going up for preorder. Starting at 12:01AM Pacific Time, the iPad mini (Wi-Fi version only) will be available for preorder on Apple’s official site, with units delivering on November 2nd.
It’s always hard to tell with a new product, but if history is anything to go by — the iPhone 5 preorders sold out within hours, and stock is still short — the iPad mini is going to be crazy in-demand. If Apple starts preorders in the middle of the night, it’s because they’re anticipating a madhouse… such a madhouse that if they held it in the middle of the day, their servers would crash under the pressure.
Hence this guide. We’re going to walk you through the best ways to make absolutely sure you get your iPad mini preordered right at the stroke of midnight and in your hands next Friday when it officially launches in the minimum amount of time, so you can go right back to sleep.
Wondering which iPad mini to buy? Check out our guide to finding the one that is right for you.
I write about courses and education a lot here. Video training courses are pretty popular items to offer. We all know that we need to hone our current skills and pick up new ones in today’s knowledge economy. This course bundle—I just read through the course offerings again—is like going to design school for $100.
Seriously. It’s all there. Sure you might be more interested in making WP themes with Dreamweaver and creating logos (first 1000 buyers only get that bonus!) or maybe InDesign and Illustrator, but the point is that you can now pick up the skills you need in the core apps that creative folks use all the time—Learn To Design Bundle.
You may know Loren Brichter for the app that made him a rockstar in the iOS development community, Tweetie. Brichter was so successful with Tweetie that Twitter ended up hiring him to make Tweetie the official Twitter client for iOS and the Mac. Twitter for Mac has since fallen by the wayside, but Twitter for iPhone and iPad both live on as a testament to Brichter’s legacy.
After spearheading the initial development of Twitter’s official clients for iOS and OS X, Brichter left the social network to do his own thing again. For the past several months he’s been working on Letterpress, a new iPhone and iPad game that’s now available in the App Store.
As is often the case with Apple products, feelings towards the new iPad mini were mixed following the Cupertino company’s special event in San Jose on Tuesday. Many were wowed by its good looks and tiny form factor, which still manages to run regular iPad apps just fine. While others were confused over its $329 price tag.
We had expected Apple to price the iPad mini along the same lines as cheap Android tablets, such as the Google Nexus 7 and the Amazon Kindle Fire, which sell for $200. We didn’t quite expect Apple to go quite that low, but we felt around $250 would be just about right.
Instead, Apple chose to ignore what its competitors were doing. You might say that this is a big mistake, and that the iPad mini doesn’t stand a chance against its 7-inch rivals. But many analysts feel the iPad mini will do just fine at $329.
There were a couple of big surprises yesterday at Apple’s iPad mini event. The first was the pricing of the iPad mini itself: while everyone anticipated a $249 or $299 starting price, the iPad mini actually starts at $329… a good $70 higher than devices like the Google Nexus 7.
But there was another surprise. No one heard a peep in the last few months about Apple’s new Fusion Drive, a combination solid state and platter based hard drive that “fuses” the best aspects of flash and traditional hard drive storage.
Those aspects? Solid state drives (or SSDs) over much faster reading and write speed, as well as “instant-on” boot up from sleep or power down. This leads to huge performance boosts all across the Mac. Traditional hard drives, however, have a couple key advantages: they are both cheaper and have more capacity, allowing you to easily store massive media libraries.
So what’s the point of the Fusion Drive? Simple. It’s the best of both worlds: the speed and instant-on of an SSD, with all of the storage space of an HDD. But how does it work?
As a brand, China’s GooPhone has made a name for itself not only because of their laughably stupid branding, but by the fact that they consistently manage to rip off Apple’s next product design before Cupertino gets their product to market… then threaten to sue Apple for IP violations.
Saucy! And now GooPhone is at it again, announcing a $99 iPad mini clone called the GooPad that looks exactly like an iPad mini, right down to the icons.
Just in case you’re not interested in watching the full iPad mini keynote, we’ve compiled the entire thing down into just 90 seconds, like always. Check out the video after the break to see Tim Cook and Phil Schiller announce all of today’s products, at a rapid rate.
The iPad mini is a totally new product for Apple. It represents a beautiful juxtaposition of the iPhone’s 4-inch display and the Retina iPad’s larger 10-inch canvas. While the rest of the industry has already shifted its focus to 7-inch tablets, Apple entered uncharted territory for itself today.
Based on what we’ve seen, the iPad mini looks like a very compelling device. I’m sure Apple will sell bazillions. What I don’t understand is Apple’s pitch for the iPad mini. What purpose does it serve, and what kind of customer is it intended for? There’s no denying that Apple unveiled a great product today, but the purpose of the iPad mini was muddled by a confusing pitch.
Today’s iPad Mini event was incredible. Tim Cook and the gang just unleashed a tsunami of new Apple products on the world for the second straight month. Yes, the iPad Mini made an appearance, but there was so much more sweet stuff that it’s hard to keep up with all the details.
Rather than getting lost in the flood of thousands of different posts that will be written about the Apple event today, we’ve broken down all the necessary info into delicious bite-size information nuggets just for you, so you can know all the essentials.
Here’s everything that Apple announced at today’s keynote:
Saying that it will allow users to use the iPad in places and environments they never could before, the iPad mini is the smallest and lightest device yet.
Apple just unveiled the all-new iMac with a gorgeous edge-to-edge display and crazy thin design. Using a new display that’s 5 millimeters thinner and laminated to the glass, the new iMac is 80% thinner than its predecessor. The display is also 75% less reflective, which is excellent news.
It’s hard to explain how thin this iMac is in words—it almost looks like an optical illusion. But don’t let the thinness fool you, the new iMac is a powerhouse. It comes with USB 3.0, Thunderbolt, and up to 3TB of internal storage and Intel’s quad-core Ivy Bridge Core i5 or i7 processors.
Fresh off of announcing a new Retina MacBook Pro, but the Mac mini is also getting a major new update. The design is the same, but there’s now four USB 3 ports.
Here’s the base configuration:
After touting the success of the Mac by calling it the number one desktop and laptop platform in the United States, Tim Cook brought Apple’s Phil Schiller onstage to talk MacBook. Schiller then unveiled the rumored 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display. The new laptop is 20% thinner and a pound lighter than the previous 13-inch MacBook Pro.
The 13-inch Retina MacBook Pro leaked several days ago via a Chinese forum. The machine features a HDMI port, USB 3.0, and SD card slot like the 15-inch Retina. It’s awesome, but it will cost you.
Apple is expected to unveil a new, smaller iPad today, October 23rd, 2012, at 10AM ET/1PM PST, with a launch of the device expected for sale on November 2. Invites to the event were sent out last week.
This is the most anticipated iPad release yet, bringing the apples-and-oranges competition between Amazon’s Kindle Fire and the newly-releaced Google Nexus 7 to a boil just in time for the holiday gift-giving season of 2012. We’re all extremely excited to see what this heavily rumored new form factor will bring to the table, and how Apple will position the device in its already spectacularly successful line of iOS devices.
The iPad 2 was announced in March of 2011, with the new iPad (not the iPad 3, as we all assumed) was revealed in March of 2012. The iPad 2 broke the thinness barrier of the iPad one, and brought faster CPU and graphics enhancements, while the iPad 3 upped the ante to Retina-quality resolution and a faster, warmer CPU.
What will the iPad mini do to convince us all we need yet one more of Cupertino’s magical devices in our households? In this Cult of Mac rumor roundup, we’ll examine everything we think we know about the iPad Mini.
Apple will hold a media event at 10AM PT/1PM ET today, October 23rd at the California Theatre in San Jose. Select members of the press will gather to see the “little more” Apple has up its sleeve for the holiday season. The rumored iPad mini is expected to be announced as well as new Mac hardware and iTunes 11.
Wondering what all Apple will announce this time around? Here’s what you can expect to see at tomorrow’s event:
When Apple holds a press event to announce its latest gadget, the vast majority of us are frantically refreshing our favorite websites in an effort to keep up with the news as it’s breaking. It’s not often we get to watch the event live.
But sometimes, Apple treats us to a live video feed. And it’s doing that today for the much-anticipated iPad mini event.
The picture above is purported to show third party non-approved authentication chips for Apple’s new Lightning USB cables. They’re pretty much a huge deal for anyone who plans to make iPhone 5 accessories or cables, because now that the Lightning authentication chip has been cracked, manufacturers can create cheaper accessories because they won’t have to pay Apple a fee to use the official Lightning chip.
Earlier this year, Apple CEO Tim Cook famously said that Cupertino was going to “double down on secrecy” this year. It hasn’t worked. Apple — once a company known for the surprise “one more thing” — had every single detail of the iPhone 5 leaked to the public before the actual event. Can Apple ever get its secrecy back?
Probably not. A new report talking to a number of Apple employees under the condition of anonymity suggests that while Apple HQ is as secretive of new products as ever, Cupertino can do nothing about leaks that come out of the Asian supply chain.
While it introduced a stack of great new features, iOS 6 also brought a few bugs to our iOS devices this summer. Users have reported problems with Wi-Fi, iPhone 5 display glitches, and more. But Apple could be preparing to fix those before it starts its holiday celebrations.
According to one report, the Cupertino company is currently testing iOS 6.0.1 for a release within the coming weeks, while iOS 6.1 will arrive after the holidays.
Apple’s upcoming iPad mini media event will be held at an unusual location, the California Theatre in San Jose, California. Instead of typical locations like the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco or Apple’s own Town Hall, the company is branching out and presenting in a venue it hasn’t used in 7 years.
As usual, the venue was decorated for Tuesday’s event over the weekend. Here are some pictures of Apple’s swanky signage: