Apple News Roundup

Today as part of the press event, Apple showed a video about the iPad mini and in the video showed off a new Smart Cover, one without the current aluminum hinge. These were only shown/mentioned in relation to the iPad mini, and show a single piece of material wrapping around to where the magnets attach to the body of the iPad. They are available in blue, green, pink, light gray, dark gray and Product (Red). It is not clear if they will be available for other models, and no price has been mentioned as of yet.

Just two weeks after Apple sold its 100 millionth iPad, the company has announced the iPad mini. As Phil Schiller said, it is not a shrunken-down iPad but a unique design with an aluminium enclosure. It can be held in one hand and is thin and light. It has a 7.9-inch screen with a 1,024x768 resolution (same as the iPad 2) with no tweaking needed for apps, is 7.2 mm thin, about as thin as a pencil. It weighs 0.68 pounds, 53 percent lighter than the newly announced fourth-generation iPad. It will come in white and black.

Consumers and competitors alike apparently can't get too comfortable with the pace of iPad updates, because just six months after the "new iPad" came out, Apple has announced the fourth-generation iPad. Powered by an A6X chip, it doubles the CPU performance of its predecessor. It has a 720p FaceTime HD camera and has "greatly expanded LTE coverage" according to Phil Schiller.

Apple has pulled one unexpected rabbit out of its hat today, the Apple Fusion Drive. It's a combination of SSD and HDD technology. Fusion Drive is part of the new iMac just announced, and is a technology supported by Mountain Lion. In concept, it's similar to auto-tiering that is used in enterprise environments.

Apple has introduced a new line of iMacs, its eighth generation of what it's now calling its "flagship desktop line." Although broadly similar in design to its predecessor, the big departure is its thickness -- the new iMac is 5 mm thin at its edge. Part of how Apple got the iMac that thin is that it ditched the optical drive from the iMac. The display is laminated directly to the glass, similarly to how the iPhone and MacBook Pro with Retina display LCDs are built.

Besides a new 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display, Apple also updated its Mac mini line of desktops. The affordable Mac computer keeps the same boxy form factor, but soups up internals with a Core i5 or Core i7 Ivy Bridge processor (dual-core or quad-core configuration), integrated Intel HD Graphics 4000, up to 16 GB RAM and up to 1 TB hard drive or 256 GB SSD. Other features include Bluetooth 4.0, Gigabit Ethernet, HDMI out, FireWire 800, Thunderbolt port, four USB 3.0 ports and an SD card slot.

As expected, Apple announced a 13-inch MacBook Pro with Retina display this morning. "We're taking our best product and introducing something so much better," Phil Schiller said. It's 0.75 inches thin and weighs just over 3.5 pounds, almost a full pound lighter than the previous generation -- the lightest MacBook Pro ever.