Apple has stepped up it’s game this week. Tuesday, Apple took aim at one of the biggest and seemingly unassailable businesses of its rival Microsoft, its Office software for tasks like word processing and spreadsheets.
Apple rolled out the fifth generation of its market-leading tablet Tuesday. Among its new features, the iPad will weigh 1 pound, down from 1.4 pounds. It’s 20% thinner and 28% lighter than the current fourth-generation iPad.
The iPad Air will have the same 9.7-inch screen as previous iPads and pack the same A7 processing chip that’s in the iPhone 5S. That will make it 72 times faster than the original iPad, according to Apple Senior Vice President Phil Schiller.
“This is our biggest leap forward ever with a full-size iPad,” Schiller said.
The iPad Air will go on sale November 1. Prices will start at $499 for a 16GB Wi-Fi-only model and go up to $629 for a 16GB with 4G LTE connectivity.
Schiller also announced a revamped iPad Mini starting at $399. It will be available later in November in silver or space gray and will pack a speedy A7 processor and the same high-resolution “Retina display” as bigger iPads.
New MacBook Pro and MacBook Air laptops also were rolled out and go on sale immediately. They get the usual incremental updates: better graphics, longer battery life, faster flash storage and next-generation Wi-Fi. Apple also announced that both iWork and iLife, their suites of office and creative software, are now free with the purchase of every new Mac.
Each Apple app used to cost $10 apiece. The latest version of the Macintosh operating system, Mavericks, will also be free.
The pricing maneuver was perhaps the lone surprise at an Apple new media event here at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. As expected, Apple souped up its iPads with faster processors and zippier Internet connections.
With its free software offering, Apple is capitalizing on strong growth in tablet computing sales and Microsoft’s reluctance to offer Office for the iPad.
Tablets are devouring the PC market, which has long been Microsoft’s playing ground. About 120 million tablets were shipped in 2012, nearly seven times as many as in 2010, when the first Apple iPad was released, according to Gartner, a market research company.
Smartphones are still more popular than tablets: Gartner predicts manufacturers will ship one billion smartphones and 184 million tablets this year.
Mavericks- The New OS X Update
At first glance, it closely resembles the previous version, Mountain Lion, but comes with hundreds of small improvements that add up to a significantly upgraded operating system.
For example, you can now reply to an iMessage right from the notification of a new incoming message, rather than open up the iMessage app. Safari has similar improvements—new functions and features that let you stay in your current window while getting relevant information or related tasks done.
More importantly for laptop users, Mavericks contains a number of improvements that extend battery life and improve memory. It’s impressive to see these kinds of improvements at the software level.