HOME  → POSTS  → 2013

Apple’s 2013 iPad Announcement

• Apple • 379 words • 2 minutes to read

Last month, when writing about Apple’s Fall 2013 Product Announcement, I’d guessed at a few announcements that they didn’t end up making. Today, Apple announced all of those things and more.

OS X Mavericks

OS X 10.9 ”Mavericks”. Available today. Free (down from $19.99 last year).

MacBook Air

Lighter and faster than the last model. Faster 802.11ac wireless networking, Bluetooth 4.0 and Thunderbolt 2. Available today. Starting at $999.

MacBook Pro with Retina Display

Lighter and faster than the last model. Faster 802.11ac wireless networking, Bluetooth 4.0 and Thunderbolt 2. Available today. Starting at $1,299.

MacBook Pro (non-Retina)

Quietly discontinued in favor of the all-Retina lineup.

Mac Pro

An incredibly powerful machine. Faster 802.11ac wireless networking, Bluetooth 4.0 and Thunderbolt 2. Available in December. Starting at $2,999.

iLife and iWork (for iOS and OS X)

New versions for iOS as well as OS X. Faster, better, simpler, more powerful. Free with any Mac or iOS device purchase.

iPad Air

New line of iPads, replaces “iPad classic”. Smaller, lighter, faster. MIMO wireless networking. Available November 1. Starting at $499. iPad 2 sticking around for $399.

iPad mini with Retina Display

iPad mini with a Retina Display. Starting at $399. Available in November. Last-generation iPad mini sticking around for $299.

iPad

Quietly discontinued in favor of the iPad Air.

What was not announced and/or what we didn’t get

For all the rumor and speculation from analysts and pundits, here’s where we landed.

  • Anybody with a brain knew that there wouldn’t be an iWatch or iHDTV.
  • No “Touch ID” fingerprint sensors in the new iPads. We’ll be unlocking our iPads like neanderthals for the foreseeable future.
  • No iMac or Mac mini updates.
  • No Apple TV updates.
  • No updates to the Thunderbolt display. (I was secretly wishing for a Retina-capable Thunderbolt display with 4K resolution.)
  • iPad Air gets the same larger-pixel update as the iPhone 5s got for better indoor shots, but stays at 5 MP.
  • iPad Air and iPad mini are still on 802.11n wireless networking speeds, but the iPad Air makes up for it with dual-signal MIMO networking.
  • No Gold/Champagne-colored iPads.
  • After reading through the things that the analysts are saying about Apple, they still have absolutely no idea how Apple works — despite Apple operating like clockwork, year after year.

is an engineering manager with over 20 years of experience across software development, site reliability engineering, and security. He is the creator of SimplePie and AWS SDK for PHP, patented multifactor-authentication-as-a-service at WePay, defined much of the CI/CD and SRE disciplines at McGraw-Hill Education, and came up with the idea of “serverless, event-driven, responsive functions in the cloud” while at Amazon Web Services in 2010. Ryan's aptly-named blog, , is where he writes about ideas longer than . Ambivert. Curious. Not a coffee drinker.