Today Apple has unveiled the successor to last year’s iPad Air, called the iPad Air 2. At 6.1mm thick, this puts it among Sony’s Xperia tablets which are also thin with similar thickness. It’s 18% thinner than the iPad Air. iPad next to iPad Air 2 looks like a gigantic monster from another time. Like it runs on steam. It’s made with a laminated screen this means the LCD, glass, and touch sensor are optically bonded now. There’s no air gaps. There’s an anti-reflective coating on the glass, reducing reflections by 56%.
The whole new generation chip, new iPad has a A8X processor an improved processor from the A8 found in latest iPhone 6 phones. It’s 64-bit, of course. The CPU is 40% faster than iPad Air. The iPad Air 2 has 180x the graphics performance of the original iPad. There is also 10 hour battery life with the M8 coprocesor that tracks motion, elevation.
New iSight camera is 8MP, 1.12 micron pixels, f2.4, and does 1080p HD video. You can take 43mp panoramas.There’s burst mode too, new for the iPad. Ditto Timelapse. Slo-Mo is also on the iPad Air 2.
There is also wifi 802.11AC with MIMO. That means faster Wi-Fi. Also support for 20 bands for LTE and it should be faster there too. And, yes, there is TouchID and it works just like it does on the iPhone. When it comes to pricing the wifi models are: 16gb will go for $499, $599 for 64gb, $699 for 128gb. Cellular adds $130 to those prices. It will come in Silver, Space Gray, and Gold.
Among other things announced include:
The Mac Mini and the iMac with retina 5k display.
