
At its press event yesterday afternoon, Apple CEO Tim Cook took to the stage and unveiled a slew of new and refreshed hardware products. With the iPhone 5 and new iPod lineup announced several weeks ago, nearly all Apple devices have received refreshed specs and/or complete design overhauls.
4th Generation iPad and iPad Mini
The iPad Mini has been long rumored, so no one was surprised when Apple unveiled the new 7.9-inch iPad form factor. Essentially sporting the same specifications as the iPad 2, the Mini ships with a dual-core A5 chip at its heart, 16GB of storage, Wi-Fi, and a 1,024 x 768 IPS multitouch display. The hardware is a svelte 7.2mm thick and .68 pounds in weight, and is manufactured using similar processes to those of the iPhone 5 that give it that slick, anodized edge. Base price starts at $329, with higher-capacity and LTE models going up from there.
A new 9.7-inch iPad wasn't expected, but Apple chose to make obsolete the current model just shy of eight months after its unveiling. The device has had mostly just an internal refresh, replacing the A5X CPU with the A6X (for roughly double the performance), adding the new Lightning connector like on the iPhone 5, and bumping up the resolution on the front-facing camera.
What wasn't discussed is how we refer to these models without sounding stupid. Is the third-generation model now the "Old New iPad" or is the fourth-gen model the "New New iPad?" When this model is replaced, will it then be the "Old New New iPad?"