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Apple Releases a Big Tablet, and More

Accepted submission by takyon at 2015-09-09 23:54:12
Hardware

The big Apple announcement on Sept. 9 was the iPad Pro [anandtech.com], a 12.9" tablet with a screen resolution of 2732×2048. The price starts at $799 for the 32 GB Wi-Fi version, increases to $949 for 128 GB of storage, and $1079 for 128 GB and LTE cellular connectivity. Two accessories are available: a $99 Apple Pencil with a 240Hz input scanning rate, and a $169 Smart Keyboard, a form and price which may be familiar to you if you have seen Microsoft's Surface. Battery life of the iPad Pro should reach 10 hours, comparable to previous iPads. The iPad Mini 4 is a 7.85" tablet. Mini 4 weighs up to 304g (0.670 lbs) while the Pro weighs up to 723g (1.594 lbs).

The A9X chip [tomshardware.com] in the iPad Pro will be built on either Samsung's 14nm or TSMC's 16nm FinFet process. Apple claims the CPU is 80% faster and the GPU is 2x as fast compared to the A8X SoC. This would make the CPU 22x more powerful than the original iPad, and the GPU 360x more powerful.

The iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus [anandtech.com] replace the previous iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus models. The new versions use the Apple A9 SoC with 70% faster CPU and 90% faster GPU performance than the A8. The M9 motion coprocessor is built onto the SoC, and Apple has added always-on Siri activation, similar to the Moto X The display adds a "precise force sensing layer" called "3D Touch," similar to the "Force Touch" on Apple Watch. The front-facing camera has been increased from 1.2 to 5 megapixels, and can use the display as a flash to enable... low light selfies! The rear camera can now record 4K resolution (presumably Ultra HD) video.

The new Apple TV [anandtech.com] will cost a minimum of $149, more than double the $69 price of previous versions. The SoC inside has jumped from Apple A5 [wikipedia.org] to Apple A8 [wikipedia.org], and RAM has been quadrupled to 2 GB, which should allow it to act as a console, running a broader selection of more powerful games and apps. The tvOS UI can be controlled using voice recognition (Siri) or by remote. The remote comes with a "touch surface" and dedicated Siri button to initiate voice input.

iOS 9 and watchOS 2 will launch [anandtech.com] on Sept. 16. OS X El Capitan will launch on Sept. 30 with unchanged system requirements from the previous version, Yosemite.


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