Priced at $329, Apple unveiled its iPad Mini at a media event held at the California Theater in San Jose this morning. As expected, the tablet is 7.9 inches, and will compete with the likes of Barnes & Noble's Nook Color and the Amazon's Kindle Fire HD.
The devices go on sale Friday and the WiFi-only version will ship Nov. 2. For Minis with 4G cellular connection, the shipping date is pushed back another two weeks.
The mini is 7.2 mm thick, which Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook said is, "a quarter thinner than the fourth-generation iPad...Thinner than a pencil."
The new product has the same resolution as the iPad, 1,024 × 768. Most impressively, the Mini's size won't prevent it from running all the same software as the iPad.
The $329 price is for 16GB of storage with Wi-Fi; 32GB with Wi-Fi costs $429, and 64 GB with Wi-Fi is $529.
For devices with Wi-Fi and 4G cellular connections, the 16GB tablet is $459, the 32GB is $559, and the 64GB is $659.
The unveiling was made by senior vice president Phil Schiller and Cook who noted that Macs have grabbed the number one spot for both desktops and notebooks in the country.
Also unveiled was a new 13-inch MacBook Pro, 20 percent thinner than its predecessor, and a full pound lighter. The new laptop features a 2.5-GHz Intel processor, a high-resolution Retina display with over 4 million pixels, and a solid-state drive rather than a spinning disk. It will start at $1,700.
Schiller also described updates to the company's Mac Mini and iMacs. The razor-thin iMac, which starts at $1,299, starts shipping next month, according to Schiller.
The event was live-streamed.
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