Today was an exciting day for us here at Charlotte Street Computers, as Apple just announced a bunch of exciting new products that we will be stocking our shelves with for the Holiday shopping season. Tim Cook, CEO of Apple, introduced an updated line of Apple products including a 13” MacBook Pro with Retina Display, a super-thin iMac, a faster Mac Mini, a new 4th generation iPad and the long-awaited iPad Mini!
The iPad mini definitely stole the show with a 7.9” screen, amazingly thin design and low price tag (only $329!). Since the smaller screen has the same resolution as the iPad 2, it will still run all of your favorite iPad apps but now you’ll be able to fit them into the palm of your hand. Along with the iPad mini is it’s bigger brother, the 4th generation iPad, which is pretty much the same iPad we know and love but with a faster processor and a new Lightning connector.
Apple also announced the 13” MacBook Pro with Retina Display which has a nearly identical design to the 15” version. This 13” MacBook Pro has shed it’s DVD drive and spinning hard drive for a much thinner design and has a much faster SSD (Solid State Drive). While the screen is certainly an improvement, the 13” model doesn’t pack quick the same performance punch that the 15” model has, but we do expect to see it blow existing 13” MacBook Pro’s out of the water. The 13” MacBook Pro with Retina Display starts at $1,699.
The new iMac will be available in the usual 21.5” and 27” flavors ($1,299 and $1,799 respectively), but this time with an incredibly thin design. Part of this new design came from removing the DVD drive, so those using DVDs will need to pick up an Apple USB Superdrive ($79) which you can connect to one of the iMac’s new USB 3 ports. For the first time ever Apple has also removed FireWire from the iMac line, but fortunately you can still connect your FireWire 800 devices with a Thunderbolt to FireWire 800 adapter. Also introduced with the new iMac is the “Fusion Drive” which blends together the best of Flash storage (speed) and a traditional spinning hard drive (storage capacity). We can’t wait to see it in action for ourselves, but I’m sure it will give a pretty significant speed boost to iMac users.
Last but not least is the Mac Mini. No major new features for this little guy, but the addition 
of USB 3 and an option for a quad-core processor certainly are welcomed upgrades. The $599 model now comes with 4GB of RAM instead of 2GB, which means all Macs now ship with a minimum of 4GB of RAM.
Overall, Apple did a great job updating their product line as well as introducing some new members to the Apple family. We will keep you posted as to the availability of these fantastic new gizmos as soon as we have it! If you have any specific questions about these devices or when they will be available, please feel free to shoot us an e-mail at contact@charlottestreetcomputers.com.
