Something strange is afoot, Apple have revised the iPad and they have announced the new version with a press release, not with a conference and four minute long TV advert featuring the latest pop sensation.
Admittedly, the new version isn’t much to sing and dance about as all they have done is increased the onboard storage from 64GB to 128GB. Apart from that everything else is identical to the old fourth generation iPad with Retina display.
“With twice the storage capacity and an unparalleled selection of over 300,000 native iPad apps, enterprises, educators and artists have even more reasons to use iPad for all their business and personal needs,” commented Apple’s senior vice president of Worldwide Marketing, Philip Schiller.
Now the exciting bit, guess how much the new iPad will cost the lucky Americans who will doubtless be setting up camp outside Apple stores as I type? $799 for the iPad with Wi-Fi model and $929 for the iPad with Wi-Fi + Cellular model.
Yep, over $900 to play Angry Birds.
The new models will be released in the US on February 5th, expect them on these shores around the same time.
Source: Press Release.
KeRaSh
I think this move is very unusual for Apple. As far as I know this would be the first tablet with 128 GB of storage and yet Apple does not try to convince people that this is a magical thing. Maybe they do it quietly because even they know that at that price this is a very hard sell to the general public, even for Apple.
I’m really bored of iOS. My two major gripes with the iPad are the limitations of the OS and the ancient aspect ratio. If they’d fix those it would be a huge step forward.
(Still not really sure news like these belong on this site… ¬_¬)
hazelam
one of those, when i win the jackpot on the lottery, prices.
i’d love an ipad, and i could fill up quite a bit of that 128 gigs, i have a lot of video podcasts on itunes, but i can’t imagine me having enough disposable income to buy one any time soon.
and i’d be terrified to take something that expensive out with me.
plutoniumdragon
The latest iPad with the A6x is quite a powerful device, certainly faster at many things than some uber-budget laptops but I think the point is to compete with Either Surface or the Microsoft switch to cloud/subscription based licensing of Office and offering more onboard storage lends belief to it being a “serious” device.
I have an iPad, but that amount of storage really isn’t necessary, even with a fair bit of music and some video mine has only about 12Gb used, most of the things I do with it are Cloud-based or streamed. As I suspect most “serious” use would be.