October 22nd, Apple Event Summary

This is just a quick run down of the announcements as they will affect users that were made today during the Apple Event:

OS X Mavericks:

There are memory allocation improvements and power usage streamlining to make OS X Mavericks more efficient, use less battery and it should give you an overall faster user experience. There is cool social networking integration in Safari and elsewhere in the OS. I have been running the beta of the new Safari for a while and I have to tell you, I LOVE it. It’s very quick and very stable. There are new apps for Mavericks too, including iBooks and Maps. Document tagging allows you to tag any document you create with some keywords, making your entire creative workflow searchable, which is just cool. You can now get notifications from websites of your choosing when they update, or have sales. The new Calendar for Mavericks looks a lot like Calendar for iOS, but the Maps integration feature is killer because you can push a map route from your Mac, to your iPhone and leave.

If you are a Mac User and you own any of the following machines, you may upgrade to OS X Mavericks, TODAY for FREE:

iMac (Mid 2007 or newer)

Macbook (Late 2008 Aluminum or early 2009)

Macbook Pro (Mid/Late 2007 or newer)

Macbook Air (Late 2008 or newer)

Mac mini (Early 2009 or newer)

Mac Pro (Early 2008 or newer)

Xserve (Early 2009)

These machines can be upgraded going all the way back to Snow Leopard, so if you are still running Snow Leopard on your Mac you CAN upgrade to Mavericks today. I want to mention again, that the upgrade to Mavericks is totally free and you can do this upgrade via the Mac App Store as soon as it becomes available in your area.

New Macbook Pros:

13” MBP is now lighter at 3.46 pounds. .71 inches thin. It has a Haswell processor. It starts at 1299$ and comes with a retina display and starts shipping today.

The 15” MBP has an Intel Crystalwell chip, Iris Pro integrated graphics with an option GeForce GT 750m GPU. 1999$ starting price.

The new Mac Pro is just gorgeous. I’m not even going to talk to you about it here. It’s amazing, but it’s not releasing until December.

There are new updates to iLife and iWork. What you need to know is that iLife (Garage Band, iMovie, iPhoto) and iWork (Pages, Numbers and Keynote) have now become free with the purchase of any new Mac or iOS device. These apps now sync with iCloud and have a feature called Collaboration that allows you to share your workflow with a colleague and trade ideas back and forth, on the fly, over iCloud. This is VERY cool.

iPad:

iPad Air will be released on November 1st and pricing starts at 499$ for a 16 GB model. iPad Air is faster, thinner and lighter than the previous gen iPad. It has a 5MP iSight 1080p HD camera (that’s the backside) and an HD Facetime camera (that’s the front side). It has improved backlight illumination, insane battery life and newly added MIMO wifi, which improves the speed of your Wifi data transfers. This iPad replaces the 4th gen iPad in the lineup.

iPad 2 will remain in the line up, starting at 399$

iPad Mini now has a retina display. It also sports the new A7 chip from the iPhone 5S. 10 hour battery life. MIMO wifi and all of the bells and whistles from the iPad Air. This also releases on November 1st and pricing starts at 399$

The 1st gen iPad Mini received a price drop to 299$

That’s all the news that’s fit to print!

As soon as I can get Mavericks on here, I’ll play with it for a few hours and post a few first impressions, so stay tuned Mac fans!