Apple Reveals 5K iMac, Two New iPads & Releases OS X ‘Yosemite’

Apple had lots to talk about at a press event earlier today, with a couple of product announcements as well as a note that OS X 10.10 ‘Yosemite’ is now available. Right off the top, anyone interested in upgrading to Yosemite can do so for free through the Mac App Store; all you require is a Mac released within the last five or six years, and are running a version of OS X no earlier than 10.6 Snow Leopard. You can read all about what’s new right here.

As for the products announced, it’s the iMac ‘Retina’ that strikes me as being the most interesting, mostly for the fact that Apple skipped right on by 4K to adopt 5K instead. It’s not unlike Apple to pull this kind of trick, because it always wants to be on the leading-edge of such technologies. Like the Dell UltraSharp display announced last month, Apple’s 27-inch Retina sports a 5120×2880 resolution, resulting in a pixel count of 14.7 million – about 80% more than 4K.

Apple’s 5K iMac doesn’t come cheap, though: It starts at $2,499, includes a quad-core Intel Core i5, 8GB of DDR3-1600, 1TB of storage, and AMD’s 2GB Radeon R9 M290X graphics card.

To help put 5K into perspective, I’d recommend looking at the Dell post mentioned above, as a comparison graphic is included. If you’d rather just load up a 5K image into your browser, Apple takes care of that.

On the iPad front, Apple’s released its ‘thinnest and lightest’ iPad ever with the Air 2. With a thickness of 6.1mm, it’s 18% thinner than the original Air, and it weighs just under a pound, 0.96lbs to be exact. Packed into the Air 2’s 9.7-inch display is a 2048×1536 resolution, resulting in a tight pixel width of 264 ppi. Despite its thin frame, the Air 2 is powerful: It utilizes Apple’s second-gen 64-bit SoC, in the form of A8X, which helps it become 40% faster than the original Air, and deliver 2.5x the graphics performance.

The most notable feature of both the iPad Air 2 and iPad mini 3 is Touch ID, which is in effect robust fingerprint technology. With it, you can secure your iPad without the need of a password, and also make purchasing items from iTunes or the App Store easier and safer than before. Given how often I tap away passwords on my phone and tablets, this is a feature I’d definitely opt for.

If nearly 10 inches is a bit too large for you, the iPad mini 3, with its 7.87-inch frame, might be more intriguing to you. It sticks with Apple’s A7 SoC under its hood, which is still plenty fast, and like the Air 2, it has a resolution of 2048×1536, resulting in a ppi of 326.

Between the mini 3 and Air 2, I admit that I think the latter is a bit more attractive, based simply on the fact that it costs $100 more but tacks on two inches (that’s not going to be ideal for everyone, of course) and also uses Apple’s latest high-end chip. Both of the new iPads come in silver, gold and space gray colors and can be yours on the 17th for $399 (mini 3) and $499 (Air 2).