Apple spreads spring colours with a range of new product launches

In its first announcement of 2021, Apple unveiled products like iPad Pro Tablets, iMac, Apple TV 4K, and iPhone 12 in Purple. It is not clear whether this variant will be available in India

Apple has just made it easier to find not just its products but also third-party offerings. The Cupertino-based tech giant announced the launch of AirTag and expanded its Find My ecosystem. Apple’s Spring event was loaded with announcements.

In its first announcement of 2021, Apple unveiled a range of products like iPad Pro Tablets, iMac, Apple TV 4K, and iPhone 12 in Purple colour. iPhone 12 and iPhone 12mini will go up for pre-orders starting this week. The new colour has “elements of sophistication and brightness” said Apple CEO Tim Cook. The purple colour variant will join the already available Black, Blue, Green, Red, and White colours. It is still not clear if this is available in India.

AirTag is one of the most awaited product from the company. AirTag helps keep track of and find the items that matter most with Apple’s Find My app. Whether attached to a handbag, keys, backpack, or other items, AirTag taps into the vast, global Find My network and can help locate a lost item, all while keeping location data private and anonymous with end-to-end encryption. AirTag can be purchased in one and four packs for just $29 and $99, respectively, and will be available beginning Friday, April 30.

iMac

Among the products, Apple announced the all new iMac, now available in bright colours, a much more compact and thin design, and enabled by the M1 chip. The new iMac also includes a 1080p FaceTime HD camera, studio-quality mics, and a six-speaker sound system. Also, Touch ID comes to iMac for the first time.

Enabled by the system-on-chip architecture and power efficiency of M1, the logic board and thermals are consolidated and reduced in size compared to the previous generation’s, allowing the side profile of iMac to practically disappear. The much more compact design reduces the volume of iMac by 50 percent, allowing it to take up less space and fit easily in even more places, said the company.

The new line of iMac will feature a 23.5-inch 4.5K Retina display that comes with 11.3 million pixels, 500 nits of maximum brightness and P3 1B color support. In addition, the display will feature Apple’s True Tone technology that adjusts colour temperature automatically as per the surroundings as well as an anti-reflective coating. The new iMac comes with up to 8 GPU cores that promise up to 50 per cent better GPU performance than the predecessors. The device will also boast of 3x faster machine learning than the previous generation iMac.

The new iMac joins the family of Mac models powered by M1, including MacBook Air, 13-inch MacBook Pro, and Mac mini, marking another step forward in Apple’s transition to Apple silicon. Customers can order it beginning Friday, April 30. iMac will be available in the second half of May.

For storage, iMac is available in three variants—256GB and 512GB internal storage.

All of these will make use of 8GB unified memory for performance. The base variant of the iMac will retail for Rs 1,19,900. It will be available with 7-core GPU, without the two USB type-3 ports and support for Gigabit Ethernet and in only four colour options.

As for the other two with 8-core GPU, the mid-variant will come with 256GB storage and will be priced at Rs 1,39,900, while the premium model will feature 512GB storage in all seven colour options and will retail for Rs 1,59,900.

iPad Pro & iPad Pro Mini

M1Chip also comes to the iPad family of product. iPad Pro will support 5G and comes with  8-core CPU design features— delivering up to 50 percent faster CPU performance than A12Z Bionic, said the company. iPad Pro comes with next-generation 16-core Apple Neural Engine, an advanced image signal processor (ISP), a unified, high-bandwidth memory architecture with up to 16GB of memory, 2x faster storage, and up to 2TB capacity.

iPad Pro comes with new liquid retina XDR display. The Liquid Retina XDR display features up to 1000 nits of full-screen brightness, 1600 nits of peak brightness, and a phenomenal 1 million-to-1 contrast ratio to enhance creative workflows. iPad Pro get support for Thunderbolt and USB 4 makes the USB-C port on iPad Pro the fastest, most versatile port ever on an iPad, with 4x more bandwidth for wired connections than the previous iPad Pro — up to 40Gbps.

In India, the 12.9-inch iPad Pro will cost Rs 99,900 for the Wi-Fi version and Rs 1,13,900 for the Wi-Fi and LTE model. On the other hand, the 11-inch iPad Pro will cost Rs 71,900 and Rs 85,900 for the Wi-Fi and the Wi-Fi + LTE models, respectively. You can order the new iPad Pros from April 30 but the shipping will likely start in May.

Pricing for the iPhone 12 purple variant starts at Rs. 79,900 and Rs. 69,900 for the iPhone 12 mini - the same as the pricing for other colours.