It’s the iPad on a diet.
Apple’s new super-thin iPad Air weighs nearly half a pound less and operates twice as fast as the previous model, the company revealed on Tuesday.
The fifth-generation iPad weighs exactly one pound, nearly 30 percent less than the iPad 4 — making it the lightest full-sized tablet and among the fastest, company honchos said at an event to unveil the new gadget in San Francisco.
“From the original iPad, we’re up to over eight times faster. In terms of graphics performance, we’re 72 times faster,” said company vice president Phil Schiller.
“[It’s] thinner, lighter and more powerful than ever before. So new, it deserves a new name,” he said, adding it won’t simply be called the iPad 5.
The high-tech toy is also 20-percent thinner than the iPad 4 and runs on a higher-speed A7 chip, also featured in the new iPhone 5s. It also comes complete with a high-resolution “retina display” screen surrounded by a thinner-than-before “bezel” border, which gives the look of an iPad Mini, even though its height and width are roughly the same as the iPad 4.
A 16GB iPad Air costs $499 and comes in silver, white, gray and black. It will “start to ship” on Nov. 1 and will hit the stands soon after, Apple representatives said.
CEO Tim Cook also revealed a new iPad Mini, set to hit the market “sometime in November.” The new Mini runs on the same A7 chip and features the same retina screen and operating system.
Company reps said the original iPad Mini will stay on sale, dropping in price from $329 to $299. The 16GB iPad Mini with retina will sell for $399, Apple representatives said.
Apple unveiled the new gadgets the same day Nokia announced a possible competing product — the company’s first tablet ever. The 10-inch Lumia 2520 runs on Windows and starts at $499.
Apple representatives don’t seem worried.
“Regardless of what you might hear or read about how many other tablets are bought or sold or activated, iPad is used more than four times more than all the others put together,” Cook said to an audience of thousands at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco on Tuesday.