 Welcome to Newsdesk on SiliconANGLE TV for Wednesday, October 24th, 2012. I'm Kristen Folletti. Yesterday, Apple hosted a groundbreaking event in San Jose, California to debut a new line of products. What was revealed? Here to tell us more is SiliconANGLE Newsdesk Editor Kristen Nicole. Welcome, Kristen. Hey, good morning. Kristen, we spoke yesterday with SiliconANGLE contributing editor John Casaretto about what we speculated would be announced at the Apple event. Taking a look at the Apple homepage today, it's obvious the big announcement was that of the new iPad mini, which did not take on a different name that had been rumored. Were any other major surprises or were most of the leaks turn out to be on point from yesterday? Well, a lot of the rumors did turn out to be true. It really seems like Apple might be losing its grip on this wall of secrecy they built up around their product launches. We saw this with the iPhone 5, of course, and again with the iPad mini. So a good portion of the speculations and the leaks that we saw in the leaks leading up to yesterday's event did in fact turn out to be true. What can you tell us about the new iPad mini? Oh, well, it's smaller. Little baby iPad, it's just under eight inches, so it's slightly bigger than some of the rival tablets that are closer to seven inches. It's really thin. It's light. The aluminum body, like a lot of the Apple products do, so it's not made of the plastic that you'll see with the Kindle Fire and some of the other Android powered devices that are in this category here. So the display is good. The apps are still going to be from the tablet sector. So it's not going to be mobile apps on here. It'll be optimized apps from the regular tablet market. The rumored starting price we quoted yesterday at $3.29 turned out to be dead on. When will Fanatics be able to get their hands on the new iPad mini? Well, it looks like pre-order start next week, October 26th, and they should be available in stores November 2nd, so very soon. Along with the announcement of an iPad mini, Apple also introduced a fourth generation iPad. Was this expected considering we just saw the launch of a new iPad this past March? No, I don't think it was really expected. Like you said, there was an iPad third generation that came out not too long ago, and one of the big things about the previous iPad, iPad 3, if you would like to call it, it didn't have too many updates compared to the iPad 2. So with the iPad 4, you have some more updates that we probably should have seen with the third generation, and here we are just a few months later with the fourth generation iPad. So it's got the same display, retina display that we saw with the iPad 3. Some of the other specs, it's the same size, things of that nature. What's different is the processor. It should be a little speedier. And one key difference between the new iPad 4, fourth generation, and the iPad mini is they didn't take the opportunity to put that faster processor in the iPad mini. So if you're debating between whether you want to get the new full size iPad or the iPad mini, that's definitely something to think about. How will these new iPad devices compete with Android tablets and other competitors? Well, with the surprise at a 3.29, they are slightly pricing themselves out of the direct competition with the pricing of Android devices. Of course, that's not entirely surprising, given that they're Apple products. But I think that something in the closer to the 250 range, or at least an option for something that could be priced around 250 would play a little bit better for those that are looking at the price. I mentioned yesterday in my write up right after the event, it was actually during the event that the that this is really going to be about the ecosystem. Apple is really looking to round out their device lineup, their software offerings and really close the loop on that and offer something that can still be in that size range that we're seeing with the Android market, the Nexus 7, the Kindle Fire, some of Samsung's fablets. So this I don't think it's really going to be so much about the price. Apple really still wants to keep themselves separate than directly competing with Android on price. Tim Cook announced an interesting statistic yesterday saying to date 100 million iPads have been sold. So do you think the iPad mini will have the same success? It could. We'll just have to see how how the consumer market goes. It's almost holiday shopping season, so that'll be a great opportunity for Apple to gauge the market and see what the interest is around this new seven inch tablet. And with the the size thing that's going on here, it is a little bit more comfortable to hold in your hand. And the fact that they were able to use full size tablet applications on this new iPad mini, I think that will really help because now you don't have some of the issues with the Android scene in terms of fragmentation. Developers still have the opportunity to create one app that will work on on all the tablets. So we'll see how how the consumers respond to this new tablet size as we've seen with some of the other tablets in this size range. It could be extremely popular. Yesterday, when we spoke with John Casaretto, we mentioned that alleged photos of a new 13 inch MacBook Pro featuring a retina display had been leaked in a Chinese forum, yet we didn't anticipate a new MacBook Pro would be revealed at the same time as an iPad mini. Did that come as a shock to you? It was a little surprising, but once once the rumors started coming about some of the other devices, I think one of the rumors was that we were going to see a new Mac mini come out at yesterday's yesterday's event. It's kind of indicated that we might be seeing more at the Apple event yesterday than just the iPad mini. So in that regards, it wasn't too much of a surprise, but I think just the fact that they took yesterday's event as an opportunity to reveal so many product updates really shows what what Apple is going after here. So with the new 13 inch, they've got the new retina display. They haven't updated this particular line since early 2011. I'm not entirely surprised that Apple is kind of using this as a chance to further their their lineup with the new line of Mac minis also debuted. Any major announcements there? What was that? The new the new line of Mac minis that they also debuted. Were there any major announcements in that regard? Let's see. I actually don't remember too much about the Mac mini now that I was just talking about it. It's kind of split my mind. Another product Tim Cook was very eager to announce was the next generation iMac available in the two twenty one point five and twenty seven inch models. Give us some specs on those new iMacs. Well, they have the updated. They have better processors. They have the new retina displays. They're kind of catching up with some of the other updates that we saw earlier this year. So really rounding out a lot of the products that Apple already has in the market and kind of I think what Apple is really trying to do here is unify a lot of the consumer experiences across the board. Although there's still a few disparities like I mentioned with the iPad for fourth generation and the iPad mini, but really seeing a lot of catch up here. Something called the Fusion Drive was introduced on the new iMacs. Can you explain to us how that works? It should help with booting things up faster. Apple's been an early supporter of flash technology. So being able to incorporate this into their their all in one devices is just one more way that Apple is kind of able to stay ahead of the curves at the bar on how the consumer interacts with with the computer and has a little bit more and more power behind it. So we should see some improvements across the board in that regard. There were also a few small iBooks updates. Anything to talk about there? Yeah, well, with the iBooks updates, there's more options for self publishers out there. This is always a good thing. And there's some new interactivity that's been incorporated into iBooks, so things like widgets that let the the reader kind of play around more with the content. And you have a lot more flexibility there. And there's some new templates available. It's important to note that these new templates do support the iPad portrait only. So this isn't optimized for iPhone quite yet. Of the new products announced, do you feel there was anything Apple held back on? Disappointments or things we didn't see, but we're hoping to? Well, we didn't see a whole lot on Apple TV. So not that we were necessarily expecting it, but with all the other device updates that we saw, we didn't that was one of the products that we didn't really get a whole lot of information on yesterday. Yesterday's event streamed live on the Internet and was also available on Apple TV, but we didn't see that new announcement hoping for Apple HDTV. Do you think that's going to be the focus of Apple's next keynote? Or where where do you see Apple going next? It could be. I don't know if it'll be the focus of their next their next event unless they're ready to move into the direction of home entertainment, which could be a increasingly competitive market with Microsoft's Windows 8 and their new Xbox Entertainment. All these things coming out for the home, even Google with their event when they launched the Nexus 7. Came out with the queue geared towards home entertainment. So if Apple's ready to kind of make that leap, we could see something with Apple TV, the HDTV and maybe even some other products. People have been circulating about television sets from Apple for a little while now. And if there I think if it's going to be an event focused on that, it would be targeting the home entertainment sector. Well, Kristin, thanks so much for your time today. We appreciate you joining us. Absolutely. Thank you. And remember, you can follow the news of the day and get the latest breaking analysis on tech innovation at Newsdesk on SiliconANGLE TV.