Yesterday Apple had one of those events again, the kind where they cram a keynote into a Tuesday afternoon and half of Twitter loses its mind for six hours straight. iPad mini, a fourth-generation full-size iPad, a thinner iMac, an updated Mac mini, a 13-inch MacBook Pro with a Retina screen. A lot of stuff. But I'm not going to do the whole rundown here because by the time I'm typing this every gadget blog on earth has already posted the spec sheets three times over. What I actually want to talk about is the iPad in my bag right now, the one I bought in March, the one Apple just quietly made look old after seven months.
Let me back up. I bought the third-generation iPad the week it came out, stood in a line at the Bellevue Square store like an idiot, paid $499 for the 16GB WiFi model. It has the Retina display, it has the A5X chip, it does everything I need it to do. And now, as of yesterday, there's a "new" new iPad with an A6X chip and the Lightning connector instead of the old 30-pin dock connector, and mine is instantly the old one. Not old as in broken. Old as in "that's the one from last spring."
Seven months. That's the whole gap. Apple went a full year between the iPad 2 and the third-gen iPad, and everybody sort of understood the rhythm at that point, spring launches, yearly cycle, fine. Then they just broke the pattern without telling anyone and dropped a new model in October. I don't think this is some grand betrayal or a conspiracy to screw early adopters, I've read a couple of comment threads already calling it that and it's a bit much. But it does sting a little, in a very specific, very petty way, to have bought the "new iPad" and then watch it get demoted to "the old new iPad" before I've even filled up the storage on it.
The connector thing bugs me more than the chip, honestly. I've got a drawer in my kitchen, the standard junk drawer everybody has, and it's slowly filling up with 30-pin cables now that the iPhone 5 and this new iPad both use Lightning. I bought three of those white 30-pin-to-USB cables over the years for various rooms of the apartment and desks at work, and in about eighteen months they're going to be as useful as a mini-DisplayPort cable in a drawer full of HDMI stuff. Nobody talks about this part. Everyone's excited about "thinner" and "faster" and nobody mentions that you're about to own a small pile of dead-end cables.
The iPad mini is the part of the announcement I actually care about, for what it's worth. $329 for the base 16GB model is more than I expected, I was in the camp guessing something closer to $249 to compete with the Nexus 7 and the Kindle Fire HD, and Apple just didn't play that game at all. Same resolution as the iPad 2, not Retina, which is going to be the thing every review nitpicks for the next two weeks. I still think it's going to sell an absurd number of units over the holidays regardless, because it's smaller, it's lighter, and it's an iPad, and that label alone moves units at this point.
The new iMac is the one nobody's going to actually get their hands on for a while, they said the 21.5 inch ships in late November and the 27 inch in December, which is a weirdly long wait for something they just showed off on stage. 5mm thick at the edge is a neat trick but I'll believe the whole "no optical drive, redesigned internals" thing is worth the tradeoffs once I actually see one sitting on a desk instead of a press photo.
Anyway. My iPad still works fine. It'll keep working fine for years, probably. But there's something very of-this-industry about buying a thing, being genuinely happy with it, and then having the same company reset the clock on you seven months later without so much as a courtesy heads up. I don't regret the purchase. I just regret bragging about it to my brother-in-law at Thanksgiving last year like I'd gotten in on something exclusive.