We've heard many stories about how the iPad was in development for at least 5 years, and the iPhone around 3-4.

I think it's extremely likely any product we're seeing today was in development before Jobs passed. Give it a few more years until we start to see products Jobs had not yet thought of.

Apple like most large company's have a lot of R&D products that never see the light of day. Deciding which of those to take all the way to consumers is a huge part of what makes or breaks a tech company and I suspect we have already seen some slight changes. Even if it's just 'new iPad' vs 'iPad 3' style changes.

It's funny, Jobs had no problem going back on things he said once he changed his mind. But now that someone else is in charge, that same thing ends up being "rebuilding Apple."

The biggest surprise was how indifferent the Mini is.. $429 for the 32GB model versus $249 for the soon-to-be-announced 32GB Nexus 7, and with inferior hardware (much lower resolution screen, half the RAM, slower processor, etc). I hope for Apple's sake that this isn't a sign of things to come now that Cook is in charge.

I was never a fan of Jobs, but I have to hand it to him that he always upped the ante with new product releases. With the Mini, Apple bring an inferior product late to the party.

The problem is that the Nexus 7 doesn't seem to have any "killer app" that really show cases that extra umph in the power dept that wouldn't be possible on an iPad.

I'd say they're probably following a product roadmap that was laid out by Jobs and Cook prior to his death. Apple has been working to where Cook thinks it should go for a long while now, unrelenting progress in maximising, and increasing the efficiency of, the supply chain.

Seems like a lot of people are looking for stories about Apple's 'new' management. It surprises me that these stories always use the products themselves as evidence of new directions or decisions. It's too soon for that.

There are other things that people could point out or discuss but they're a little more subtle. For example, I wonder about the following:

- Are there more leaks from/about Apple now? Perhaps the new management isn't as zealous about shutting them down? Or is this simply a result of more scrutiny?

- The explicit comparisons with competitors products seems out-of-whack with keynotes of old. Almost makes them look desperate? Would this have happened several years ago? I don't remember seeing outright comparisons with windows machines.

- Way too many jargon words in this keynote, which takes away from the 'magic'. Do I really care about 'plasma deposition' or 'nits' of brightness?

I feel there are difference between old-Apple and new-Apple but I don't know if I'm imagining it. Regardless, I'm pretty confident that we're not close to seeing any of new-Apple's products just yet.

This article is moronic.

> Cook yesterday unveiled the long rumored iPad mini, a move the purist Jobs condemned just two years ago... Cook reacted, quickly plugging the final hole in Apple’s consumer electronics empire.

Steve Jobs routinely panned the product configurations and strategies of other companies, only to turn around and release something that entirely contradicted his earlier stance. This was a guy who slammed Intel at every single keynote, showing off whatever benchmarks his team could think of to emphasize the PPC's superiority over x86 – until he announced WWDC attendees could order an Intel-based developer box because the times, they were a-changin'.

So while this article would have us believe that Cook initiated a crash program to build a 7 inch iPad immediately upon Jobs' death, what I think is more likely is that the form factor has been in progress since it was understood that the iPad was a hit.

Like you suggest, I'm sure Jobs had a hand in the current lineup, he's admitted to have tested out tablet prototypes of varying sizes. But for a guy who's always loved playing hard to get, the mini release didn't feel very Jobsy. He liked watching the competition struggle for a bit, then swoop in at the 11th hour with the perfect solution so we can all go "ooh" and "aah."

The iPad mini was defense. So I credit Cook with the speed of timing more than anything. Zero games. We asked for it, we got it. When has that ever happened in Apple's history?

This is exactly why I think Apple will move to ARM for Macs soon, even though most Apple users find that hard to believe.

I would kill for an MacBook ARM. How much power and cycles remain wasted on x86 legacy cruft?

Only Apple could make this kind of huge transition as they've worked for years to be able to put an OSX-derived OS on a tiny iPod form factor (and thus creating the iPhone and iPod touch).

Bringing that back to the laptop world would be truly awesome. They have the ecosystem, toolchain, and numerous successful similar transitions from 68000->PPC->Intel already.

As someone who would have liked an 11" MBAir but got the 13" because there isn't enough space in the 11" to hold batteries to run an x86 cpu as long as I'd like, this makes sense to me.

There's only one way to go thinner, smaller, or lighter on their laptops at this point, outside of some huge breakthrough in battery technology.

What doesn't make sense, though, is apps (built for x86)... Though an app-store-only model (and requiring ARM builds for inclusion in the app store) is not entirely out of the question, iOS style. Back to the Mac, indeed.

I don't know if an x64->ARM translation layer for the transition is feasible, performance-wise, though - perhaps someone with more knowledge of the architecture can chime in here.

> I don't know if an x64->ARM translation layer for the transition is feasible, performance-wise, though - perhaps someone with more knowledge of the architecture can chime in here.

It's completely feasible. The problem I see is that mapping 64-bit addresses into a 32-bit space is expensive. I can't think of anything in ARM that will make things more performant at the moment, but I'm sure there's some sort of way to pull it off. If OS X binaries are relocatable by default, that'd be an easy solution.

64-bit ARMs are around the corner; I wouldn't be surprised if Apple has a cooperation agreement with ARM that gives them access to the not-yet-finalized but good-enough-to-work-with 64-bit ARM architecture.

Apple has the expertise to be such a client. They're a very significant customer of ARM, and also (unless things changed when I wasn't looking) a major shareholder.

Emulating intel code on the ARM is feasible, though going to be 5x-10x slower for high performance compute code. However: most apps are not high performance compute code; and given that native ARM for most apps is not a lot more than a recompile away, that might not be a problem.

(With notable exceptions like Adobe - I'm sure Apple can solve these individual problems well enough to make that into a non-deal-breaker)

I find it hard to believe. It's not that it's a bad idea, it's just that Macs seem still too much of a ghetto, and Windows is still too successful, and I'd have imagined Boot Camp to be a reasonable draw. The fate of Windows 8 may change things, but for now, I bet far, far more people bought a Mac because it could run Windows software than didn't buy a PC because it couldn't run Mac software. And I bet that this number is significant enough to care about.

But, who knows? My sample set is fairly small. I'm sure Apple have a better idea than me about the truth of any these suppositions.

In 2007/2008, almost everyone I knew who had a Mac would run at least 50% of the time in Windows. But recently, they stay in OSX all the time, and most don't even have Parallels/VMWare/VirtualBox installed.

The times, they are a-changing.

I'd be shocked to learn they didn't at least have prototype MacBooks running ARM processors in the lab for the last couple years, as they did with x86 once upon a time. Very compelling case from both a product and business perspective. Longer battery life, higher hardware margins.

> The year Apple became the biggest company in the world, successfully accused Samsung of plagiarism in court, and finally released the iPhone 5 — a beautifully fine-tuned device.

"Plagiarism"? Are you kidding me? I'm sorry, but this is horrible reporting. They successfully accused Samsung of many things, but none of them were even similar to plagiarism.

Does this article seem to you as if it's interested in something resembling fair and balanced journalism? It seems to be linkbait for apple fanboys.