Tong Family

Say what you want about Apple, but if you are someone (like me) who wants simple, amazing and well built, it is hard not to lust for these many, many new products, in order of desire:

1. I can’t decide if I want the iPad Mini more now that it has a Retina display or the iPad Air (would Steve have just called it the iPad, probably). Now there is a huge price differential between Apple and Android tablets, so it will be interesting to see how much of a premium Apple can carry ($400 for an iPad Mini and $500 for an iPad Air and Android and Amazon tablets are way less, so it looks like the market is really splitting into high and low ends). But for less than a pound to have all that beauty is pretty amazing. It is a hard choice because with only $100 between the two and the weight of the iPad Air, it is way more tempting than before.
2. MacBook Air 13″ with Retina. Man this is quite a machine, it has Haswell, it is super light and just $1300 in the base configuration. Quite a machine at an incredible price plus you can get AppleCare, something to think about for everyone holding on to their original MacBook Airs. It has 802.11ac, 9 hour battery life. Wow.
3. OS X Mavericks. This is now a *free* upgrade for all compatible Macs. Kind of an amazing deal. My 5GB download is happening right now. The bigt new features are an iCloud Keychain so that you (and the NSA, sorry couldn’t help that jab) can get your all passwords in one place, seamless sync between Macs and iOS for Calendar, iBooks, Safari and Maps. It is a very laptop focused release as it has timer coallescing to batch low level interactions lowering idle cpu consumption by 70%, compressed memory to lower the amount of data swapped to disk, app nap to cut down inactive app usage. Also improvements to finder, safari, a dedicated maps app.