Apple’s iPad event (live updates)

Here are all the big-ticket items and their price tags:

iPad Air — from $499 (the iPad 2 now from $399)
iPad mini retina —  from $399 (the original iPad mini now from $299)
Smart Covers — starting at $69

13-inch MacBook Pro — from $1,299
15-inch MacBook Pro — from $1,999

Mac Pro — from $2,999

OS X Mavericks — free

With the announcements over, I’m off to hit the hands-on area. Thanks for following along, folks.

From a clever new iPad spot:

Apple has a nice visual in the commercial, showing the iPad hiding behind a pencil on a table — yes, folks, it’s that thin.

“This is what we mean by ‘Designed by Apple in California,’” Cook says. “Other companies would be proud to have just one of these products.” But Apple, he says, is glad to bring all of these products to users by the holidays.

Tim Cook is back on stage, after Schiller wraps up his iPad spiel with the news that Apple is also releasing new smart covers, which will start at $69.

Cook is now recapping everything we’ve seen today — the new Mac Pro, MacBook Pros, Mavericks and new software updates. And, of course, he’s also talking up the new models of the iPad.

“We couldn’t be prouder of both new iPads,” Cook says.

The iPad mini will come in silver and white and in space gray and black. Sorry, gold-lovers.

The new tablet will here in time for the holidays,  available in November, for $399.

The existing iPad mini will  get a price cut down to $299.

Apple’s moved on to showing off how the Mac Pro is made, with a video full of drilling bits, shiny metal and rows of gleaming cylindrical computer towers.

Each Mac Pro bears the inscription, “Designed by Apple in California. Assembled in the USA.”

Schiller is back to talk about the iPad mini — which does indeed have the much-anticipated and desired retina display. It has 2048 x 1536 pixels, which Schiller says is the same as the iPad Air. That means that the new retina iPad mini will be able to run all the same apps as the iPad Air.

Apple’s iWork chief, Roger Rosner, is on stage to show off new features in Pages, which allows users to easily customize things such as posters. Rosner said that Apple is also introducing collaboration features to iWork in iCloud, meaning that users will be able to work on the same document at the same time.

Software and Internet services head Eddy Cue and Rosner are now working on the same document, in real time, working on a poster for a fake Eddy Cue music gig.

And here’s your standard Jony Ive video to explain the iPad:

The video features the voice of the Apple design guru talking about the iPad’s durability. The video shows the iPad in schools, in the great outdoors, and taking all the kinds of daily abuse that you’d expect for a device that goes just about everywhere with its users.

Apple is also making sure to note that the iPad still has its 10-hour battery life, despite its now thinner, lighter chassis. They’re also referring again to the new software on the device, much of which they’ve already shown off.

Cue says that there’s a new user interface in all of iWork, which is Apple’s suite of productivity programs: Pages, Numbers and Keynote.

Changes to all of the iWork apps are designed to make the programs easier to use, and Cue promises across- the-board speed improvements.

Apple’s update to Keynote — which it’s using today — lets users tap transitions and animations from the iPhone and iPad, so that they can make stronger presentations on the go.

Apple’s senior VP of global marketing, Phil Schiller, is on now to chat about MacBooks, saying that the MacBook Pro will get major updates today.

The 13.inch MacBook Pro is 3.46 pounds, and 0.71 inches thin. It sports an Intel Haswell chip, a fourth-gen, dual-core chip with integrated graphics that he says are up to 90 percent faster than the previous generation. And it also gets up to nine hours of battery life. That includes up to nine hours of iTunes movie playback — enough to watch the whole Batman trilogy, Schiller notes.

The computer also has a Thunderbolt 2 port, and comes with Mavericks.

The new 13-inch computer starts at $1,299 — down from a starting price of $1,499 in the previous generation. It ships today.

You can adjust the drum track as you’re listening, and it will get added to your song on the fly. Amazing.

(Apple)

Running through his introductions of the new Mac Pro and the new MacBook Pros, Apple marketing chief Philip Schiller rattled off a ton of acronyms and highlighted a bunch of individual specs. Some of them were repeated on the slides behind him, details like “4096 stream processors” and “384-bit memory buses.”

This trip into the weeds seems unusual for a company that has mostly focused these events on showing the everyday activities that can be accomplished with its technology. This shift to throwing lots of specs at the audience seems pedestrian and recalls much of the industry arms race of the last decade, when manufacturers tried to out-advertise each other on processor speeds and hard drive capacity.

Apple’s new iPad is getting a new name, the iPad Air, says Phil Schiller, showing off a 9.7-inch retina display tablet with a smaller bezel.

The entire device is 20 percent thinner overall, Schiller said. It weighs just one pound and will be easy to hold with one hand, Schiller says. The demo photo onstage shows someone holding the tablet for reading on the train — a primary use for consumers in the all-important emerging markets in Asia.

The CPU performance far outstrips the previous generation, Schiller says, and is up to 72 times faster in graphics.