events

Last fall, Apple had a lot of products to introduce: a new iPhone, two new iPads, three new iPods, and a few new Macs. Apple ended up dividing those new devices into two events: an iPhone + iPod event and an iPad + Mac event.

Without much occurring during the first half of this year, and even with the new iPhones launching this month, Apple still has a significant amount of products to still announce this year. Let’s take a look at what’s coming:

• Redesigned full-sized iPad (64-bit, looks like a larger iPad mini, likely no Touch ID)
• iPad mini with Retina display (both 32-bit and 64-bit versions have been in testing, likely no Touch ID)
• iPad mini without Retina display (version with faster, A6 processor has been in testing)
• MacBook Pros with Haswell chips, improved battery life
• Haswell Mac minis
• Final OS X Mavericks details, pricing (launch targeted for late October, but sources now say there’s been internal chatter about a (very unlikely) push-back to early November
• Mac Pro tech specs, pricing, availability details
• Secret Mac-related hardware that nobody knows about coming as soon as late 2013
• New Apple TV hardware
• Redesigned first-party iOS 7 apps
• New iWork for Mac
• New iWork for iOS
• New Final Cut Pro

Could Apple announce all of this in one sitting?…

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Apple’s education event is underway at New York City’s Guggenheim Museum, where Eddy Cue, the company’s vice president of Internet Software and Services, told the audience how Apple is “going to help teachers reinvent the curriculum.” Noting that Apple has seen 700 million downloads from iTunes U, Cue took the wraps off a brand new free software for the iPhone, iPad and iPod touch. Aptly named iTunes U, the app makes it “simple for anyone to take courses anywhere.”

Indeed, adorned with the beautiful mahogany bookshelf graphics, the app is akin to iBooks in many respects. It is aimed at teachers and supports many interesting features, including the ability to customize topics, provide students with office hours, post messages to the class and give assignments. With this app, content can be downloaded for later consumption or streamed directly to students on-demand. More information is available after the break and at Apple’s freshly updated web site.

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Apple’s education event is underway at New York City’s Guggenheim Museum where the company announced the “iBooks 2″ app, a major new version designed to help integrate the iPad into school curriculum. That was Apple’s first highlight of the event — reinventing textbooks. We have been given some interesting metrics, and now Schiller unveiled “iBooks Author.” It is a new (and free!) Mac app for authoring e-books.

“Authors are going to love to use iBooks Create to create not only textbooks, but any kind of book,” said Schiller. Roger Rosner, Apple’s vice president of Productivity Software and iWork took the stage to give an interesting demonstration. Upon choosing one of the templates that ship with the program, users can begin adding their own photos, movies, text and multi-touch widgets in a fashion similar to the Pages program.

The iBooks Author reflows text dynamically, WYSIWYG-style, as you drag page elements around. It also supports Microsoft Word format, and the app is clever enough to automatically create sections and headers and lay out the pages automatically when you drop a Word document onto the chapter. Additional tidbits are available after the break.

[slideshow]

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Image courtesy of AllThingsD

Apple’s education event is underway at New York City’s Guggenheim Museum, where Phil Schiller, the company’s vice president of worldwide marketing, provided an update on key metrics related to Apple’s education business. Remarking that the United States “is not at the top of industrialized nations,” Schiller said: “If you’re a freshman, you only have a 70 percent chance of graduating.”

After playing a video that outlined the problem with U.S. education today, Schiller said “no one person or company” could fix it all. Apple, of course, will try. The basis for such an ambitious undertaking, of course, is the iPad, which Schiller said was No. 1 on kids wish lists this holiday season. The goal is to help integrate the iPad into the curriculum.

However, the iPad is already strong in education. Here are some interesting metrics:

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