Apple held a major press event on Tuesday where it unveiled its latest lineup of fall products, most notably new updates to the full-sized iPad and iPad mini tablet devices. The Apple rumor mill had been churning on this event for weeks and a lot of what happened lived up to expectations but the event was not entirely without its surprises. Below is our list of three unexpected outcomes of Apple's Oct. 22 press event.
Free OS X Mavericks: At its World Wide Developer's Conference in June, Apple's new update to its operating system was expected to get a release date at today's event, and it did. The product's immediate availability was announced at the keynote event. However, that wasn't the surprising part. Apple also announced that, in an effort to get OS X Mavericks into the laps and living rooms of as many people as possible, the software update would be free for all users.
iPad Mini Retina Display & A7 Chip: The biggest rumor surrounding the iPad mini upgrade was whether or not the company's supply chain would be able to support a high-resolution retina display. Not only were those rumors true but speculation that Apple could also drastically improve the device's performance by including the 64-bit A7 processing chip helped as well. The new chip should give the iPad mini 2 a huge shot in the arm in terms of computing power.
No Touch ID: Not all of the surprises came in the form of an unveiling or new feature. The new iPad Air took a lot of pages out of the successful iPhone 5S' book, it seems surprising that the new flagship smartphone's most excting and talked about feature didn't make its way into the home button of the new iPad. It's unclear as of now what the reason for the lack of the Touch ID biometric fingerprint scanner but the culprit likely has to do with Apple's supply chain.
