The Verge has a decent summary article.

- New 13" and 15" MacBook Pros. Retina displays. Fast guts. Long battery life. Reasonable prices (at least on the 13" model).

- Mac Pro, coming in December, starting at $3000. (No word of a 4K display, presumably that's also TBA in December.)

- iPad Air. It's thin. $499+

- iPad Mini. It's higher resolution. $399+

- OS X Mavericks. It's a free download for everybody. Today. Also, new Macs come with free iLife and iWork.

Just placed an order for a new 15" MBP. Psyched about finally having SSD storage since I'm doing so much with virtual machines nowadays.

Useful factoid: when you download the Mavericks installer, via the Apple Store, it dumps a 5.3GB "Install OS X Mavericks.app" in /Applications. This is apparently deleted after the install is complete, so copy it away before you finish the install. Then, you can install bunches of machines without waiting for that big download.

Lots of great upgrades. My wife will probably be getting the new iPad Mini for Christmas

The only criticism I have is merely the naming of "iPad 2." I'm sorry, that's just confusing. I thought it was good to strip away the naming on the last iPad and just call it "iPad," but now it looks like they were just starting over.

Other than that, it's a nice set of updates. They needed that retina on the iPad Mini, though it's still quite a bit more expensive than a Nexus 7.

I'd love to have one of those Mac Pros Did they say anything about pricing for those this time around? All I know is that the site they made for it is quite impressive.

Damnit Dan, we've had a strict (undocumented and unspoken) no talking about new Apple stuff rule here since like June. Why'd you have to go and break that trend?

I'm happy they made OS X free now. It keeps their platform up to date on either side now. Mavericks and iOS 7 have a lot of features that work together. I'm glad iOS 7.0.3 brought back the iCloud keychain, been missing that since the developer betas.

iPad wise, I'm disappointed TouchID didn't make the cut this year. I'm now frustrated when I got to unlock the iPad I have after living with a 5s for a few weeks.

Yep, same as previous Mac App Store OS installs. One difference this year is Apple included a tool to make a USB drive now, instead of the older method.



Also noteworthy, the download is useful to hold on to for running in a VM. VMWare Fusion and Parallels accept this file as the equivalent of an iso for install.

For anyone with an 802.11g based Airport, Mavericks cannot configure them. The old Airport Utility simply won't run, due to missing symbols in the 802.11 ktext. I'm keeping a 10.7 VM around to configure my one G based Airport Express for now.

I must have missed it in the announcement. $2,999. Holy cow.

Evan at that steep price tag I think I'll be taking the plunge.

I thought that about the old Mac Pro, so far I've got 4 1/2 years use out of it so it is actually really good value!

Cheers

Cris

Oh definitely. I didn't mean to imply it wasn't worth that cost. It's just a really high cost What did the old Mac Pro start at?

Notes so far from the upgrade:

- I jumped from 10.7 straight to 10.9. No worries.

- Lots of new updates from the Apple Store (new Keynote, new Xcode, etc.).

- Once I installed the new Xcode, I did a 'brew update; brew upgrade' and everything seems to be working fine. It's grinding away now.

- Adobe also had updates for Creative Studio (I'm running CS6). That's been running for an hour and is still running. There was a dialog early on to install Java, which I guess Adobe needs. I guess Apple doesn't default to installing Java any more.

- f.lux broke. Downloaded a new one, manually reinstalled, worked fine.

- Apple silently removed web sharing from the preferences pane, but Apache is still there and still works just fine.

- I always configure my sshd_config to disable password login (public-key only). Every time I do an Apple upgrade, they toss my old sshd_config, and this time was no exception. Come on Apple, really?

- I've never been a user of Apple's calendar, mail, etc., but the new integrated notification service is intriguing. I'd really like to work Apple's Reminders into my workflow somehow. Right now I'm using Gmail's "Tasks" feature, but it's not supported by the Android app and hasn't been updated in forever. Ideally, I want a way to be able to turn any email into a task and to manage those tasks anywhere. Anyway, the upgrade hasn't broken my old workflow, but it's making me ponder whether I want to look at a different one.

T-Mobile is offering the new iPads with cellular. Two nice perks with them. 200MB of data usage a month is free. And they will be selling the devices on a 24 month installment plan (basically a 0% interest line of credit).

http://www.macrumors.com/2013/10/23/t-mobile-offering-ipad-air-and-retina-ipad-mini-for-0-down/

Yeah, this 200MB deal is pretty interesting. I assume that if you go over, you get nothing, versus the plans that cost money which start off fast then fall back to 2G speeds when you use up your quota.

I wonder why T-Mobile didn't offer the same deal with the Nexus 7. That came with one month (and 1GB) free, and thereafter you pay. If I could instead have 200MB/month free forever, I'd probably take that deal.

Oh, ho! I spoke too soon. Links: 9to5Google, Engadget.

Correct. And part of that is Apple forcing the issue. Any iPad with cellular must have an option to not tie the customer into a contract. It also must allow the customer to go month to month, sign up on the device, and not have any overage charges. Along with tethering being allowed. Carriers can tie the devices into mobile share plans and other setups though, and when that happens, the on device account management tends to be disabled.

Apparently, if you go over, you still get 2G speeds.

That sounds suspiciously like "free, unlimited 2G service forever, with occasional fast LTE as a bonus". Amazing if true. The fine print suggests you need some sort of active account, even a prepaid one, unused and on a different SIM, will do the job. If you're doing business with T-Mobile anyway, this basically says "adding a tablet is free, if you don't need lots of data". Still great.

It seems to be true. https://twitter.com/drakino/status/393169367082344449

I'm pretty surprised by that. And it's a clever way to work around the no overage charge rule for cellular iPads, while also being great for consumers.

Looks very similar to offerings up this way with Wind Mobile and Mobilicity. Full speed to a point, then throttling to lower speeds.

Great way to do it, if they must.

Cheers