- A new 27" iMac with a "5K" ultra-HD screen. (Notably absent: a standalone monitor with the same specs that you might connect to your Mac Pro.)

- A new Mac Mini. $499 to start, $999 loaded (16GB RAM, 1TB SSD). This seems like a big winner.

- A variety of new iPad devices. Thinner, super-high-res display. Good specs.

- OS X Yosemite shipping very soon.

I'm betting the standalone monitor will come once they move to Thunderbolt 3. Spec wise, Thunderbolt 2 (due to the displayport version it uses) lacks enough bandwidth for a 5k display. Will be interesting to see the teardown of the 5K iMac and see how they wired the screen up to the GPU. Notable that they also went back to AMD graphics for the 5k only. Price premium for the screen seems to be around $500, based on a comparison to the older 27 inch iMac.

Interesting tidbit on the cellular iPad Air 2 and Mini 3 models, an Apple SIM: http://www.macrumors.com/2014/10/16/ipad-air-2-apple-sim/ . This allows US users to use AT&T, T-Mobile or Sprint for data without SIM swapping.

Resolution wise, the iPads match last year's offering, at base 2x Retina of 2048x1536. Probably waiting on some newer displays to be able to go 3x like the iPhone 6 Plus.

Just reading up on more of it, and the iPad updates are odd. The iPad Air 2 is a proper upgrade over the Air. A7 to A8X processor change, Touch ID, better camera, etc.

The Mini 3 has three differences from the Mini 2. Touch ID, storage options, and a gold color choice. No processor or other technical spec bump. It's a strange lineup with 3 mini models available. Non retina, or two retina choices with a $100 premium for a touch ID sensor.

One other notable absence: no upgrades to the MacBook line. My "late 2010" MacBook Air isn't quite the wonder it used to be, and needs to be replaced, but I'm not doing it until there's something new, like the much-rumored "Retina MacBook Air". It's a bit surprising that Apple hasn't done this yet.

Amusement du jour: we're finally seeing 64-bit ARM chips coming out, both in the iOS and Android universe. Those same chips, of course, could be mounted in a MacBook Air case and you'd have an entirely reasonable device that would still be a "real" Mac, albeit perhaps without needing a fan. That would be all kinds of attractive.

MacBook updates will likely come sometime next year. Intel's tick cycle (die shrink) to go to Broadwell was delayed a bit, slipping from Q3 2014 to very late Q4 2014 or early 2015. They did manage to push out some slightly faster Haswell chips though.

Looks like I'm getting an iPad Air 2. It's a clear upgrade for anyone on the older 9.7 inch non Air iPads. It's also the first time Apple has varied the power of the tablet from the phone significantly. iPhone 6 has an A8 dual core CPU with 1GB of RAM. iPad Air 2 has the A8X, a triple core CPU and 2GB RAM. Past iPads have used X variants of the processor, though it's been a GPU only boost to help with the larger resolution screens, never a CPU boost until now.

I think the CPU and RAM increase is to help support the rumored split screen mode, allowing multiple apps to run at the same time on screen. This is one aspect of the Surface RT based devices I liked.

Thanks to T-Mobile offering 24 month 0% loans on the cellular iPads, it's an easy sell for myself. I use the cellular features of an iPad, since it costs me $0 a month to do so. I was on the fence about a mini or Air, but with the new performance gap, I can't justify a new mini this year. My iPad 3 is already starting to slow me down when using it.

Pure CPU benchmarks are placing the thing at levels that beat a 2011 MacBook Air, and sit below the 2012 MacBook Airs. For those using a tablet a s a computing device, and not just a media consumption device, this is damn impressive.

http://daringfireball.net/2014/10/ipad_air_2 is a good review of it.

I doubt Apple will do this. The Air 2 shows their intent to push the pure tablet forward as a computer. For those who want a keyboard, they can easily add one via 3rd parties.

A MacBook Air running an ARM processor would force the Mac to support 2 architectures with some strong pain points. x86 code would need to be somehow runnable on the MacBook ARM Air, or it loses all the 3rd party apps out today.

I think if the Surface ARM units had taken off in a meaningful way, Apple may reconsider. The Windows market didn't pick up on Windows RT though, and it looks like Surface RT is dead in favor of Intel based Surface Pros. I don't see Apple doing anything major in this space to improve on what Microsoft attempted.

Well, Apple certainly knows all about fat binaries and supporting one architecture on another (Rosetta), and their toolchain and OS kernel certainly support ARM today. It's just a matter of whether their in-house ARM chips offer a sufficient benefit over Intel's chips that it would be worth the pain. On the one hand, you'd have to support legacy x86 software and deal with that transition; on the other hand, you could run iOS apps natively, and you might be able to eek out longer battery life.

Amusement: Google has a much easier time of this, with running Android apps on ChromeOS devices (no, really), since Android apps are distributed as Dalvik bytecode which is then compiled at install time for the local machine architecture. Thus, most Android apps don't know or care whether they're on x86 or ARM.

I suppose now that a jailbreak seems imminent (pangu exists for iOS 8.x, but lacks polish) I should see about what applecare will do for the broken screen on my iPad Air. the crack is by the home button, not under the video, so i was waiting lest a replacement leave me with an unjailbreakable iPad.

Agreed Apple has a lot of experience in this area. Under the hood every iOS app is a fat binary, since ARM isn't just one architecture. Nor are the variants compatible with each other like x86/PowerPC. I just don't see evidence ARM is powerful enough currently to make the jump and allow a smooth transition (At Apple's quality/polish level). Nor can I see Apple being willing to drag this out across a multi year timeframe.

For PowerPC to x86, they had a clear transition path for every product. Low end went to Core processors. High end went to Xeon. They also were able to license the binary translation layer Rosetta (it wasn't an in house technology).

Before there was Rosetta, or intel macs, I was actually running MacOS on my office Linux head in http://pearpc.sourceforge.net/

Surprised to see PearPC had a release in 2011. Though I suppose now it's a viable way to run older Mac stuff on a modern Mac. I remember poking at it shortly before the Intel transition on Windows. Very slow, I think because it was pure emulation without any binary translation.

Digging deeper, maybe Dan is onto something. I did find a product equivalent to what Rosetta was for x86 on ARM.

http://eltechs.com/product/exagear-desktop/

The technical challenges I saw with an ARM MacBook Air are smaller then I thought.

I did pick up an iPad Air 2 last week, and the jump from the iPad 3 is a big one. The performance jump combined with the tablet form factor has me using the iPad more over the laptop at night, even for gaming. Hearthstone loads quicker because the iPad lacks the Battle.net launcher overhead, and the app is kept up to date automatically. And the increased RAM allows me to swap in and out of the game without it being forced to close.

The Apple SIM is a really nice change as well. Right now it's sitting on T-Mobile for their 200MB free plan, though at any time I can transition it to Sprint. Unfortunately AT&T is locking down the Apple SIM if it's ever used on their network, requiring a replacement SIM to be bought from Apple to be able to switch networks.