Apple

It's the start of a brand new year, and as usual there is a lot happening in the first half of 2019, for both Apple itself and for connected companies in the rest of the technology sphere. AppleInsider details some of the things you should expect to hear more about in the next few months.

Apple hasn't updated the Mac Pro for a considerable amount of time, with the only real change to the product line being an update to the 2013 model in 2017 that added a six-core Xeon configuration and dual AMD G500 GPUs. A change is well overdue.

When Apple introduced the fourth iteration of its smartwatch, the big new selling point wasn't a feature we typically associate with a watch or any sort of smart device. Instead, the company added a feature that had only recently arrived in the form of specialized consumer devices: an electrocardiograph (ECG), a device made for monitoring the heart's electrical activity.

Just $200 separates the 11-inch and 12-inch 2018 iPad Pros. This is a fairly narrow gap, and we've been told it's a hard call —so AppleInsider is here to help.

Both iPad Pros — regardless of size — have the same internal specs. That means you won't get better performance for choosing one over the other, so the decision really comes down to screen size.

Of all the different reasons one would prefer a particular size over another, there are three where one model excels over the other.

An interview previously recorded with Apple CEO Tim Cook at Apple Park aired on Sunday night, with the executive telling Axios' Ina Fried and Mike Allen that he sees privacy regulation of tech as an inevitability.

Fried challenged Cook to answer why Apple takes Google's money to be the default search engine when Google's business explicitly relies on making money off of user data.

Apple's new iPad Pro sports several new features of note, including the most dramatic aesthetic redesign in years, Face ID, new Pencil features, and the very welcome move to USB-C. But the star of the show is the new A12X system on a chip (SoC).

What's old is new again, and what's new is old. Apple has just released a new version of the old MacBook Air, a beloved laptop that hasn't received any real love in years. I've been using it for the past four days—traveling with it, typing on it, editing photos, wearing its battery down. Staring at its gorgeous new Retina display, which is not unlike the display on my own personal MacBook Pro.

Steve Jobs famously believed the devices his company produced would bring technology to the masses, but he was rarely willing to make the compromises necessary to bring that vision to fruition. Apple has only sometimes released products that were priced for everyone.

Like a college graduate ready to head off into the workforce and start a career, Apple has graduated the iPad from tablet school. As he prepared to lift the curtain on the new 11-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pro last week, CEO Tim Cook explained that Apple sees the iPad as a personal computer now. Apple says that new designation makes iPad the top-selling line of PCs in the world.

Apple will host another product announcement event on October 30 at 10am Eastern time, according to invitations that have gone out to members of the press and an update to Apple's live events page.

"At Apple, we care deeply about the evolution of the iPad into increasingly a tool that is essential to a creative workflow," Schiller said at the event. "That's why over the last few years we've been creating the iPad Pro line and we've been building unique technologies like our A-Series chips, special versions of that with the CPU and GPU performance for professionals."

The SVP added that "Adobe has understood the potential of the iPad Pro," and that the companies' teams have been "working together on some really amazing technology."