Apple reveals new products

Yahoo Finance’s Alexis Christoforous, Dan Howley and Kristin Myers discuss Apple's new product line.

Video transcript

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KRISTIN MYERS: Welcome back. Let's turn now to Apple. They're having their spring loaded event today. Let's turn now to our tech editor Dan Howley for everything that Apple revealed today. So Dan, I'm seeing AirTags, a new design for the iMac, which of course in the break you were very excited about. So what are you keeping your eyes on today? What caught your attention?

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah. I think the big star of the show, despite having the new iMacs which looked great, the new iPads, was really the Apple M1 Chip. That's their chip that they built based on ARMs technology. We have Tim Cook actually giving a brief sound bite on what he thinks about the M1 Chip. Let's take a look.

TIM COOK: M1 delivers incredible performance, custom technologies, and revolutionary power efficiency. With a giant leap in performance per watt, every Mac with M1 is transformed into a completely different class of product. This isn't just an upgrade. It's a breakthrough.

DAN HOWLEY: So that was basically him kind of explaining where the M1 lands. We obviously saw them debut in the MacBook Pro, the MacBook Air, as well as the Mac Mini. This is the first time, though, that it's showing up in the iMac. And the iMac is actually, Apple says, the first Mac designed specifically around the M1. And that's why if you take a look at it, it looks so ludicrously thin. But they say that the performance is actually much better than the prior generation, which was based on Intel. They throw a little shade at Intel there without specifically naming them. That's kind of Apple's way of doing things.

The new iMacs come in seven different colors, start I believe at $1,299. But they're not the only devices that are getting Apple's new M1 chips. The iPad Pros are actually getting them now. And that will start at $799 or $1,099 depending on the size you get, whether it's the 11 inch or the 12.9 inch. The 12.9 inch by the way gets an all new display technology based on Apple's 6K display, it's a big screen that's really used for video editing and things along those lines.

It's called Liquid Retina XDR display. That's what's going to be in the 12.9 inch. That uses specifically made mini LEDs that are much smaller than the LEDs that were previously in the iPad Pros. And just to give you an idea of how much smaller they are, these iPads have 10,000 LEDs in them compared with the 72 that were in the prior iPad Pro. And really what that means is they'll be able to treat this similar to a high end television set. If you have, for instance, in this-- sorry, iPad local dimming, which essentially means that the iPad will be able to control different areas of display for brightness.

And that will help ensure better contrast, less light bleed, across different images. So say you're on a pitch black screen with a moon, if they didn't have local dimming, you may see some of the white from the moon spread out into where it should be pitch black. This will control for that better. So it'll make it a much better display.

And then out of that, after that rather, we have the new AirTags. Those are essentially little trackers that you would put on something like your remote, your keys, your purse, anything that you may tend to misplace. And you would simply look them up using the Find My app in your iPhone similar to what you would use for Find My iPhone with your Apple Watch, your Mac, what have you.

And this will allow you to track those items in physical locations. They also have using Apple's technology kind of a directional feature to them, where they'll tell you how many more feet you have to walk and in which direction to get to your device. And then you can press a button for it to make a sound. Now these are kind of a contentious device because Tile, which makes a similar product, is actually accusing Apple of antitrust because of the way the permissions for locations are used with Title versus with Apple's AirTags.

And of course, finally we had the new upgrade for Apple TV, that's the Apple TV 4K. That now gets Apple's A12 Bionic chip, which used to show up in the iPhones. Now the company says that with that chip, they'll be able to provide higher frame rates, HDR technology, as well as 4K in the television viewing experience as well as, thankfully, a new remote, a new Siri remote. Gone is that kind of weird touch sensor at the top. Now it's got a full click bar and everything along those lines.

So really a slew of new updates coming out of Apple today.

ALEXIS CHRISTOFOROUS: I'm really happy to be here, believe it or not, about that remote change for Apple TV. I always complained about the way the old one worked. But before we let you go, I also want to talk about what they said today regarding podcasts. What's interesting is they really Apple popularized podcasts years ago but never really monetized it. And now I guess Tim Cook is out with a paid subscription model.

DAN HOWLEY: Yeah. This is-- obviously, I mean we wouldn't call them podcasts if it wasn't for the iPod. So that's really where podcasts come from. And I think Apple seeing the popularity with Spotify and with other services, they need to jump in there. And I think that's why they're doing this, and obviously they want to monetize better services [INAUDIBLE] the big thing for Apple outside of hardware. And this is a way for them to kind of play in that space even more so.

KRISTIN MYERS: All right. Well, I was today years old when I learned that podcasts are named after the iPod. I don't know where I've been that I didn't know that this whole time. Tech editor Dan Howley, thanks so much for breaking that down for us.