The tablet market is shrinking, but Apple Inc. is faring quite well, shipping more than 400 million iPads to date including 44.2 million in the past year alone — more than the number of laptops sold by any other manufacturer during that period.

Apple Chief Executive Tim Cook made sure to drive home the tablet line’s popularity at the Howard Gilman Opera House in Brooklyn today, where he unveiled a redesigned iPad Pro sporting major changes across the board. Cook also pulled back the covers on new iterations of the MacBook Air and Mac Mini that represent the biggest refresh of the two product lines in years.

A sleeker, faster iPad Pro

The new iPad Pro will come in 12.9-inch and 11-inch editions with virtually identical specifications. Apple said the 11-inch model fits its display in the same form factor as the previous model, which had a smaller 10.5-inch panel, thanks to the streamlined design introduced with the upgrade.

The iPad Pro features a nearly edge-to-edge Liquid Retina Display framed by slimmed-down bezels. The difference is especially pronounced at the bottom, where Apple has removed the Home button more than a year after doing the same with the iPhone.

At the top is a TrueDepth front-facing camera array that brings the Face ID facial recognition technology to the iPad Pro for the first time. The system enables users to unlock their tablets and log into apps simply by looking at the tablet. Apple is pairing the unit with an improved 12-megapixel rear camera that can shoot 4K video at 60 frames per second.

Under the hood, the iPad Pro features a new A12X Bionic chip with an eight-core central processing unit and a seven-core graphics card. Apple claims that the tablet runs single-core tasks 35 percent faster than last year’s iPad Pro while providing up to 90 percent more computing power for multicore apps. Graphics performance has doubled, too.

Even with the higher power chip, Apple said the iPad Pro has a healthy battery life of up 10 hours. It charges via a USB-C port that replaces the proprietary Lightning connectors in the previous model, allowing users to connect their tablets to other devices such as TVs and even charge their phones. But this increased versatility is offset somewhat by the fact that Apple has removed the existing 3.5-millimeter headphone jack.

The 12.9-inch and 11-inch iPad Pros have a starting price of $999 and $799, respectively, with storage capacity ranging from 64 gigabytes to 1 terabyte.

“What Apple has been able to achieve with this year’s iPad Pro is impressive, and 3 years in now appears to be realizing the device’s laptop-rivaling premise laid out in 2015,” Macquarie Capital (USA) Inc. analyst Ben Schachter wrote in a note to clients.

Magnetic Apple Pencil 2, new keyboard

Apple’s push to revamp the iPad Pro experience encompasses accessories as well. At today’s event, the company unveiled a rebuilt Apple Pencil with a magnetic pairing mechanism that lets it clip to the side of the tablet and charge wirelessly. Furthermore, the stylus now features a touch-sensitive section that users can tap to perform actions such as switching the on-display cursor from a pencil to an eraser.

Apple is bringing the stylus to market alongside an overhauled version of its keyboard accessory, the Smart Keyboard Folio, that attaches magnetically as well. It introduces the ability to prop up an iPad Pro at one of two different angles and comes in separate editions for the 11-inch and 12.9-inch iPad Pros.

The Smart Keyboard Folio models will cost $179 and $199, respectively while the iPad Pencil 2 is set to ship for $129, $30 more than its predecessor.

Apple beefs up the MacBook Air and Mac Mini

Similarly to the redesigned iPad Pro, the new MacBook Air and Mac Mini that Apple debuted today feature improvements over their predecessors in just about every key area.

The MacBook Air, the most lightweight of the company’s laptops, has received a Retina display like the ones in the pricier MacBook and MacBook Pro that provides four times higher resolution than before. The 13.5-inch display has a bezel that is 50 percent thinner and is accompanied by new speakers that offer 25 percent higher volume.

Apple has upgraded the MacBook Air’s internals as well. The laptop will ship with an eighth-generation, dual-core Intel Core i5 CPU, up to 16 gigabytes of memory and as much as 1.5 terabytes of flash. Moreover, the model is the first MacBook Air to feature the company’s Touch ID fingerprint recognition feature, which is powered by a homegrown security chip called the T2 that originally appeared in the 2018 MacBook Pro.

The upgrades to the Mac Mini are more limited in scope, but they’re no less significant: it’s been four years since Apple last released a new version of its desktop computer. Apple said that the modernized Mac Mini offers up to five times as much as performance as the previous model thanks to the inclusion of latest-generation Intel silicon.

Storage technology has also improved a great deal since the previous Mac Mini’s release. According to Apple, the new model will ship with flash drives up to four times faster than those in its predecessor, which should be a big boon for graphic designers and other users who work with big files. 

The $799 base Mac Mini includes a 3.6GHz Intel CPU, 8 gigabytes of memory and a 128-gigabyte flash drive. The new MacBook Air, in turn, is set to start from $1,199. That will get buyers a 1.1-gigahertz Intel Core i5 chip, 8 gigabytes of RAM and 128 gigabytes of flash storage.

Photos: Apple