苹果公司正式推出iPad mini（在线收听）

Apple has unveiled its latest product that seeks to carve out a niche in a relatively new area - the mini tablet.

At the historic California Theater in San Jose, Apple VP of worldwide marketing, Phil Schiller, unveiled the new tablet.

iPad Mini has a 7.9 inch screen. That’s 0.9 inches bigger than its chief rival, Google’s Nexus 7, which has been grabbing a bigger share of the tablet market.

Apple claims the area of the screen is 67% larger than the Nexus 7, while surfing the web in landscape mode.

Apple also touts the screen ratio being the same as the iPad 2, so developer’s apps work exactly the same - another shot at Android which is more fragmented.

The iPad mini is the width of a pencil and the weight of a paper pad. But perhaps the biggest shock is the price.

iPad mini’s base model, with 16 gigabytes, comes in at 329-dollars-far pricier than the 199 dollars for the Nexus 7 and Amazon’s Kindle Fire.

A big surprise was the arrival of the fourth generation of the "regular sized" iPad.

Lighter and faster with a new A6-X chip, this new iPad comes only about 7 months since the last iPad was launched.

CEO Tim Cook announced that Apple had sold 100 million iPad sales in just 2 years and that 91-percent of all web traffic for tablets is through the iPad.

Apple also refreshed its entire line of Mac Book Pro laptops and introduced a new iMac all-one-desktop that’s 80perecent thinner than the previous version.

The late founder Steve Jobs had famously said that seven-inch tablets were too big to compete with a smartphone and too small to compete with an iPad.

The thinking here has obviously changed since his passing.