Precision-engineered to weigh less than half a kilogram, iPad Air is 20% thinner and 28% lighter than the fourth generation iPad, and with a narrower bezel the borders of iPad Air are thinner.

Apple also announced iPad mini with Retina display, bringing all the pixels from the 9.7-inch iPad to its 7.9-inch screen, delivering razor sharp text and detail in the same thin and light design. The new iPads feature the powerful and power-efficient Apple-designed A7 chip with 64-bit desktop-class architecture, ultrafast wireless with faster built-in Wi-Fi and expanded 4G LTE cellular connectivity, and the newly-designed iOS 7 featuring hundreds of great new features.

“iPad created an entirely new mobile computing experience, and the new iPad Air is another big leap ahead. It is so thin, light and powerful, once you hold one in your hand you will understand what a tremendous advancement this is,” says Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide marketing Philip Schiller.

“iPad Air with its 9.7-inch Retina display weighs less than half a kilogram and packs the performance of iOS 7 running on a 64-bit desktop-class Apple A7 chip, and delivers all-day battery life.”

Precision-engineered to weigh less than half a kilogram, iPad Air is 20% thinner and 28% lighter than the fourth generation iPad, and with a 43% narrower bezel the borders of iPad Air are thinner. iPad Air’s Retina display makes web pages, text, images and video look incredibly sharp and realistic, and the new power-efficient A7 chip allows the battery to be even smaller, helping reduce the overall volume by 24% from the previous generation while doubling its performance and maintaining its up to 10-hour battery life.

The new iPad mini with Retina display packs all the 3.1 million pixels (2048-by-1536 resolution) of iPad Air into its 7.9-inch Multi-Touch display, for a pixel density of 326 pixels per inch. The 7.9-inch Retina display of iPad mini is 35% larger than screens on 7-inch tablets, and is the only small tablet to deliver the full iPad experience, now with razor sharp Retina quality. Images are crisp, text is crystal clear, movies play at full 1080p HD-resolution and the 475,000 apps designed specifically for iPad work automatically.

The A7 chip in iPad Air and iPad mini with Retina display offers 64-bit desktop-class architecture, advanced graphics and improved image signal processing from previous generations. With up to twice the CPU and graphics performance on iPad Air, and up to four times the CPU and eight times the graphics performance on iPad mini with Retina display, almost everything you do is faster and better than ever, from launching apps and editing photos to playing graphic-intensive games—all while delivering all-day battery life. The A7 chip’s 64-bit architecture and support for OpenGL ES version 3.0 unlocks game console-like visual effects. The new iPads also feature the M7 motion coprocessor that gathers data from the accelerometer, gyroscope and compass to offload work from the A7 for improved power efficiency.

Both new iPads feature two antennas to support Multiple-In-Multiple-Out (MIMO) technology, bringing twice the Wi-Fi performance to iPad Air and iPad mini with Retina display at a data rate up to 300Mbps. Cellular models also come with expanded 4G LTE coverage to accommodate even more 4G LTE networks worldwide, while continuing to deliver comprehensive support for other fast cellular technology around the world (DC-HSDPA, HSPA+), all in a single model.

iPad Air and iPad mini with Retina display now have a next generation FaceTime HD camera with improved backside illumination sensors featuring larger pixels for better low-light performance. The iSight camera with 5MP sensor and advanced optics, combined with iOS 7 and the image signal processing of A7, further improves still image and video capture on iPad bringing faster auto-focus, up to three times video zoom, five times still zoom, better dynamic range and automatic image and video stabilisation.

The new iPads come with iOS 7, featuring a new user interface, completely redesigned with an elegant colour palette, distinct, functional layers and subtle motion. iOS 7 has hundreds of great new features, including Control Center, Notification Center, improved Multitasking, AirDrop, enhanced Photos, Safari and Siri.

iPad customers have access to the App Store, which now offers more than one million apps to iPhone, iPad and iPod touch users in 155 countries around the world, and more than 475,000 apps are designed specifically for iPad. More than 60 billion apps have been downloaded from the App Store, which offers customers an incredible range of apps in 24 categories, including newspapers and magazines in Newsstand, games and entertainment, kids, education, business, news, sports, health and fitness and travel.