iPad Air Unveiled by Apple

Apple trotted out its fifth-generation iPad today in San Francisco at the company's annual unveiling event. This model, which is now called the iPad Air, is "thinner, lighter, and more powerful than ever before," Apple's Phil Schiller said.

In this model, the 9.7-inch tablet with Retina Display weighs just a pound (down from 1.9 in the fourth-generation iPad. It weighs an extremely thin 7.5 millimeters, down from 9.4mm -- that's a 20 percent slimmer build, if you're keeping count. The bezel is also much narrower, too; 43 percent so, in fact.

A new A7 chip inside makes it 8 times faster than before. For reference, this is the same 64-bit chip populating the iPhone 5S, and also comes with its M7 motion co-processor. M7 promises graphics that render at twice the rate as the previous iPad.

Graphics-wise, that means that this iPad Air is 72 times faster than the original iPad in GPU performance. In terms of Wi-Fi, there's MIMO wireless technology onboard, but the Air is using 802.11n standard, not the the more current 'ac' Wi-Fi designation.