In a press event held in San Francisco today, Apple showed off major updates to a few of its products. The iPad grows bigger with iPad Pro, Apple TV gets a new operating system and remote, and the iPhones look the same, but get some interesting innovations.

Bigger iPad Pro coming in November

When Time Cook said that he had “The biggest news in iPad since the iPad,” he wasn’t kidding. The iPad Pro is massive, big enough that it’s width can accommodate the height of the latest model, iPad Air 2.

The 12.9-inch (diagonal) Retina display is supported by a four-speaker audio system that balances the sound output depending on how you’ve got it oriented.

iPad Pro is built with an A9X processor, 1.8 times faster than the A8X it replaces. Apple’s Phil Schiller called it “desktop-class performance” and claimed that it’s faster than 80 percent of the laptops sold in the last year.

The larger screen means that the iPad Pro can display a full-size keyboard, and even a piano keyboard, are possible with the larger screen.

Apple claims a 10-hour battery life for the iPad Pro. And while the new tablet is only 8 mm thicker than the iPad Air 2, it weighs almost as much as the first iPad. Time will tell how difficult it will be to hold that up for an entire day.

Available in November, the iPad Pro will come in three configurations:

• 32 GB Wi-Fi (US$799)
• 128 GB Wi-Fi (US$949)
• 128 GB with Wi-Fi and cellular (US$1,079)

Also announced was the iPad mini 4, with the features of iPad Air 2 compressed into a smaller package.

Accessories make the iPad Pro even better

Two peripherals designed to work with the iPad Pro make it even more useful.

The iPad Pro keyboard case (US$169) borrows from Microsoft’s Surface tablet by including a keyboard case accessory. It uses magnetic connectors to keep the iPad Pro attached to the keyboard, but also to transmit power to the keyboard, and data to the iPad.

The Apple Pencil (US$99), which borrows from Samsung’s Note, is a stylus with sensors that send information to the iPad Pro. You can even use the Pencil and fingertips at the same time, with a virtual ruler, for example.

In the demo video, an illustrator’s hand was not impacting the drawing, but their fingertip was, which indicated how useful the Pencil could be.

New Apple TV the “future of television”?

Apple’s move into the living room takes another step with the new Apple TV. The company’s plan is to replicate what worked with smartphones, by providing the hardware, the operating system, and a solid user experience, and let others come up with the content and the software.

So Apple TV is getting its own operating system, tvOS, which has been opened up to software developers to create apps for the living room. They include games, home shopping apps, and sports apps.

The new device is voice-controlled with Siri, and comes with a new remote which has directional sensors and a touch surface area.

Voice commands for Siri are elegant, and there are built-in features that will immediately improve TV viewing, like being able to say, “What did she say?” during a program, which will skip back 15 seconds and turns on closed captioning.

The new remote connects to the Apple TV with Bluetooth, and it can control TV and tuner power, volume, and inputs.

There are two configurations of the device, which will be available in late October, each with different flash storage capacity:

• 32 GB (US$149)
• 64 GB (US$199)

New iPhones want you to press harder

The force feedback that is available on Apple’s new Macbook laptop has been built into the new iPhones.

3D Touch brings force feedback gestures to the iPhone. By pressing lighter or harder on the screen, you can have even more control over your smartphone.

Continue pressing, for example, to open apps or dive deeper into content.

You get touch feedback, too, which comes from a new “taptic” vibrator.

The other big iteration on the new iPhones is a better camera system that includes a 12 MP iSight camera in the devices that does not compromise on image quality, 4K video capability, and a new feature called Live Photos.

Live Photos takes a still picture and adds a few seconds of animation and sound. The experience is like the wizard pictures in Harry Potter coming to life.

What the iPhone does is grab still photos for 1.5 seconds before and after the image. And Live Photos is coming to all Apple devices with the next software updates.

Pricing for the new iPhones is the same as when the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus were released last year (which themselves become cheaper). Prices to purchase the smartphones outright (they are cheaper with a 24-month contract):

iPhone 6S

• 16 GB ($899)
• 64 GB ($1,029)
• 128 GB ($1,159)

iPhone 6S Plus

• 16 GB ($1,029)
• 64 GB ($1,159)
• 128 GB ($1,289)

The new iPhones come out on September 25.

Cross-posted at the Georgia Straight