Not my Mac product line.  Except for anticipating a switch to a new cell phone next month, my personal electronic tool product line is set for the foreseeable future (famous last words, I know).  The big announcement from Apple this week, dubbed “A Little More” was supposed to reveal an iPad Mini, but there was so much more.

The day began with the announcement of a 13″ MacBookPro Retina laptop, iBooks, followed by a new MacMini, the new iMac, even a new full-sized iPad (angering approximately 50% of the people who just purchased the third generation model six months ago), then, finally, the iPad Mini. That’s all of the Mac Mobile line in the last two months and about two-thirds of their desktop line.

The MacMini is quite the bargain.  The key to buying it is to make sure you get the processor you want to live with for the life of the product — it’s soldered onto the motherboard.  Memory and hard drive are both easily user upgradable.

As for the iPad Mini, it costs less than the iPad2, which remains on the market, but it equals or exceeds iPad2 specs in every way except screen size.  To me, if I were choosing between an iPad2 and a Mini, I’d take the Mini.  The screen resolution on the iPad2 is just fine, so the improved cameras in the Mini coupled with the lighter weight, not bad screen size, and lower cost makes this a winner to me.  The lighter weight will make reading on the Mini a more pleasant experience.  I’ll have to handle it to see the rest.

The improvements on the fourth generation iPad are a nice plus. I’m glad I didn’t spring for a third generation when it came out, and I probably won’t spring for the fourth generation.  I purchased a 64G iPad2 WiFi model with an eye for keeping it for several years, and there’s no compelling reason to change that approach.  I still have 20G of space available on it, and it is a really bizarre thing to use for a camera.  A new one, even with the nice cameras included, is still a bizarre thing to use for a camera, and I don’t FaceTime (which, I believe it would be great for — I love the mobile hot spot commercial where the kid playing the tuba at a concert sees an empty chair in the front row, looks disappointed, and when he glances out to begin playing, there’s dad and grandparents waving to him from FaceTime screens after mom and siblings set up the conferences on their mobile hot spot).

There’s a trend toward eliminating optical drives from computers.  Apple acted upon several years ago with the introduction of the first Macbook Air.  I understood that would be the direction, but most of the world wasn’t ready for it. Most people didn’t have ubiquitous internet connections then. The mechanism for easy access to software via the web or the App Store was just coming into play.  When the next generation Airs were introduced in 2010, more people were ready, and the devices’ sales picked up.

As I understand things, Google’s Chromebook is a piece of hardware that runs a web browser and everything else has to be done on the web (maybe I don’t understand it, but that’s what it sounds like to me).  That’s probably the next direction, but I don’t plan on being ready for that for several more years.  We have a long way to go with our infrastructure before I’m ready to embrace that approach.

The march to making computers as easy as toasters to use and operate continues.