The day is finally here, and Apple executives are taking the stage at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco to announce its latest cool products. And as usual, the festivities kicked off with a volley of Apple updates.
Apple CEO Tim Cook hit the stage running at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco this morning, ready to talk about the company's latest products. Calling this "an amazing time at Apple," Cook launched into an update on the company's retail stores first.
First up was a new store in Barcelona, Spain, which includes a signature glass staircase and construction which used limestone from a local quarry. "No one would have done this but Apple," Cook remarked.
Following a rousing video of the Barcelona grand opening, Cook quickly moved on to the Mac, recapping the OS X Mountain Lion launch and its "fantastic" reviews. To date, Mac users have downloaded seven million copies of the latest OS X release.
Calling the new MacBook Pro with Retina Display "the best Mac we've ever made," Cook noted that the company's notebooks now rank number one in the U.S. for the last three months.
The subject then quickly turned to the iPad, where Cook recapped shipping 17 million of the tablets between April and June. "To put this in perspective, we sold more iPads than any PC manufacturer sold of their entire lineup," Cook remarked.
The iPad now stands at 84 million units sold through June, with a 62 percent market share. 94 percent of all Fortune 500 companies have also now deployed the iPad for their business.
Moving on to the App Store, Cook noted that there are now more than 700,000 apps in what he calls "the most vibrant app ecosystem on the planet." A whopping 90 percent of all apps are downloaded every month, and the average customer now uses more than 100 apps.
All together, iOS products have now sold more than 400 million devices since their inception -- and Cook promises that Apple will now be taking it to the next level.
Following the introduction of the iPhone 5, a release date for iOS 6 on September 19, a preview of the new iTunes coming in October and revamped iPod nano and iPod touch models, Cook closed out the event with musical guest The Foo Fighters, leaving us plenty to swoon over until the full media event goes online for all to enjoy later tonight.
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