Apple Reveals iPad '4': Price Points Start at $499, Release Date Starts Today

At the company’s media event in San Jose on Tuesday, just seven months after Apple unveiled its third-generation iPad, the Cupertino, Calif.-based computer company released its fourth-generation iPad.

The new iPad "4" looks and feels exactly like the third-generation model, complete with a 9.7-inch Retina Display boasting a 2048x1536 resolution, but Apple has endowed its newest tablet with faster processors, an updated camera infrastructure, faster Wi-Fi, and the company’s new 8-pin Lightning connector.

“We were already so far ahead of the competition, this just—I don’t even see them in the rear view mirror,” said Phil Schiller, Apple’s SVP of marketing, who introduced the fourth-generation iPad to San Jose’s California Theatre on Tuesday.

The new fourth-generation iPad features a new A6X chip, which performs about twice as better than the A5X chip, which is featured in the new iPad and the iPhone 4S. In fact, Schiller said that the all-new A6X chip doubles the chip speed and graphics performance of the A5X chip, and the new processor also powers enhanced features in the tablet, including photo and video stabilization and face detection. It’s also very energy efficient, in order to give the iPad its typical 10 hours of battery life.

The iPad 4 is more than twice as fast on Wi-Fi, but the tablet will now be featured on the LTE networks, including many more that the new iPad and iPhone 5 aren’t available on, such as Sprint’s LTE network in the US.

Apple’s fourth-generation iPad costs exactly the same as it did before, starting at $499 for a Wi-Fi-only model with 16GB of storage, $599 for 32GB, and $699 for 64GB. For customers that want LTE, Apple sells those cellular-enabled tablets starting at $629 for 16GB, $729 for 32GB, and $829 for 64GB.