The five key announcements from Apple's iPad event

Apple's latest tech event proved to be another newsworthy affair, with the introduction of several new products as well as updates to its software suite for personal computers, tablets and smartphones.

Here's a recap of the five biggest announcements:

1. iPad Air. As expected, the new 9.7-inch iPad is thinner and lighter than earlier models, and comes in space gray and silver (what, no gold?). Although it doesn't boast the champagne hue of the iPhone 5s, it does sport the same A7 processing chip and M7 coprocessor. Also missing is the fingerprint sensor rumored to be included with the new iPad. It starts at $499 for a 16GB, Wi-Fi only model. Interestingly, Apple is keeping the iPad 2 around, selling that for $399.

2. iPad Mini with Retina display. Apple's smaller tablet gets a big screen boost with the addition of a Retina display. The 7.9-inch device features 2048 x 1536 resolution and the A7 chip, along with 10 hours of battery life. It starts at $399, with the original iPad Mini now available at $299.

3. Mac Pro. Seeking out a traditional personal computer and got money to burn? Apple rolls out its Mac Pro starting at a whopping $2,999. For that price, consumers get an Intel Xenon 5 Quad-Core processor and 4K display support (full specifications here).

4. New MacBooks. The MacBook Pro gets an overhaul, with thinner, lighter models boasting the new Intel Haswell chips. Both the 13- and 15-inch models get a price cut, now available at $1,299 and $1,999 respectively.

5. Free Mavericks. The two big words Apple used with software were "free" and "today." The highlight is the latest version of the Mac operating system called OS X Mavericks is available today for free. Users must be running OS X 10.6.8 or later to snag the upgrade. Features include multiple display support, iBooks and Maps apps and upgraded notifications.

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Apple Unveils New IPads Amid Crowded Tablet Market

Philip Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide marketing at Apple Inc., unveils the iPad Air during a press event in San Francisco, on Oct. 22, 2013. The Air goes on sale on Nov. 1, with prices starting at $499. Photographer: Noah Berger/Bloomberg

Apple Inc. (AAPL:US) introduced new iPads in time for holiday shoppers, as it battles to stay ahead of rivals in the increasingly crowded market for tablet computers.

Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook debuted a new iPad mini with a high-definition screen, as well as a thinner and lighter design for the larger tablet named the iPad Air. The iPad Air goes on sale on Nov. 1, starting at $499. The iPad mini will be available later in November for $399 and up, higher than the previous model’s starting price of $329.

“This is just the beginning for iPad,” Cook said to a crowd of media and technology-industry insiders at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater in downtown San Francisco. “We have been busy working on the next generation of iPad.”

VIDEO: Apple Unveils New 13-, 15-Inch Macbook Pro Laptops

In the year since Apple last updated the iPad, companies including Samsung Electronics Co. (005930), Asustek Computer Inc. (2357), Google Inc. (GOOG:US)and Amazon.com Inc. (AMZN:US) have unveiled new tablets, often at lower prices. The competition adds pressure to Apple because the iPad is its second-largest source of revenue after its flagship iPhone. Success of the new models will be critical as the Cupertino, California-based company attempts to reignite revenue growth, which has slowed.

New Macs

Apple today also introduced new Mac software, called Mavericks, which is available free of charge. The software may stoke hardware sales, with the company also showing an updated high-end Mac Pro desktop computer starting at $2,999 aimed at professions that need extra computing power, as well as new MacBook Pro laptops.

“We still believe deeply in this category and we’re not slowing down on our innovations” in Macs, said Cook. The Mac Pro will be assembled in the U.S., he said.

VIDEO: iPad Air Shows Bankruptcy of Thinking: Kedrosky

Apple shares fell less than 1 percent to close at $519.87 in New York, leaving the stock down 2 percent for the year, compared with a 23 percent increase in the Standard & Poor’s 500 Index.

Apple is updating its products ahead of the lucrative holiday shopping season. As part of the lineup, the company released new iPhones (AAPL:US) -- the iPhone 5s and 5c -- last month.

Yet more than three years after Steve Jobs unveiled the iPad, the growth of the global tablet market is showing signs of decelerating. Tablet shipments are projected to increase 28 percent in 2014 to 301 million units, after doubling in 2012, according to Counterpoint Research.

Competitors are cutting into Apple’s lead. The company’s tablet market share slid to 32 percent in the second quarter, compared to 60 percent a year earlier, according to IDC.

Samsung, Asustek, Lenovo Group Ltd. (992), Acer Inc. (2353) and others are offering devices with prices starting at less than half of the iPad mini’s previous starting cost of $329. Amazon.com introduced new Kindle Fires last month with higher-resolution screens at prices starting from $229, while Microsoft Corp. and Nokia Oyj (NOK1V) took the wraps off new tablets this week.

Biggest Usage

Cook alluded to the competition today, noting that “everybody seems to be making a tablet.” He said the iPad is still used more than four times more than all other tablets put together. Apple has sold more than 170 million iPads, he said.

In a move to spur growth, Apple will also roll out the new iPad Air in China at the same time as other markets, said Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of product marketing. Apple also dropped the price of last year’s iPad mini model to $299.

No Worries

Benedict Evans of Enders Analysis said the higher starting price of the iPad mini shows Apple isn’t worried about competitors. He said the tablet market has bifurcated into two, with Apple controlling the high-end with its collection of popular iPad-specific apps, and a slew of other lower-end tablets used mainly to watch video or browse the Web.

“Apple apparently doesn’t fear much tablet competition,” he said.

Some rivals’ tablet efforts have flopped. Microsoft took an $900 million writedown earlier this year after its Surface failed to catch on with consumers.

Apple is also going on the offensive by offering its operating system software for free. That threatens companies such as Microsoft, which typically sells its software in pricier packages. Carl Howe, an analyst at Yankee Group, said Apple giving away its software is tantamount to “challenging the Microsoft model.”

Developers at Apple’s event said the updated iPads will attract consumers, especially the lighter and thinner iPad Air.

“When you have a lighter weight device, you’re going to get more usage,” said Mike McCue, co-founder of news-reading application Flipboard Inc. “People are more likely to throw it in a backpack, pick it up or use it.”

Some carriers and developers immediately began using the new iPads as a marketing opportunity. T-Mobile US Inc. (TMUS:US), which is selling the iPad for the first time, is offering users 200-megabits of high-speed data service at no extra cost, to help the fourth-largest carrier stand apart from its rivals. The 200-megabit allotment covers about five Web page downloads a day, according to the company’s data calculator. Users can buy 2.5GB of additional data for $30 or 4.5GB for $40.

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Beam me up: Bits of information teleported across computer chip

Quantum mechanics allows for some very strange things, like the teleportation of information and computers that can break even the toughest codes.

Recently, scientists at the Swiss Federal Institute of Technology (ETH) in Zurich made a step toward building a working quantum computer by teleporting bits of information across a computer chip. The results of the study were detailed Aug. 15 in the journal Nature.

Creating such a circuit is an important milestone, said Benjamin Schumacher, a professor of physics at Kenyon College in Ohio. "Everybody really knows if you are ever going to make a real quantum computer, it must be solid state," said Schumacher, who was not involved in the new research. " Solid state " refers to computers built with single-piece transistors — with no moving parts and with components that are self-contained. Almost every electronic device is built with solid-state electronics. [ Wacky Physics: The Coolest Quantum Particles Explained ]

Bill Munro, a research scientist at Japanese phone giant NTT, who has done extensive research into quantum computing, said the ETH team's work is a "very nice experiment," adding, "it really shows prototyping the technology" involved in making a quantum computer.

Previous teleportation experiments have used lasers to transport quantum information between photons. But that isn't as practical for building real computers. Solid-state circuits, on the other hand, are a well-known field and computer chip manufacturers have decades of experience in miniaturizing them, Schumacher said.

In new experiment, the scientists took advantage of a property of quantum physics called entanglement to teleport the quantum bits, called qubits. When two particles interact, they form a connection — they are entangled — so that an action performed on one affects the other, even when they're separated by great distances. In addition, no matter how far apart they are, if you know the state of one particle, you instantly know the state of the other.

Teleporting qubits

To set up the teleportation, the scientists put 3 micron-size electronic circuits (where 1 micron is one-millionth of a meter) on a tiny computer chip measuring 0.3 by 0.3 inches (7 by 7 millimeters). Two of the circuits were the senders, while the other served as the receiver. The scientists cooled the chip to near absolute zero and turned on a current in the circuits.

At that temperature, the electrons in the circuits, which are the qubits, started behaving according to quantum mechanical rules (in this case, becoming entangled.

The ETH team encoded information in the form of spin states, into the sending circuits' qubits, and measured them. At the same time, the researchers measured the state of the qubits in the receiver. The sending and receiving qubits' states were correlated — the information had been teleported.

The teleportation wasn't the only achievement. Usually, in teleportation experiments, the information transmission isn't reliable, meaning the experiment can't be reliably repeated. "Especially for large objects, the success rate is often small," said study co-author Arkady Fedorov from the University of Queensland in Australia. "You run the experiment millions of times and it works." In this experiment, the teleportation worked almost every time.

The ETH group also managed to make a qubit out of billions of electrons, nearly a quarter of a millimeter across, which is large by teleportation standards. "It's not anymore like a photon that you cannot see or some atom in a trap," Fedorov said.

Since the qubit doesn't go through the intervening space, some might ask if this is a way to communicate faster than light. It isn't, Schumacher noted. That's because even though two entangled particles share correlated states, it's impossible to know the states beforehand. There's a 50-50 chance a particle will be in state A or B. [ 10 Weird Implications of Traveling Faster than Light ]

Quantum computers?

For quantum computers, though, instantaneous transmission isn't critical. Rather, the ability of quantum bits to be in two states at once is key to the reality of these computers.

In an ordinary, or classical, computer, the bits — the 1s and 0s that make up the language of computer code — have a definite state. They are either 1 or 0. But qubits can be in both states at the same time. They are in a state called superposition. In quantum mechanics, a physical system has no definite state until it is observed — that is, until it leaves some trace in the surrounding environment.

This phenomenon is very different from the way people ordinarily experience things, but it is outlined in the famous Schrodinger's cat thought experiment. Picture a cat in a box with a vial of poison gas that opens when a tiny piece of radioactive metal emits an alpha particle as it decays. Emitting an alpha particle is a quantum-mechanical process, which means that whether it happens in any given stretch of time is basically random. In that sense, when you open the box, the cat has a 50-50 probability of being alive or dead.

In classical mechanics, the physics would dictate that the cat was alive or dead before we open the box; we just can't see it. But in quantum mechanics, the cat is in both states — just as the qubits in the teleportation experiment are in both states before they are observed.

That's another aspect of the work that makes it unique, Schumacher said. For the qubits to remain in their dual state, they can't interact with the environment in any way. A computer's components, though, have to interact with each other to be useful. "You have two contradictory requirements," he said. "The qubits must interact with each other and the parts have to be isolated from the outside world."

Raymond LaFlamme, executive director of the Institute for Quantum Computing at the University of Waterloo in Waterloo, Ontario, said the experiment is a big step because it implies not just teleporting qubits, but the logical operations, such as addition or subtraction. "You can change the transformation that you do," he said, "You can transform the bit ... and then flip the bit from 0 to 1."

Fedorov said that future experiments would likely involve getting the teleportation to work in more than one chip, using more qubits.

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Noise-canceling window sensor helps you enjoy the silence amid cacophony

Sono is a noise-cancelling gadget that can selectively convert a specific annoying background noise into a more pleasant sound, such as birds chirping.

The cacophony of any city's hammering jack hammers, beeping buses, and relentlessly yacking citizens can make anyone long for an oasis of silence. Enter the Sono, a futuristic noise-canceling gadget that sticks on the window and turns even the noisiest of rooms into a chill place to think. The pebble-shaped device, a finalist in a prestigious design competition, serves as a reminder of the power of quiet.

"From time to time, I just want to escape the noisy world for a while to reset my mind," Rudolf Stefanich, an industrial designer who created the Sono device while a graduate student at the University of Vienna in Austria, told NBC News in an email. The gadget was selected as a top-20 finalist for the annual James Dyson Award. The famous designer will hand pick and announce a winner on Nov. 7.

Stefanich recently moved to Shanghai to take a job with Designaffaris, an international design and strategy company. Inspiration for Sono came while he was working in a large office where meeting rooms were enclosed with glass doors that looked great, but failed to contain any noise. "I thought, 'Wouldn't it be great if you had a volume knob on that glass to simply turn down the volume," he said. 

The Sono device sticks to the window where it senses the noise vibrations on the glass surface. It uses this information to generate a signal that cancels out the vibrations, similar to the way the noise-canceling headphones some travelers wear to drown out the droning conversations of their fellow passengers.

Sono can turn the sound of a barking dog into a tweeting bird.

The major advance comes from the digital sound processing technology that "allows for more complex functions like selective noise cancelling or sound event detection," he explained. "For example, you could detect the sound of your neighbor's dog barking, cancel out that specific sound and replace it with with a bird's tweet."

Yes, Sono can selectively turn the grating yips of that annoying ankle biter into more soothing sounds.

The gadget's battery can be recharged the old-fashioned way via plugging it in to the grid, but it gets extra battery power by harvesting energy from the electromagnetic noise in the surrounding environment, such as Wi-Fi signals. That technology, Stefanich noted, is currently being developed at Nokia Research Center and may soon be a standard feature in many electronic gadgets.

Stefanich is currently looking for a partner and funding to complete the engineering for the device and usher it toward commercial production. To see the vision, check out the video below.

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Eye contact makes you less likely to win an argument, probably because it's creepy

Forget what you learned in Public Speaking 101: Eye contact may actually dissuade your audience from your argument, says a new study in Psychological Science.

In the study, participants watched videos of speakers expressing controversial opinions, and were told to focus on either the orators' mouths or eyes. The results: People were less likely to shift their opinions when the speakers made direct eye contact.

Researchers say if you're skeptical, excessive eye contact makes you less inclined to change your mind, unless you already agree with the speaker to begin with. How come? The researchers speculate that eye contact sends different messages -- trust in friendly situations, but competition or hostility in others. (Pull up a chair. The way you arrange seating during meetings can persuade your audience to agree with your ideas. Discover how to Persuade Your Colleagues and Clients With This Trick.)

Beyond that, "staring directly into someone's eyes without looking away is unnatural," says non-verbal behavior expert Marc Salem, Ph.D.

Instead, exude non-threatening, natural confidence to get your way. It starts with your posture, Salem says. Sit or stand in a way that's open and similar to those around you -- for example, if your boss is leaning back in your chair, you should do the same. Don't rush your words, either; when you speak too quickly, your body doesn't know what to do with itself, and you end up looking awkward, Salem says.

Finally, put your phone down. Even in a casual setting, speaking while holding a device (or anything at all, like a pen) in your hand will make you seem closed off, says Salem. (Freaking out before your big presentation? Don't sweat it. Reframing the way you look at stress may improve your performance.

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