Recap: Apple’s iPad Air, iPad Mini with Retina, and OS X event (liveblog)

SAN FRANCISCO — Apple unveiled the iPad Air, a thinner version of its big tablet, and iPad Mini with Retina Display at a huge press event today.

Below you can find a recap of our liveblog, as well as all of the major news.

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• Photo gallery: Apple’s new iPad Air, iPad Mini, MacBooks, and Mac Pro
• This is Apple’s new iPad Air: thinner, lighter, more powerful
• Apple’s iPad Mini finally gets a Retina Display
• New OSX Mavericks available today for free — and it supports most post-2007 Macs
• Apple’s new Mac Pro: a mini supercomputer available in December for $2,999
• Apple’s latest MacBook Pros: Beefed-up batteries, Thunderbolt 2, and the power of Haswell chips
• Apple reboots iLife & iWork apps for Mac and iOS 7 — and offers them for free
• You people have bought over 170M iPads
• iTunes Radio already has 20M users a month after September launch
• Two thirds of (upgradeable) Apple mobile devices running iOS 7 today

With Apple holding a dominating — but declining — 32 percent of the worldwide tablet market, today’s announcement is a critical one for the company. Will it be able to hold on to its market share against Android tablets, led by Samsung, which has 18 percent (and has more than doubled its share in the past year)? Note: Apple’s iPad still commands 81 percent of North American tablet usage, and typically iPad usage (as opposed to unit sales) far outstrip that of competing Android tablets.

Complicating things for the company is the fact that Microsoft’s new Surface and Surface Pro tablets start shipping today, and Nokia (which Microsoft is in the process of acquiring) has just released its own Windows RT-based tablet this morning.