Apple surprised us by announcing it was launching a fourth-generation iPad just seven months after it rolled out the Retina display-equipped third-generation iPad in March. Though externally it remains almost identical to the third-gen iPad—save its new Lightning connector, which replaces the 30-pin Dock connector—internally Apple has revved up its processor. The company claims the iPad 4 packs both double the computing performance and double the graphics performance over the previous model.

Former Apple CEO Steve Jobs famously trashed 7" tablets as being "dead in the water" in 2010. Two years later, under the reign of new CEO Tim Cook, Apple has released its own miniature tablet—one that has a diagonal screen measurement of 7.9", which Apple considers vastly different than what's offered by similar small tablets.