Apple unveils smaller smartphone, tablet

Apple Inc. on Monday unveiled a new smartphone and tablet, both with smaller screens, in an effort to retool its product lineup of iPhones and iPads.

At an event held at its headquarters in Cupertino, California, the Silicon Valley technology company also announced a series of upgrades to its hardware products, including Apple TV and Apple Watch, and software services such as iOS.

The new phone, named iPhone SE, has a four-inch screen, the same size as the iPhone 5 series initially released in 2012 and smaller than the iPhone 6 series rolled out about a year ago. The iPhone 6 and 6s have 4.7-inch screens, and the iPhone 6 Plus and 6s Plus have 5.5-inch screens.

With a starting price of 399 U.S. dollars, the iPhone SE is the most affordable handset Apple has ever released.

Greg Joswiak, head of iPhone marketing, said Apple has found that its four-inch devices still have a huge market, and therefore, it has packed functionalities as powerful as those in the iPhone 6s into the smaller iPhone SE.

“There are lots of people who still want a four-inch phone. Even though the big-screen phones was a tremendous success for them, and created the biggest selling quarters of phone sales of any company in history, what they found was there were people holding out, there were people who were keeping their two-year-old or three-year-old four-inch phone because they just want a four-inch phone. So they made a four-inch phone. They put all the internal capabilities of the current success in it, bigger phone into a smaller phone, and they cut the price,” said Walter Mossberg, a U.S. columnist and journalist.

The new tablet computer, a new iPad Pro, is a 9.7-inch device, down from the 12.9-inch product introduced at the autumn launch last year.

Apple has positioned iPad Pro as a replacement for laptop computers. However, with the Apple product’s high price tag of 599 U.S. dollars, the strategy aims mostly at professionals.

“They’ve put it in the form factor of the more traditional iPad with a couple of new features, and it’s 200 dollars less, and they’re hoping it will bring it more into the mainstream. They’re hoping that will get people upgrading, not only from older iPads, but from older Windows PCs. They put up a slide that said there are 600 million Windows PCs that are five years old, and they’re saying you can do real work on this,” said Mossberg.

Orders of both the iPhone SE and iPad Pro will begin on March 24, and they will be available from March 31.