Technology

From new iPads to new MacBook Airs, Apple had a bunch of hardware refreshes to debut this morning. Hereeverything they showed off.

New MacBook Air

The MacBook Air is, at last, getting a Retina display. Roughly six years after the MacBook Pro went high-res, Appleslim line is following suit.

It has a 13.3″ screen, with a slimmer bezel (now black, rather than aluminum). Therea TouchID fingerprint sensor near the upper-right corner of the keyboard — a keyboard which, by the way, has been shifted over to Applebutterfly mechanism keys. Oh, and itgot actual function keys. No goofy Touch Bar here.

It has a 20 percent larger Force Touch trackpad. The speakers are 25 percent louder than the previous generation with, the company claims, double the bass. Apple says the bodies of the new MacBook Airs are made of 100 percent recycled aluminum.

It has two Thunderbolt ports, and crams an Intel i5 CPU, up to 16GB of 2133Mhz RAM and up to 1.5 TB of storage into its 2.75-lb body. It&ll start at $1,199. Orders start today, and will ship out starting November 7th.

New Mac Mini

Given that itbeen four years since the last Mac Mini refresh, you might&ve assumed Apple was done with the line. Nope!

The new Mac Mini will come in 4-core or 6-core models, up to 2TB of SSD storage and up to 64GB of memory. It has got a new thermal system that doubles the airflow to keep things cool. It has gigabit Ethernet (or 10 gigabit Ethernet, as an upgrade), 4 thunderbolt ports, HDMI and 2 USB-A ports. Like the new MacBook air, itmade of 100 percent recycled aluminum.

The base model starts at $799, and will start shipping out on November 7th.

New iPad Pro

Goodbye home button! Like many an iPhone before it, the new iPad Pro ditches the home button in favor of a much slimmer bezel.

By slimming down the bezel, they&re able to cram an 11″ screen into the same body that previously fit a 10.5″ screen. They&ll also continue to offer an even larger model with a massive 12.9″ display.

On the inside, itrunning Applenew A12X Bionic chip — a chip packing an 8-core CPU, a 7-core GPU, Applesecure enclave and a storage controller that lets the new iPads handle up to 1TB of storage. Apple claims this new iPad Pro is faster than &92% of portable PCs.&

It has FaceID for unlocking your iPad with just your ol& noggin, with a 7-megapixel camera on the front and a 12-megapixel camera on the back.

Perhaps most notably, the iPad Pro is dropping the Lightning port in favor of USB-C. That USB-C port can drive an external 5K display — or, in a pinch, charge your phone.

The 11″ iPad Pro will start at $799, while the 12.9″ model starts at $999. Orders start today, shipping out starting November 7th.

New Apple Pencil

The new Apple Pencil is built to snap magnetically to the edge of the new iPad Pro. Once snapped, it automatically pairs and starts wirelessly charging. No more goofy pencil sticking out of your iPad! Tap the Pencil to the Pro and the iPad wakes up and launches right into Notes. It has support for gestures now, like double-tapping the edge of the pencil to zoom way in or out in Photoshop.

iOS 12.1

As expected, the first big update to iOS 12 ships today, its biggest feature being Group FaceTime for chatting with up to 32 people at once. Italso got 70 new emojis, and brings dual SIM support to the iPhone XS, iPhone XS Max and iPhone XR.

Lightning had a good run, but ittime to switch everything to USB-C. Apple finally dropped the Lightning port with the new iPad Pro. And the USB-C port is much more versatile than Lightning.

For instance, you can plug a 5K display to your iPad Pro and show some video on the external display. Itstill unclear how itgoing to work when it comes to software, but it opens up a lot possibilities.

You can also use USB-C dongles to plus all sort of data accessories. SD card readers, Ethernet cables, etc. The iPad Pro is looking more and more like a traditional laptop. Many third-party accessory makers will probably use this opportunity to develop docks and other hubs.

Finally, the good thing about USB-C is that you can theoretically turn any device into an external battery pack. Using a USB-C to Lightning, you can now charge an iPhone from your iPad. Itan expensive battery pack, but it can be useful for those who always carry both at the same time.

Now lethope this is the first sign that USB-C is coming to the iPhone. I can&t wait to use my laptop charger to charge my phone, or my iPhone charger to charge my Nintendo Switch.

To get an edge on the market, investors must look beyond traditional financial info like revenue and profits. Our every online activity generates data exhaust like web traffic, Twitter mentions, app downloads, and search trends. Itthe ability to overlay the old and new data sets to spot surprising trends that will set the best traders apart. Sentieo wants to be their tool.

Sentieo is an investment research software suite that uses AI to scan financial documents, analyze alternative data sets, and create visualizations. The fintech SAAS startup now has 700 customers including top hedge funds plus mutual funds, Fortune 500s, and investment banks who pay around $500 to $1000 per year per license. Thata lot cheaper than a $21,000 Bloomberg Terminal subscription.

Now Sentieo is ready to crank up its name recognition with a sales and marketing blitz fueled by a new $19 million Series A round led byCentana, a $250 million growth equity firm focused on fintech SAAS. Now with $30 million in total funding, the 160-person startup plans to &Educate [traders] that ‘hey, this product is built by people who sat in your seats'& says CEO Alap Shah.

Sentieo charts Search Trends data and Sentieo Index data on Facebook vs the social networkrevenue

10 year ago, Shah was making the Wall Street rounds after graduating from Harvard in economics. He was an analyst in consulting at Novantas, private equity at Castanea, and worked for hedges funds VIking Global and Citadel. &It became clear that there were some really big holes in my process where software wasn&t meeting my needs. Importantly, there was a hole around search& Shah tellsme. &We&ve grown accustomed to going to Google. But unfortunately thatjust not the way the old-school financial data programs are structured.&

Sentieo co-founder and CEO Alap Shah

So he built his own. &I used all the financial tools out there: Capital IQ, FactSet, Bloomberg — each had their strengths and weaknesses. But they were all over 20 years old, so they pre-date the cloud,pre-date SAAS, pre-date mobile!& With Sentieo, he wanted to develop a tool that could understand the nuances of business momentum before it showed up in the balance sheets.

Sentieo does have a traditional financial equity data terminal with real-time pricing. But therealso a machine learning and natural language processing-powered document search tool that can sort through SEC documents, earnings call transcripts, press releases, and more. It taps Alexa web traffic data, Apptopia app download rates, and Twitter chatter, as well as Thomson Reuters analyst estimates and fundamentals. Customers can annotate files, organize ideas, generate visualizations, and share their insights through SentieoNotebook.

For example, Sentieo could look through all of Teslaearnings calls and financial documents for mentions of guidance on Model 3 production volume. It could highlight them all, analyze the sentiment of those mentions, and chart them against Teslashare price. Or you could search for all the companies starting to list President Trump as a risk factor for their business, which would surface how the medical cannabis companies are concerned about his Attorney General Jeff Sessions& stance on legalization.

Sentieosynonym library allows it to hunt down different ways of saying the same thing with the goal of not forcing investors — or their dutiful analysts — to read through 100 page 10-Q documents manually. &You can get the same information at 10x the speed with something like Sentieo& Shah claims. It wants to a be a &research management system&, like a Salesforce CRM for tracking investment ideas.

But Sentieo65-person India-based engineering must keep data from all 50 feeds, 25 million documents, and 64,000 equities flowing to keep customers satisfied. There are a ton of moving parts, and Sentieo is competing with much bigger companies. Beyond Bloomberg, there are lots of alternative data providers out there. And Microsoftsoftware suite also has plenty of info management tools.

Sentieohope is to emerge as an aggregator of information sources and an annotation tool that benefits from being purposefully designed for what analystsneed. If Robinhood is on one side of the spectrum making investing easy for novice traders, Sentieo is on the other end making investing smarter for experts. &Itreally at the bleeding edge of how you get the data today& Shah concludes. &For every company driven by consumer demand, there are all these little breadcrumbs being left all over the internet.&

[Disclosure: I briefly rented a room in an apartment where Shah lived five years ago and I know him from the San Francisco social scene frequented by many Silicon Valley figures.]