Apple updates ipad with more storage

New model to offer 128GB of memory

has debuted an iPad with twice the memory of older models, offering users more space to store movies, videos and books amid mounting competition in the tablet market.

The new iPad with 128 gigabytes of storage will be available Feb. 5, starting at US$799 for a Wi-Fi version and US$929 for a device that also offers a cellular connection, Cupertino, Calif.-based Apple said Tuesday in a statement.

Apple bolstered its product lineup in October with the iPad mini, priced from $329 to $659, and a fourth-generation iPad that costs $499 to $829, depending on the features. The latest iPad model comes as Apple works to fend off challengers from Google Inc. and Samsung Electronics Co. in the market for tablets, which NPD DisplaySearch has estimated will more than double to US$162-billion by 2017.

“The tablet market is expanding, and Apple sees a market opportunity, not just at the low end but also in the high end with heavy media consumers,” Tavis McCourt, an analyst at Raymond James & Associates, said in an interview.

Apple’s shares advanced 1.5% to $456.59 at 9:34 a.m. in New York. Through yesterday, the stock had lost 15% this year.

Earlier this month, Apple posted the slowest profit growth since 2003 and the weakest sales increase in 14 quarters, fueling concern about chief executive Tim Cook’s ability to keep producing hit products more than a year after the death of cofounder Steve Jobs.

“With more than 120 million iPads sold, it’s clear that customers around the world love their iPads, and every day they are finding more great reasons to work, learn and play on their iPads rather than their old PCs,” said Philip Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of marketing, in the statement.

Apple said the added memory will be especially useful to businesses that use heavy amounts of data and need more storage capabilities. The iPad is used for storing

Apple sees an opportunity, not just at the low end

project blueprints, training videos, service manuals, Xrays and other data-heavy files. Nearly all Fortune 500 companies are using the iPad, Apple said.

The more expensive iPad model follows the same strategy Apple employed when its Mac computers were challenged by lower-priced rivals, Mr. McCourt said.

“This is Apple logic,” he said. “When cheap netbooks were popular and taking over, Apple upgraded, rebranded, and raised the price of their MacBooks.”

Apple could apply this same high-end strategy to the iPhone with future models of the handset, Mr. McCourt said.

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Less than a week after Alberta’s premier warned of a $6-billion budget shortfall because of deeply-discounted Canadian oil prices, Avery Shenfeld, chief economist at CIBC World Markets, said Canada’s provinces should consider locking in oil prices to provide some certainty to budgets that can be thrown out of whack by commodity swings. “Provincial finance ministers are now acutely aware that a bountiful surplus can turn into a gaping deficit in a hurry when commodity prices slip,” Mr. Shenfeld wrote in a research report. Alberta, Canada’s largest oil producer and the biggest exporter to the United States, is dealing with plunging resource revenue as a lack of pipeline capacity backs up oil in the province, pushing crude prices to as much as US$40 per barrel below the U.S. West Texas Intermediate benchmark.