Hands On With the Apple iPad Air 2

Pre-orders begin Oct. 17 and they will start shipping by the end of next week.

Among the updates on Apple's new iPads is Touch ID, the fingerprint scanner currently available on newer iPhones like iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.

The new iPads will come in silver, gray, and a new gold color.

The iPad Air 2 is just 6.1mm thick and weighs less than a pound.

Behold, the gold.

It's a "magical piece of glass," said Phil Schiller.

You could stack two iPad Air 2 devices on top of one another and still be thinner than the original iPad, according to Apple.

Apple slimmed down the tablet by eliminating a micro-thin layer of air usually found between the LCD, touch layer, and glass on the tablet, Schiller said.

During the presentation, Apple showed off the hyper-lapse option on the new iPad camera. One of the shots they captured was a Venice canal, which just happened to be shooting as George Clooney's wedding party zoomed by.

There's a second-generation 64-bit architecture and 3 billion transistors, which delivers a 40 percent improvement in CPU performance and 2.5 times the graphics performance of iPad Air, Apple said.

The iPad Air 2 includes a built-in iSight camera with an 8-megapixel camera that will now support panoramas, burst mode, and timelapse videos.

Inside the new iPad is an A8X chip, a version of the A8 chip found in the new iPhones created specifically for iPad Air 2.

The iPad Air 2 also reduced internal reflection, which makes graphics and text look like they are just sitting right on top of the screen.