Apple announced the new iPad on Wednesday, and the response, both from the general public and mainstream media, has been, as usual, huge.

With a stunning Retina 2048×1536 pixel display, dual-core A5X chip, quad-core graphics and 4G connectivity – plus a cheaper iPad 2 – there’s certainly been plenty to talk about. But what did Twitter think?

Thanks to new data from the official Twitter communications profile, we can find out. They’ve published a chart that shows Twitter’s reaction to Apple’s Wednesday keynote, which started to buzz with the first announcement of the new iPad, and peaked at that oh-so-attractive $499 price tag, with over 10,000 tweets per minute registering on the network.

The announcement of a 16GB iPad 2 for just $399 also generated a flurry of tweets, and with good reason: that’s a great price for such a brilliant device.

What do you think of the new iPad?