Apple March 2023 Event! What NOT to expect!

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Apple’s already tossed us the brand new MacBook Pros, Mac mini and HomePods in January without warning - so in March, when we’d first expect to be getting an event, what will we see? AND, what WON’T we see… let’s talk.

Last spring, Apple introduced the Mac Studio with M1 Ultra, Green iPhone 13 and 13 pro, iPhone SE3 and the M1 iPad Air, so what’s in store this year?

Well I feel like a new colour for the iPhone is pretty much a no brainer, though Apple’s struggled to produce enough of the pro iPhones because of supply constraints, and no-one wants the plus. So maybe they’re just going to paint a bunch of the phones they have sitting around? I think a new colour is maybe 50/50, and maybe will only come to the base 14 and 14 plus models as they really need a boost in interest at this point. We’ll see. Solid maybe here.

iPad Air COULD get M2, but really, is that going to make it sell more, and again it’ll be bumping up against the just updated M2 iPads Pro from late last year. And there’s no rumours of updates to the iPhone SE this year, with the redesigned version as good as cancelled for now.

On the Mac front, we got the Studio and the introduction of the M1 Ultra last time, along with the Studio Display.

What’s due an update? iMac. But I don’t think we’ll be that lucky. iMac was last updated in Spring 2021, and by all accounts was the last Apple product Jony Ive was heavily involved in. You can tell, because it’s a just a sea of USB-C on the back there, whereas the MacBook Pro’s which got redesigned since have all the IO. I actually think that the M1 iMac design was probably designed around the same time as the 12” MacBook but could just never actually get used because Intel’s chips would have turned it to lava. It’s basically a celebration of thin. Marc Gurman has suggested this may be updated in late 2023, which would most likely mean M3 inside, but I think we could see a slight redesign in terms of IO and, dare I say it… darker colours? After the MacBook Air didn’t get the light bezels we expected, I feel like we could see dark bezels and maybe even a midnight option this fall. Which I’m here for.

We’re also hearing that the Mac Studio itself may NEVER get an update at all, being too similar to the upcoming Mac Pro. I’m not sure I buy that though.

I think the Mac Studio has been received amazingly well by the Apple community since it launched, and basically its fate rests on the Mac Pro getting M2 Ultra.

Is it just me or does that seem a bit MID for a Mac Pro. Now I’ve said it for a while, but I’m not the only one with an idea of the M2 Ultra Mac Pro being way more expandable than people seem to expect. For example,
Robb Lincoln asks
#icaveanswers. What are the chances the Mac Pro consists of a high speed, high bandwidth backplane into which multiple M2Ultra processor cards slot?

And yes. All the “No more Mac Studio” stuff seems to be because there’s little point in having an Ultra Studio when there’s an ultra Mac Pro. But a Max studio would still be very useable for more potential people than the Ultra would have been, and certainly more than an even more pricey Mac Pro.

But right from the start (and I mean in November 2020 when I talked about the Apple Silicon roadmap) I thought Apple could well use multiple SOCs in the Mac Pro as the best way to scale performance there. It has a few advantages, and even president in Apple’s history.

PowerMac G5s had multiple discreet processors back in the day before Intel came on the scene. For their day, these things were insanely powerful.
So once you get up to the M1 or future M2 Ultra chips, there will be very few coming off the wafer that are fully working. I’d imagine that all the M1 chips beyond the base model were made as Ultras, and then cut down to Maxes and Pros based on the working areas, with the best available dies reserved for ultras. Imagine how hard it would have been to get fully working M1 Extreme chips that were essentially a connected pair of M1 Ultras? That’s why multiple SOCs would make so much more sense.

Apple Reality.

Now I’m absolutely not expecting Apple’s reality headset to be released at the spring event, but announced and previewed makes way more sense.

I don’t have much new info on these, a pair of 4k displays, one for each eye, something around an M2 Pro to power it, another display on the outside to scare your mom by displaying your eyes on the inside. That kind of thing. We still don’t know what it will do and why we’d want it, and that’s why Apple needs to start building hype way before it arrives. And devs need to start building Apps