What To Expect At Next Week’s Apple Event

Apple has sent out fancy invitations to media for an event, to be held in Brooklyn, New York next week. With the dust barely settled on its recent iPhone event (the third phone that was announced, the iPhone XR, is hitting the stores this week) Apple’s “There’s more in the making” event is expected to delver new iPad Pro devices and possibly some new Macs. Here’s what I think we’ll be seeing.

The Easy Prediction – iPad Pro Refresh

There’s little doubt that Apple won’t be announcing an updated iPad range. The new iPad Pro will get a processor bump to the A12 Bionic, an edge-to-edge display and will adopt FaceID while losing the Home button.

That means screen sizes will increase with the 11-inches and perhaps 13.5-inches the new normal. Ans those displays will have greater sensitivity to the Apple Pencil allowing artists to do more – the event title is about making.

And this could be the start of Apple moving people over to USB-C as the universal charging solution for all their devices.

I’m also hoping the Smart Keyboard is upgraded as I’m finding the corners of my getting a little frayed after a year of use.

The Likely Update – MacBook Air

The MacBook Air has not seen a lot of love from Apple. It received a small performance bump just over a year ago but otherwise it’s very similar to the model that debuted a year ago.

Perhaps the new MacBook Air will be dubbed the MacBook X – just as the 10th anniversary iPhone was last year.

The new MacBook Air will be an entry-level portable Mac, undercutting the MacBook on price but omitting premium options from the MacBook Pro such as the TouchBar, discrete graphics and the fastest CPUs.

The Wish List – Desktop Macs

There are two products that have received scant attention over recent years.

The Mac mini is well overdue for an update. It’s been four years and change since the Mac mini has seen any love from Cupertino. I expect we’ll see a totally revised form factor with something closer to the Apple TV in size and design released, although I expect it will be in white or aluminium rather than black.

Like Apple’s latest portable, it will support larger storage options, 32GB of memory and, I expect, the high-end model to support discrete graphics.

The Mac Pro was famously killed off by Apple after the company admitted they made mistakes on the design. I expect that with a creativity-focussed event that we’ll see an all-new Mac Pro released.

And expect the price to be hefty – I doubt there will be any change from $5,000 on the entry level Mac Pro.