Apple event: The new products it didn’t announce – and why they could be just as important as those it did

(Apple)

Apple has held its first event of the year, launching a whole host of new products.

That includes a fast new standalone computer known as the Mac Studio, a screen to go with it called the Studio Display, an upgraded iPad Air and an iPhone SE.

But even among that array of flashy new products, there was some notable gaps. And those gaps could reveal as much about Apple’s plans as the products they really did announce.

Here are the big omissions from the “Peek Performance” event.

Truly new iPhones

Apple did show off a new iPhone at the event: a third generation of the iPhone SE, which keeps the old iPhone 8 inspired design and gives it the same fast processor from the iPhone 13.

And it did update the iPhone 13, too. Both the Pro and non-Pro model get a new colour – each in their own green – but no other changes.

Apple did not show off a truly new iPhone during the event, however. And it very rarely does, saving those until September.

A 27-inch iMac or iMac Pro

Apple’s events are often times to reveal new products, to much fanfare – but to discontinue them, too, to considerably less. It did that this time with the 27-inch iMac, which has now disappeared from the website.

Without the announcement of a new product to replace it, there’s no way to know what exactly that discontinuation means. Apple didn’t give any clues, disappearing the computer from its website without mentioning it in the event.

Will the Mac Studio and a 27-inch studio display fill that hole in the line-up? Or will the 27-inch iMac – or even iMac Pro, which was previously discontinued – come back in a new form?

For now, there are no answers. There are only the other Apple computers that replace it: the smaller iMac, and the new Mac Studio.

An M2 chip

Apple announced it would be moving its Macs to its own chips in summer 2020, and the first of them started to arrive later that year. It was known as the M1, and first came in the MacBook Pro, MacBook Air and Mac Mini.

In the time since, it has announced a whole host of upgraded versions: the M1 Max and the M1 Pro are vastly more powerful versions of the same chip and were revealed with new versions of the MacBook Pro late last year. At its event last night, it went one further and announced the M1 Ultra, which is two M1 Maxes stuck together so precisely that they work as one processor.

But it notably didn’t announce any M2, or an upgrade to the base model of the chip. That means we still don’t know how Apple will follow up on the processor that has received so many plaudits, and what its strategy for the future looks like.

We can expect that M2 to come, and probably soon – most likely in redesigned MacBooks at some point this year. But until then we don’t know how often it plans to overhaul those chips, or what kind of improvements it will find itself able to make as it does.

Mac Pro

Apple revealed a lot of new products last night. But one of them was only a tease: after revealing all the new products, Apple’s hardware engineering lead John Ternus said there was “one more product to go: Mac Pro” but that the announcement would be for “another day”.

Mr Ternus did not say when that day might come. And he did not reveal what that Mac Pro might look like when it does.

But it was clearly meant as a way to put an end to speculation that Apple is killing off the Mac Pro or that it is not planning on bringing it over to its own processors.

The older version of the Mac Pro remains in Apple’s line-up for now. But it has an Intel rather than Apple Silicon chip, meaning that the cheaper and newer Mac Studio is likely to beat it in many tasks.