Gurman: October Apple Event Unlikely, Upcoming iPad Air Refresh Could Arrive via Press Release Instead

I consider myself a tech geek and I have no idea what is an iPad Air.

iPad lineup is so mess up. Please clean this up.
 
one more said:
The only next meaningful Air refresh, IMO, would be giving it an OLED screen. Since it is not happening this year, those of us with Air 5 can comfortably chill until the OLED model, which will probably be Air 7 in the autumn/fall of 2024 or spring 2025.
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That would be really nice, but they will want to differentiate the Air and Pro 11 model. The Air 6 is probably going to have the exact same LCD screen it has now (maybe slightly brighter), and the Air 7 will have the 'hand me down' current Pro 11 screen i.e. LCD with 120 hz refresh (maybe called Pro-motion or something else).

For the vast majority of Apple consumers though, the iPad Air is the best bang for buck iPad you can get, especially since they were given the M chips with 8GB RAM. Both my Air 3 and 4 are still going strong and handle anything I throw at them.
 
This would be very suprising as the iPad air 4 and 5 were both shockingly good products which ate some of the iPad pro sales I'm sure.

Considering how good the 5 is, I don't see it needing a refresh?
 
tomtad said:
It’s certainly not forgotten, it did after all get a total redesign just a few years ago. I do think however Apple probably got the strategy wrong on this iMac however and this is probably why they haven’t updated it since. That and launching just after the Covid computer boom was fading likely means they’ve likely got a lot of stock to shift.

Where I feel they went wrong was in taking the proposition of the iMac back to its roots as an easy to use, affordable computer for everyone. Yes it was fun to see the colours back but the market that existed in 1998 just isn’t there in the 2020s with laptops and tablets now largely making it up.

The iMac over the years had shifted towards the prosumer market where a desktop Mac made sense with a large screen and processing power. The current iMac with its smaller screen and fanless processor just doesn’t appeal to that market as the previous generation did.

Personally I feel the iMac needs to go back to what it was offering before. Yes you always have the market for people who want a simple home computer but it also needs to be able to scale to offer something to the prosumer to succeed. A larger screen paired with a thicker body with less constrained internals is the way to go.
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I’ve always been reluctant to buy an iMac. A Mac Mini or a Mac Studio paired with the screen that fits your budget and has the features you need always made more sense to me. If only your screen needs to be repaired/upgraded or only your CPU needs to be repaired/upgraded, you wouldn’t need to replace the whole thing.
 
James Godfrey said:
I knew with the launch of M2 in 15” Air that we were a while away from the M3, I suspect…

Press Release between October/January
iPad Air with M2
Spec bump to iPad mini

Spring 2024
M3 announcement
Mac mini M3
iMac M3
iPad Pro M3

WWDC 2024
MacBook Air 13 & 15 M3
MacBook Pro T/B M3

October 2024
M3 Pro/Max/Ultra announced
MacBook Pro 14 & 16
Mac Studio
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No vision pro until 2025?
 
snipr125 said:
That would be really nice, but they will want to differentiate the Air and Pro 11 model. The Air 6 is probably going to have the exact same LCD screen it has now (maybe slightly brighter), and the Air 7 will have the 'hand me down' current Pro 11 screen i.e. LCD with 120 hz refresh (maybe called Pro-motion or something else).

For the vast majority of Apple consumers though, the iPad Air is the best bang for buck iPad you can get, especially since they were given the M chips with 8GB RAM. Both my Air 3 and 4 are still going strong and handle anything I throw at them.
Click to expand...

I still think that Air 7 will get an OLED screen, as by then Pro will have had it for about two years, so it will be “old news” and time to give it to the masses. 😉 I also believe that Airs sell better than Pros, so Apple should be quite happy with a good Air upgrade cycle, considering that OLED Air prices will also most likely go up.
 
picpicmac said:
It's one of the Elemental iPads:

iPad Air.
iPad Water.
iPad Fire.
iPad Earth.
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The iPad Pro combines the best features of them, so it's basically the iPad Earth Wind and Fire.
 

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I'm going to bet that the iPad Air will move to the M2 only.

The M2 is going to be insanely fast for the sort of things that you'd expect the Air to be used for:

Which is prosumer content creation, or just being a 'nice' iPad to consume content on with its laminated screen.

Now we are firmly in the M chip era, I think that we'll increasingly see the M (and A) chips used for different tiers of products, rather than every product getting the same Mx chip variant in the same generation/cycle.

We can already see this happening with the iPhone.

Footnote: If they bump things up to the Wifi 6e standard like the IPP & move the camera to the horizontal like the basic 2022 iPad, we have a pretty good machine.
 
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