Tuesday’s twin launches, presumably paired because neither was remotely enough to carry even a website update by itself, saw the arrival of M6 updates to the iMac and MacBook Pro. Apple found itself painfully short of “exciting” things to say about the new iMac; of the six things trumpeted in the summary paragraph at the top of the press release, four also apply to the previous M4 model. The same is basically true of the M6 MacBook Pro. The best we can say about them is that at least the prices are the same.
It wasn’t until Wednesday that we got a launch that was genuinely groundbreaking (within the Apple ecosystem, at any rate), even if the touchscreen MacBook still strikes me as an offence against logic and reason.
It was a similar story earlier in October. There was one innovative if strategically questionable product, the HomeView, along with a worthy but straightforward new HomePod mini and an Apple TV refresh that costs way too much and has few exclusive features. The Apple Home Collection didn’t exactly set pulses racing either.
Traditionally, when there’s a big backlog of unreleased products, Apple follows its September event with another in October. We expected Apple to group together the Mac and iPad launches as it has so often in the past, build to the touchscreen MacBook as the flagship launch, and then very likely unveil HomeView as One More Thing. But for whatever reason it decided to go down a different route, splitting its remaining fall launches into a pair of low-key “experiences,” followed by a series of quiet press releases and site updates at the rate of one or two products per day. This seems to have become the company’s favored approach for anything less than its most high-profile launches, and there are advantages to making announcements in this way.
Most obviously, it saves on time and money because the marketing team doesn’t have to script and edit a 90-minute show, and busy senior execs don’t need to rehearse and perform a full-length presentation. But there’s the handy side effect that more obscure products get to enjoy their day in the sun. The new iPad mini would have been a minor footnote in the touchscreen MacBook show, for example, but instead it gets to bask in the glow of media and customer attention and be appreciated for the substantial (if in my opinion misguided) refresh that it is. If everything is rolled into an event, it’s inevitable that the smaller items will be lost in the hustle and bustle.
But that same hustle and bustle can sometimes do you a favor. The Apple TV’s missteps were cruelly exposed in the media spotlight, for example, and it might have been kinder to bury those perfunctory M6 micro-updates on a day when something more interesting was happening.
