What new hardware to expect from Apple next week

Apple is taking an "ain't broke/don't fix" approach to most of its gadgets.

See full article...

 

[patrick_spieler]

The only thing I’m waiting for at the moment is a new Apple TV and it seems like my chances of getting that next week are dwindling.

 

[JohnCarter17]

The only thing I’m waiting for at the moment is a new Apple TV and it seems like my chances of getting that next week are dwindling.

I thought I wanted that also, but with what I have been finding out about supported codecs on the aTV and lack of pass through audio, a Shield looks like a better option for me. I am looking for a safe streaming hub to dumbify my smart TVs.

 

[Tactical Finesse]

The reality is, that most consumer electronics are now very mature--and are good enough for most people most of the time. The low-hanging fruit of quality-of-life improvements are mostly gone and done.

 

[GaitherBill]

How many people just want a new Apple TV and nothing else?

We’ve been waiting for a year!

 

[sword_9mm]

I'd like to see the 17e released and cratering prices for the 16e so I can upgrade from my a bit slow SE2.

If the prices still stay high then this little guy is going to stay in use.

 

[unshavenyak]

The only thing I’m waiting for at the moment is a new Apple TV and it seems like my chances of getting that next week are dwindling.

I have given up hope. Thanks to the AI dumpster fire, we probably won’t see a new one for several years.

 

[Cap'n Rotbart]

Will they finally adjust their memory prices to not only include the Apple tax but also the AI tax?

/only half s

 

[SuperAce99]

hmm what about the M5 Ultra Mac Studio? Rumor suggested a March-June
2026 release... this event coincides with the start of that window.

 

[jeff0078]

How many people just want a new Apple TV and nothing else?

We’ve been waiting for a year!

What features/improvements are you looking for over the most recent model?

 

[laitpojes]

How about fixing Tahoe, which is very much "broke"?

 

[Sonix]

My LG "Smart" TV support is getting dropped by some apps already so now would be a very convenient time for a new AppleTV.... just saying....

 

[Iphtashu Fitz]

What features/improvements are you looking for over the most recent model?

The current Apple TV was released in 2022, so a simple refresh of 4 year old hardware should be enough of a desire. I've been contemplating replacing our 4+ year old Roku boxes with Apple TV's, but would rather not replace one 4 year old device with another 4 year old device. The rumors indicate that, among other things, a new Apple TV device will have vastly improved wifi capabilities. That alone is worth my waiting for it.

 

[solomonrex]

I'd like to see the 17e released and cratering prices for the 16e so I can upgrade from my a bit slow SE2.

If the prices still stay high then this little guy is going to stay in use.

I'd much prefer my iphone 15, even this year. Magsafe compatible, slider button intact, new enough for USB-C, the island thing is ok I guess, better than the plain 'back button' in the upper left.

 

[solomonrex]

The current Apple TV was released in 2022, so a simple refresh of 4 year old hardware should be enough of a desire. I've been contemplating replacing our 4+ year old Roku boxes with Apple TV's, but would rather not replace one 4 year old device with another 4 year old device. The rumors indicate that, among other things, a new Apple TV device will have vastly improved wifi capabilities. That alone is worth my waiting for it.

Other than wifi, I suspect that TV boxes don't need upgrades at all. They already serve 4k videos, one at a time, they still serve a grid of icons. I don't need anything else, like, maybe forever?

 

[sword_9mm]

I'd much prefer my iphone 15, even this year. Magsafe compatible, slider button intact, new enough for USB-C, the island thing is ok I guess, better than the plain 'back button' in the upper left.

I'll definitely take a look at the landscape.

I also need to hold these things. I have a 13 for work and it's fucking horrible. Heavy as hell and nothing about it is ergonomic.

Of course I'd love a mini but that boat sailed and sunk.

 

[GaitherBill]

What features/improvements are you looking for over the most recent model?

Nothing. I don’t want to buy the “old one” if a new one is coming out.

 

[Tactical Finesse]

Apple hardware has a long way to go on AI, particularly in installable memory. I am not going to pretend the competition is doing any better, but when you sell an “AI phone” or computer with 128 GB of memory tops and 16 standard when leading AI models are over 1 TB, it is clear you are well below the mark, sometimes by as much as 2 orders of magnitude. Any AI running locally will be a toy. For Apple’s strategy for local AI to work, it needs to get serious about installable memory in the way no one else does. This may even include committing to DIMM slots on its studio pro series. Apple needs to get out of its own way. Apple won the processor war. Now it needs to win the memory war. It is worth trillions.

Until this happens, AI will remain the province of the cloud, and the best Apple can hope for is a Google search-like deal for Gemini.

True. But counterpoint: how many people actually care about AI enough for it to impact purchasing decisions? Dell recently made the news by saying they were reverting branding because AI capabilities don't move the needle in their purchasing patterns in their experience.

There's a simple reason/argument for Apple not having socketable memory. Getting DIMM or CAMM memory as fast as soldered memory, reliably, is incredibly hard engineering. The extra copper/gold and pins introduce noise and transfer speed drops a lot. Sure a PC has upgradeable memory--but an M4 Mac Studio has ~500GB/s memory...which is many times what you can get our of most PC systems. Heck, my Strix Halo minipc "only" does 200GB/s memory and even that is faster than PCs of a similar price and also has soldered memory.

Now, all Apple's memory prices are high...especially on the Mini where its 120GB/s memory upgrades are priced as high as the Studios upgrades are...while the Studio has 4x faster memory IIRC. Especially on the middling/higher tier spec machines the pricing of RAM always gets problematic because people compare JEDEC spec memory to what Apple is shipping.

 

[nucrash]

Apple has been known to have a pretty good pulse on economic conditions and I am wondering if the rerelease of the MacBook as a low cost version might be driven by future economic woes more than trying to drive the expansion of the Apple ecosystem outward.

The last time we really saw anything like this was the eMac back in 2002 which came after the Dot Com Bubble.

I don't recall them doing anything like this during the great recession, but the economic conditions were a lot different and their focus was evolving with the iPad and iPhone so the need to expand into other areas might not have been felt.

What are your impressions?

 

[tgt]

What features/improvements are you looking for over the most recent model?

AV1 hardware decoding. I don't know about the state of VVC, but maybe there's hardware decoding for that, which would make a new Apple TV more future-proof. It's presumably far too early for AV2 hardware decoding since the spec isn't final, but perhaps it's possible to have functions that'd allow for partial hardware decoding? I don't know.

Edit: I'd rather see AV1/AV2 succeed than VVC, so perhaps it'd be better for it not to have hardware decoding for VVC.

 

[icwhatudidthere]

Apple hardware has a long way to go on AI, particularly in installable memory. I am not going to pretend the competition is doing any better, but when you sell an “AI phone” or computer with 128 GB of memory tops and 16 standard when leading AI models are over 1 TB, it is clear you are well below the mark, sometimes by as much as 2 orders of magnitude. Any AI running locally will be a toy, and market failure. For Apple’s strategy for local AI to work, it needs to get serious about installable memory in the way no one else does. This may even include committing to DIMM slots on its studio pro series, and making storage GPU direct accessible for everything else. Stop accepting limitations.

Apple needs to get out of its own way and stop imagining itself to be a purveyor of only tiny devices. Apple won the processor war. Now it needs to win the memory war. It is worth trillions. It is high time the industry stopped leaving memory up to the mismanagement of crucial and friends.

Until this happens, AI will remain the province of the cloud, and the best Apple can hope for is a Google search-like deal for Gemini. Since anyone can do that, it will be no way to distinguish Apple products.

How does installable RAM let you run 1TB models?

 

[fryhole]

The laptop is also said to be coming in multiple colors, taking a page from the iMac and the basic iPad.

IDK ... OR ... maybe taking a cue from predecessor iBooks circa 1999:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBook#Design

 

[dmsilev]

Other than wifi, I suspect that TV boxes don't need upgrades at all. They already serve 4k videos, one at a time, they still serve a grid of icons. I don't need anything else, like, maybe forever?

Hardware support for decoding new codecs would also be a reason. That's not something which evolves all that quickly, so updating the AppleTV box once every several years is probably fine. From Apple's perspective, being able to phase out production of an old SOC in favor of something more recent is probably enough to justify an update at some point.

 

[peterford]

I have this nagging feeling that at least some of the reaction here to the budget MacBook is going to entirely miss the point. "Why can't it connect to three screens?" "How am I supposed to run [cutting edge AI Model] locally on that" "Why isn't it OLED?".

 

[dmsilev]

Apple hardware has a long way to go on AI, particularly in installable memory. I am not going to pretend the competition is doing any better, but when you sell an “AI phone” or computer with 128 GB of memory tops and 16 standard when leading AI models are over 1 TB, it is clear you are well below the mark, sometimes by as much as 2 orders of magnitude. Any AI running locally will be a toy, and market failure. For Apple’s strategy for local AI to work, it needs to get serious about installable memory in the way no one else does. This may even include committing to DIMM slots on its studio pro series, and making storage GPU direct accessible for everything else. Stop accepting limitations.

If that's really important to you, you can already do that on Apple hardware. There was some news coverage (including, I think, here on Ars) a few months ago about using Thunderbolt to do essentially direct memory sharing between Mac Studios. The lack of "network" switches means that you have to do all-to-all connections and thus can only link a few Studios together, but if you're willing to shell out $10k per box for the 512 GB unit, for a mere $50k or so, you can in fact have a 2 TB system. Not as performant as a true single system with that much RAM in a single box, of course.

If that's not enough RAM for you, then (a) you are way way way out on one edge of the bell curve and (b) yes, cloud services.

 

[dmsilev]

All there is to see here is tte precusor for another round of reasons why Apple need to obsolete your perfectly fine 5 year old iPad/Macbook/iPhone and force you to buy a new one. Their lack of innovation in the last 10 years has been astounding. Where they have stuck there neck out (Vision Pro and Apple Intelligence/Siri) its been a disaster.

The Apple Silicon (M series) is less than 10 years old, and calling that a "lack of innovation" is ....a choice. Go back to 2020/2021 when the reviews of the M1 series laptops were coming out and read the commentary at the time about the combination of performance and energy efficiency/battery life. And those M1 machines are still perfectly usable today and haven't been declared obsolete by Apple.

 

[Fred Duck]

Even attached to a slower processor, this should still improve the multitasking and productivity experience on the tablet.

There is one simple, time-tested way to improve the multitasking and productivity experience on the tablet.

Apple is taking an “ain’t broke/don’t fix” approach to most of its gadgets.

You know what IS broken? Trying to use gestures to app switch on iPad.

Instead of pressing the Home button once, I have to swipe up between two and eight times. EIGHT TIMES.

Every single time.

I use 21 apps on my iPad Air every day.

Every time the gesture fails, I become crosser and crosser, and if we do the maths,
21 apps
x
5 years
x
365 days
=
38,325 failures, which is actually too low because I've owned this bloody thing for a bit over five years and I use some apps more than once a day.

Imagine if you can, that your Return key was replaced with a gesture. THAT'S how miserable it is.

It's not a Fred-only problem as I've observed other people swiping multiple times. The difference is I happen to use 21 apps every day and I know how fast and easy it is with a Home button.

For the love of the HIG, fix this, Apple!

Also great fun is that 40% of the time when swiping to app switch with my iPad on a level flat surface such as a table, the screen rotates 90º. This even occurs on my Home button-equipped iPads so something is fundamentally wrong with the system.

 

[JohnCarter17]

Apple has been known to have a pretty good pulse on economic conditions and I am wondering if the rerelease of the MacBook as a low cost version might be driven by future economic woes more than trying to drive the expansion of the Apple ecosystem outward.

The last time we really saw anything like this was the eMac back in 2002 which came after the Dot Com Bubble.

I don't recall them doing anything like this during the great recession, but the economic conditions were a lot different and their focus was evolving with the iPad and iPhone so the need to expand into other areas might not have been felt.

What are your impressions?

How about they just want to have an economy A18 model to replace stopped production of the M1 Airs that were going to Walmart? One that also lets them compete against chromebooks and the like in the educational market. Given that they are not stopping production of higher cost models, I see no support for your theory that this is driven by economic conditions.

 

[DownAndGoing]

After accidentally skipping over the entire butterfly keyboard generation, I've been a little more intentional about making my M2 air last so I can skip over the Tahoe/Liquid Glass mess. Not giving Tim Cook any money also feels like a real accomplishment these days. It feels strange to be actively avoiding Apple updates, but the M2 really has been good enough even for a power user doing some occasional gaming. Plus, sticking with the M2 means hopping over to asahi is an option, unlike the M3/4/5 devices.

I'll still follow the releases, but I won't be tempted. I swear. Really. I mean it for real this time.

 

[NetMage]

AV1 hardware decoding. I don't know about the state of VVC, but maybe there's hardware decoding for that, which would make a new Apple TV more future-proof.

The Apple Tv doesn’t get a custom SOC, it gets a later version of the Ax series, so we already know what hardware decoding is available.

 

[sword_9mm]

After accidentally skipping over the entire butterfly keyboard generation, I've been a little more intentional about making my M2 air last so I can skip over the Tahoe/Liquid Glass mess. Not giving Tim Cook any money also feels like a real accomplishment these days. It feels strange to be actively avoiding Apple updates, but the M2 really has been good enough even for a power user doing some occasional gaming. Plus, sticking with the M2 means hopping over to asahi is an option, unlike the M3/4/5 devices.

I'll still follow the releases, but I won't be tempted. I swear. Really. I mean it for real this time.

My M2 Air has been perfectly cromulent for the last however many years I've had it. Got the 16 GB model.

I have no reason to replace it and I also never update the OS. I think what's on it is what came with it out of the box. I see no reason to update it as it does what I need just fine.

 

[Old_Fogie_Late_Bloomer]

Spoiler

There is one simple, time-tested way to improve the multitasking and productivity experience on the tablet.


You know what IS broken? Trying to use gestures to app switch on iPad.

Instead of pressing the Home button once, I have to swipe up between two and eight times. EIGHT TIMES.

Every single time.

I use 21 apps on my iPad Air every day.

Every time the gesture fails, I become crosser and crosser, and if we do the maths,
21 apps
x
5 years
x
365 days
=
38,325 failures, which is actually too low because I've owned this bloody thing for a bit over five years and I use some apps more than once a day.

Imagine if you can, that your Return key was replaced with a gesture. THAT'S how miserable it is.

It's not a Fred-only problem as I've observed other people swiping multiple times. The difference is I happen to use 21 apps every day and I know how fast and easy it is with a Home button.

For the love of the HIG, fix this, Apple!

Also great fun is that 40% of the time when swiping to app switch with my iPad on a level flat surface such as a table, the screen rotates 90º. This even occurs on my Home button-equipped iPads so something is fundamentally wrong with the system.

It's a you problem.

Sorry, bro, but there's no way you aren't doing something wrong. I'm a pretty recent convert to the iPad experience, having purchased a Pro 13 1.5 years ago and a mini a few months back, but I can say that I've never had a problem like you're describing.

I'm assuming you've tried swiping in various orientations, which probably rules out an issue with the digitizer. I'm pretty sure that just leaves...you.

 

[icwhatudidthere]

It's a you problem.

Sorry, bro, but there's no way you aren't doing something wrong. I'm a pretty recent convert to the iPad experience, having purchased a Pro 13 1.5 years ago and a mini a few months back, but I can say that I've never had a problem like you're describing.

I'm assuming you've tried swiping in various orientations, which probably rules out an issue with the digitizer. I'm pretty sure that just leaves...you.

Depends. There is an issue with iPadOS 26 and swiping. It's only affected one of my iPads but is fixed temporarily when it's restarted.