Well, in the long list of Apple product launches, last week’s announcements were certainly some of them. Marketing supremo Greg Joswiak didn’t set the bar especially high when he predicted “an exciting week,” but even that comparatively tepid assessment turned out to be wildly optimistic.
The 8th-gen iPad mini falls, I would say, into the category of dull but worthwhile iterative refreshes. It gets some nice upgrades, including a thinner and lighter body, a faster processor, and an OLED screen, but doesn’t alter the fundamental truth that big-screen smartphones, and especially foldables, have rendered mid-price mini tablets largely obsolete… and thanks to another $100 price hike, the mini is now verging on premium. It needed a change of direction, not a costly glow-up.
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.
Then there was the 2nd-gen HomePod mini, which essentially amounted to better AI (in a future software update) and worse colors. This was a necessary refresh, because the HomePod desperately needed Siri AI, and would likely have appeared in a few “important announcements you missed” articles if it was bottom of the bill at a big Apple event. But the HomePod mini was second on the bill at a very small event–sorry, experience–which drew attention to the fact Apple didn’t redesign the speaker or make any substantive non-AI-related upgrades six years after the first one came out. All that focus set a standard of noteworthiness it was never going to justify.
Not every Apple product is exciting, it turns out. But of course we knew that already. The company has found over the past decade or so that small iterative updates generally make the most sense from a financial point of view. The funny thing is that this fall has been unusually interesting: we’ve seen not one, not two, but three genuinely innovative Apple product launches in the form of the iPhone Duo, the HomeView, and the (touchscreen) MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR Display. Yet the idiosyncratic manner in which the company has made its announcements has drawn attention to everything else.
Foundry
Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized roundup. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to give it a read during lunch or dinner hours too.
Apple’s touchscreen MacBook Pro finally breaks the grid.
…but the best touchscreen MacBook is already on your desk.
The touchscreen MacBook Pro completes the circle started 10 years ago.
Apple’s new iPad mini is a Duo you can’t close.
The Mac Studio with 512GB of RAM is shipping, and it costs New Car Money.
Catch up on everything Apple announced last week in our Pro and Tell live blog.
A week with iPhone Duo: Folding refined, if not perfected.
These iOS 27.2 features will make you want to download the latest updates right away.
iPhone Duo hinge issue: What’s wrong with Apple’s folding phone and how to fix it.
Claude saves an overheating Mac from a cryptominer it might have put there.
The iPhone Duo isn’t just a major iPhone release; it’s a landmark product in Apple’s lineup. We talk about our experience with the new folding phone in the latest episode of the Macworld Podcast.
You can catch every episode of the Macworld Podcast on YouTube, Spotify, Soundcloud, the Podcasts app, or our own site.
And with that, we’re done for this week’s Apple Breakfast. If you’d like to get regular roundups, sign up for our newsletters, including our new email from The Macalope–an irreverent, humorous take on the latest news and rumors from a half-man, half-mythical Mac beast. You can also follow us on Facebook, Threads, Bluesky, or X for discussion of breaking Apple news stories. See you next Monday, and stay Appley.
