Another wave of Apple’s insane product releases is coming. It needs to stop

Macworld

This time of year can be a little dull if your job is writing about Apple (or, presumably, working for Apple). There’s WWDC at the start of June, which more likely than not won’t see the launch of any hardware products, and then the rest of summer tends to pass with only the most perfunctory of announcements from Cupertino’s PR machine. Just as newspapers fill the warmer months with silly-season frivolity, Apple’s Newsroom page finds itself focusing on baseball schedules and executive retirements.

By the time we get to fall, of course, that will all change. In the space of six weeks, and conceivably in the space of a single day, we’ll get new iPhones, new Apple Watches, and new iPads, possibly an updated Vision Pro and a MacBook powered by an iPhone processor. Never mind insanely great, it’s going to be insanely busy. Will nobody think of the journalists?

This grim prospect was brought to mind last week, when a report circulated that one of the previously expected fall releases, the M5 MacBook Pro, has been pushed back to the first half of 2026. I say the first half of 2026, but these laptops are a lot more likely to launch in March or April than in June or January (even if the latter would not be unprecedented). The chances are that Apple is simply shifting one component from its overloaded fall schedule and adding it to its overloaded spring schedule.

As my colleague Jason points out in that article, spring 2026 now looks like it will see the launch of the iPhone 17e, new iPad and iPad Air models, some new MacBook Pros, and an external Mac monitor. While some may be announced outside of a dedicated spring event (assuming Apple holds one), they are nevertheless likely to cluster around the spring launch window. And that’s objectively too many products to be launching in a short space of time when the previous, considerably longer season will have seen almost zero launch activity.

There are coherent reasons for Apple’s season-on, season-off launch strategy, of course. The company targets the fall because it lines up neatly with the holiday buying period and Black Friday, which suits retailers shifting newly outdated stock. It avoids winter because most people are short of cash after Christmas, and summer because people are away and less likely to be paying attention to the media (hence the silly season I mentioned earlier). And that leaves spring as the default for announcing anything that can’t wait until the following fall. There’s a logic behind the lunacy.




Apple doesn’t hold live events anymore, but its schedule is stricter than ever.Apple

But there are definitely problems with this strategy. As I always point out, Apple is unwittingly adopting the policy of periodical cicadas, which starve predators by hiding underground for years at a time (often a prime number of years, in order to avoid syncing with other species’ shorter lifecycles; it’s honestly fascinating!) and then all emerge at once in overwhelming numbers. To be clear, the cicadas in this analogy represent information about new products, and the predators are journalists and customers trying to get that information. Apple is adopting a strategy that is used extremely successfully in nature to achieve the exact opposite of what Apple wants to happen, which is for customer wasps to eat up the tasty cicada product announcements. Learn from the cicada, Apple. Learn from the cicada.

In other words, to leave the realm of entomology behind, the problem with launching everything in a single mad day is that things get lost in the noise. Following major Apple press events we often write an article about important announcements readers are likely to have missed, and you’d be amazed at what Apple is unable to squeeze into its multi-hour presentations. Even titbits that are explicitly mentioned during the video are liable to fly under the radar because the audience has so much else to take in, and the presenters don’t have time to spend any time dwelling on it.

I imagine there’s something appealing for Apple’s PR team about delivering a rapid-fire keynote with so many products to rush through that nothing remains onscreen for longer than a couple of minutes: it has that frenetic “But wait, there’s more!” quality that implies a superabundance of innovation and gives the audience no chance to get bored.

As a spectacle, it can be pretty intense. (Although curiously, there’s usually still time for some cringeworthy skits and songs.) But as an informational resource, it’s a disaster. And the better alternative would be to hold separate events, or send out separate press releases, for each new product or batch of closely allied products. That way, interested parties could watch the event or read the press release as they please and digest the information at their leisure. And you wouldn’t have Apple Watch fans sitting restlessly through iPad spec dumps.

This could yet become a reality. Apple has many products to launch in the remainder of 2025, and more than five months left to launch them in; while a late-summer bonanza is unlikely, it could quite plausibly revert to the COVID-influenced model from 2020, when three virtual events were held in consecutive months from September to November. (Defying conventional wisdom, the company even launched the AirPods Max in December of that year.) These would not need to be huge spectacles with special effects and musical numbers, although the centerpiece iPhone launch would probably receive a certain amount of razzle-dazzle. They could focus on the details and benefits of the products.

By the time 2026 rolls around, I hope Apple will adopt a consciously diffuse launch policy. The new Vision Pro could be held back a couple of months and launch in January/February, as did its predecessor. The new iPads could be released (probably via press release) in March, followed by the iPhone 17e at a dedicated press event in April; the Mac launches could appear in May or be held back for WWDC. Each product would get its own space and receive appropriate attention from the press and customers alike. And most importantly, journalists like me wouldn’t have to go mad twice a year trying to cover everything.




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.

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Software updates, bugs, and problems

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