Tuesday’s twin releases, presumably paired because neither was remote enough to carry even a website update on its own, saw the arrival of M6 updates for the iMac and MacBook Pro. Apple found itself painfully short of “exciting” things to say about the new iMac; Of the six things announced in the summary paragraph at the top of the press release, four also apply to the previous M4 model. The same basically goes for 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 had a truly innovative launch (within the Apple ecosystem, at least), although the touchscreen MacBook still strikes me as an affront to logic and reason.
A similar story occurred in early October. There was an innovative yet strategically questionable product, HomeView, along with a worthy but simple new HomePod mini and an Apple TV upgrade that costs too much and has few exclusive features. The Apple Home Collection did not quicken the pulse either.
Traditionally, when there is a large backlog of unreleased products, Apple follows its September event with another one in October. We expected Apple to bundle the Mac and iPad releases together as it has done so many times in the past, build the touchscreen MacBook as the flagship release, and then, most likely, introduce HomeView as One More Thing. But for some reason it decided to take a different route, breaking up the remaining fall releases into a couple of discrete “experiences,” followed by a series of quiet press releases and site updates at the rate of one or two products a day. This seems to have become the company’s favorite approach for anything other than its most notable releases, and there are advantages to making announcements this way.
Most obviously, it saves time and money because the marketing team doesn’t have to write and edit a 90-minute show, and busy senior executives don’t need to rehearse and deliver a full presentation. But there is the handy side effect that more obscure products can enjoy their day in the sun. The new iPad mini would have been a minor footnote in the touchscreen MacBook showcase, for example, but instead it basks in the media glare and customer attention and is appreciated for the substantial (if in my opinion misguided) upgrade that it is. If everything becomes an event, it’s inevitable that smaller items will get lost in the hustle and bustle.
But that same hustle can sometimes do you a favor. The mistakes of the Apple TV were cruelly exposed to the media, for example, and it might have been kinder to bury those superficial M6 micro-updates on a day when something more interesting was happening.
