Fri. Dec 6th, 2024
New Apple Release December 8th

Last Thursday word came out that Apple Care Providers and third party resellers had been given a heads up that Apple would be making some changes to SKUs, pricing or products. We covered the announcement in a video that’s up there somewhere. The announcement is supposedly set for 05:30am Cupertino time, which is 13:30 GMT, so that should be fairly easy to work out your local time from.

So in this segment we’ll round up what’s most likely, what’s still expected soon and what Is most likely.

Apple Fitness Plus

First up, Apple Fitness+, which Apple said would be releasing “later this year” and we’re running out of later before the year ends. As I’ve mentioned, I’m super excited for Apple Fitness+ as gyms are just a nightmare right now, as much as I’d love to go.

As much as Apple Fitness+ works in terms of timing, unless there are more features we aren’t aware of in terms of extra hardware, it doesn’t tie into the leak that we’ve seen, so while it may come this week, its not likely to be the subject we’re expecting.

AirTags

AirTags is one piece of hardware that could tie into Fitness+ as an Apple Patent showed that AirTags could be used for motion tracking and even to measure how good your posture is.

Of course, not all patents make it to product, and often not right away anyhow. My skepticism here is that being a completely new product category for Apple, the public would need a real announcement to understand what the product can do.

AirPods Studio, Pro and Regular refresh?

Something else with potential fitness application would be new AirPods, and the AirPods Studio over ear headphones reportedly could have a lower cost sports option too, so this isn’t impossible, even though reports have suggested these will arrive around March.

Something a little more Mac?

October 16th, we put out one of our most successful videos to date – where we took the new applications from Apple for European device releases that had been approved and we looked at the gaps. Well, a number of those gaps have now been filled.

However, we still have 3 mystery gaps for Portable computers, A2147, A2158 and A2182, and a couple of spaces for desktops, the A2438 and A2439. Now the desktops I think are pretty easy, as the existing iMacs have a 1 digit increment too, A2115 and A2116, so they’re almost certainly two iMacs.

I personally don’t think we’ll get any more intel models as I’ve mentioned before, and I’d be surprised if we got whole new Apple Silicon SOCs in new form factors like the 16” MacBook Pro in a press release.

Of course, there’s no guarantee that this will just be a press release, given that noice doesn’t need to be given in the traditional way for an Apple event now they’ve gone digital. If we were to get a video presentation however I’d expect it around 10am Cupertino time, not 05:30am.

The last possibility and for me the most likely is some new configurations for the existing M1 Macs, as we saw parts leaks for 10gbit Ethernet equipped mainboards for every version of the M1 Mac mini. So this could well be the reason that the report pushed to Apple Care providers.

But what do you think we’ll see? Let me know in the comments, and I’ll see you in the next one.

Portables on the EEC Database

  • A1466, – 13” MacBook to 2017
  • A1932, 2020 MacBook Air
  • A1989 2018 MacBook Pro 13”
  • A1990 15” MacBook Pro
  • A2141 16” MacBook Pro 
  • A2147 ??
  • A2158 ??
  • A2159 MacBook Pro 13” Touch Bar
  • A2179 MacBook Air 2020 Scissor Keyboard
  • A2182 ??
  • A2251 13” MacBook Pro
  • A2337 ?? MacBook Air M1
  • A2338 ?? MacBook Pro 13” M1

Desktops on new device list (MacOS 11)

  • A1418 21” iMac
  • A1481 Mac Pro Trash Can
  • A1862 iMac Pro
  • A1991 Mac Pro
  • A1993 Mac mini
  • A2115 iMac 27”
  • A2116 iMac 21.5”
  • A2304 Rack Mount Mac Pro
  • A2330 Mac mini Developer Transition Kit (Apple Silicon)
  • A2348 ?? Mac mini M1
  • A2438 ??
  • A2439 ??