[chucker]

I don't buy the AirPods thing. It doesn't fit the theme at all. Here's my guess with the AirPods: they'll either release them with no event whatsoever, as they've already done with the AirPods Pro(!) and AirPods Max. Orrrrr they bundle them into an event where it makes sense: in spring, as outdoor hike season begins, they release the Apple Watch Trek™, a rugged version for the hardcore folks among us, and they'll release the all-new AirPods 3 with them.

Now that they have out of the way: no 30-inch iMac is a bit of a bummer, but it wouldn't shock me if that's true. I will say, though, that I'm pretty sure none of the rumors last year knew that the event was going to introduce an M1 MacBook Air, MacBook Pro and Mac mini all the same day. And I don't think anyone nailed "we'll see the iPad mini and the iPad 9 this week!" either. So maybe that part, too, is wrong, and we will in fact see an M2X 30-inch iMac.

I think it's plausible that the big iMac is the Pro (whether they put it in the name or not is another matter, but lately they seem happy to slap Pro branding on products), and the 24-inch iMac is not. So next year, that one will get the M2, but not the M2X, not even as an option.

I still don't really buy that they'll introduce an M1X in late 2021. They've already shown the Climatecatastrophe* and Minorclimatemessup* pair of performance and efficiency cores in the A15, and those will likely end up in the M2: as before, with a slightly higher clock, with more cores, and with additional features — at the least, Thunderbolt, but possibly also eGPU support this time. (It's still not clear to me if lack of eGPU support on the M1 is a driver issue that they'll eventually fix in software, a hardware limitation, or an outright decision that they're done doing that. I really hope it's not the latter?)

So, if 14- and 16-inch MacBooks Pro are coming in October, and they better be, because the 16-inch is now almost two years old (what is wrong with Apple? this is their flagship Mac laptop), I can't think of a good reason they'll ship with last year's cores. Corona-related shipment issues, yes, but if that were the reason, why bother putting the A15 in the iPad mini? They could've given that the A14 and instead prioritized the higher-margin Macs for this year's chips. No, I think we'll see the M2X.

Amusingly, it even looks like we'll see it before the M2 itself, unless they also introduce a minor upgrade to an existing M1 machine. Perhaps a spec bump for the Air, without the rumored redesign, and then the M1 Air goes to $799. It's gotta be strange for Cook to have a strategy where last year's iPhone, the one before that, and the one before that are sold for $100 off each, and then the one before that rebadged as the SE, and to have a similar strategy for the iPad (9th gen is two-years-old tech) and Watch (the SE is sort of a Series 4.5, but lacking some of the 4's and 5's features) — but nothing of the sort for the Mac. I think Apple Silicon is exactly the moment to fix that, and you fix it by continuing to sell last year's Air, which was a freakishly fast, mass-appeal laptop.

VR? No way.

*) this unfunny joke may be too obscure