Bloomberg's Mark Gurman points out that it's taking too long for Apple to update the design and physical layout of its popular product series, and he doesn't think it will get much better.
Don't expect an increased pace of design changes
Instead, the company will focus more on services like iCloud and of course Apple Intelligence — and Gorman also speculates they may launch Apple Intelligence.+ With more features to increase steady income from subscription services to convince customers to upgrade. It's more difficult with hardware: it took that six years To update the iPad design, the iPhone 15 looks almost similar to the iPhone 12 as of October 2020.
Apple Intelligence features, including an upgraded version of Siri, will be the biggest test of how much the software can drive device sales. Features will likely be a key focus of Apple's iPhone 16 marketing, just as native Siri ads helped boost iPhone 4S sales in 2011.
Mark Gurman, Bloomberg
The MacBook Pro hasn't changed much either (a Bloomberg journalist doesn't expect a design upgrade until 2025 or 2026 — maybe it will be thinner?), while the MacBook Air was significantly updated two years ago, so expect the latter design to likely live on for another five years at least. When it comes to certain products like the Apple Watch Ultra 3, almost no changes are expected.
In other Apple news
The Apple Vision Pro also gets Apple Intelligence, which isn’t expected to be a huge technical challenge as long as the headset runs iPadOS — it’s the interface that will be the biggest challenge. Speaking of AI, again, another reason Apple is asking for the iPhone 15 Pro and later is that it fears the servers won’t be able to handle so many new users at the same time, but the bigger issue is the 8GB of RAM minimum requirement. HomePods only have 1GB of RAM, and unfortunately won’t be able to run Apple Intelligence, but what about ChatGPT and the new Siri?
Speaking of ChatGPT's competitors for iPhone, don't expect Meta's Llma chatbot to become available to Apple users, though Apple is open to OpenAI competitors: according to Gorman, the reason is because Apple believes OpenAI, Google, and Anthropic offer much better services.
Gurman can also reveal that Apple has started development on the 2025 operating systems iOS 19 (“Luck”), macOS 16 (“Cheer”), and watchOS 12 (“Nepali”). “It may seem early,” Gurman explains, even though 14, 15, and 11 haven’t been released yet, but that’s tradition for Apple as it simultaneously develops next-generation devices that it must test with the new software. Unfortunately, he doesn’t know what new features the new operating systems will bring: we’ll probably have to wait until early next year before anything interesting starts leaking.
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