Thoughts and Predictions on Apple’s September 9th Event
It's that time again. Another Apple event, another chance for me to predict what's coming. Will there be new iPhones? New iPads? A game-playing Apple TV? New Macs? New Apple Watches?
Short version: Yes, Yes, Yes, No, and No.
Long version… well, grab a coffee, this article is a big one!
The New Apple TV is Coming (finally)
Lets start with the big one: A game-playing Apple TV is finally coming. For real this time! As for what it'll look like…
A version of the A8 or A9 is a given
The current Apple TV generation 3 uses half of an A5 processor. Switching to a stock A8 would improve performance by many orders of magnitude.
The iPod Touch just underwent a similar upgrade. Ars Technica benchmarked both models and found that the A8-powered iPod Touch outperformed the A5 model by over 500% in CPU benchmarks and over 900% in GPU benchmarks. Considering the current Apple TV uses half the CPU count of the old iPod Touch, it wouldn't be unreasonable to expect the new Apple TV to be 10 times more powerful than the current model in both CPU and GPU benchmarks.
And that's the minimum. Unlike iPods, iPhones, and even iPads, the Apple TV has no battery life constraints. If Apple chose to, they could greatly scale up the performance of the same chips. Or even use better chips – the A8X, the upcoming A9, an A9X. Why not?
I'm not going to predict which they're using. At the bare minimum, they go with a stock A8, which would still allow the Apple TV to outperform the iPhone 6 Plus, iPad Mini 3, and new iPod Touch.
The Hardware Won’t Change Much (and doesn’t matter)
Will the Apple TV stay in the same black box? Will the box grow? Will it be metal?
I have no clue. 9to5mac says it'll be slightly larger, and I have no reason to doubt them. If Apple makes it larger, that implies significant performance gains, as the extra space could be needed for heat dissipation. Or maybe it'll gain new features, like wireless base station functionality. Don't count on a hard disk.
The Remote
This is the biggest question mark. What the hell does the new remote look like? What does it do?
For a long time, "sourced familiar with the matter" have claimed it has a touch pad or touch screen. This always seemed stupid to me, as every example of this I've tried feels far less natural than buttons, but what do I know?
In my opinion, Nintendo came closer than anyone to nailing the touchscreen-to-TV problem. Never forget the most important truth about microconsoles: for all our talk about their inevitability, the Wii is the first and only one to gain any traction.
If Apple copied the Wii by adding motion tracking to their new remote, they'd be on the right track. Touch screen gaming on iOS is all about direct manipulation: what you see on screen and touch on screen is exactly what reacts on screen. Aiming at the TV and pressing buttons that directly impact the TV at exactly that point you're aiming is as close as anyone has come yet to translating the touchscreen to the TV.
Apple knows all of this. They might decide that the increased complexity of requiring a sensor isn't worth the trade-off. That would be bad news for iOS developers looking to translate touchscreen actions to the Apple TV.
MFi Controllers are a Given
I feel confident in this prediction: MFi controllers will be fully supported by the new Apple TV. Developers will probably need to incorporate special support for them, but most developers will do so.
In my opinion, the entire MFi controller program has been leading to this point. Everything we've seen with controller support on iOS up until now has been about preparing developers for a non-touchscreen iOS client. Apple rarely puts their cards on the table as clearly as they have with MFi controllers. Apple's goal was never iPhone controllers; the Apple TV was always the plan.
As to whether or not Apple will be doing their own MFi controller… no comment. I haven't heard anything official one way or the other.
If Apple makes their own controller, it shows they care at least a little about hardcore gamers. If they don't, it shows serious gaming is still an afterthought.
My guess is that they'll show off a new controller from an MFi partner. Probably SteelSeries. It'll be the "blessed" third party controller that gets most of Apple's promotion. Others will still work, though.
Siri and Homekit are Guaranteed
Siri is what most of the tech press seems so focused on with this new Apple TV. Personally, I couldn't care less. But that's probably how most people feel about game controller support, so to each their own.
Siri's in. If you want to talk to your TV, you'll be able to do that. Hopefully that isn't the extent of Apple's interface improvement plans.
Likewise, Homekit support will be there, probably as a mid-sized focus. It already requires an Apple TV today. No clue what it'll look like, though.
No Cable TV Competitor – Yet
If Apple was ready to roll out a TV network in the same vein as Netflix or Hulu, we'd have heard about it. Everything we've heard suggests this isn't coming yet.
I think this new Apple TV was probably delays in the hopes that the TV network would be ready. It isn't, and Apple's going ahead with the launch anyways. They can always patch a new platform in later, as they did with Apple Music on the iPhone.
Apple Music makes a lot more sense as a TV / movie platform than it does as a music service. Here's hoping Apple can get the studios to play ball.
The Current Apple TV Stays Around
Today's Apple TV 3 (revision 2) is a good product. At $69 list price, it's a great deal.
It won't get any of the new bells and whistles. No fancy new remote, no MFi controller support, probably no App Store. But whenever Apple's new media platform eventually rolls out, it'll probably come to the Apple TV 3.
A revised interface isn't outside the realm of possibility. Just don't expect anything close to the Apple TV 4.
No TV Set (Of Course)
For completeness' sake, I have to add this one. Apple isn't making an actual TV set. Not now, possibly not ever. It isn't a business that makes any sense for a company of Apple's scale. People upgrade their TVs every decade. Apple want you to upgrade your Apple TV device a heck of a lot more often than that.
It Won’t Be Called the Apple TV 4
I've been writing Apple TV 4, as have others. That's a convenient shorthand, but I doubt it'll be Apple's final title. I'm guessing it'll just be the new Apple TV.
Either The Launch or The App Store will be Delayed
This one is easy: Apple doesn't want to launch with an empty App Store. Developers need time to port their apps. For 775 apps and counting, porting to the Apple TV won't take long. For countless others, porting is a lot more complex than just recompiling, since support will need to be added for new input methods.
There's only three ways Apple could do this. They could launch the Apple TV next week with an empty App Store, launch the Apple TV next week with NO App Store until an unspecified future date, or launch the Apple TV a month or so from now. I expect the third option, but the second wouldn't surprise me.
Anyways, that's all I have for now on the new Apple TV. But obviously Apple has more than this planned for next week's event. Here are my thoughts on what else might be coming.
New iPhones Are Coming
Well duh. This has historically been the "new iPhone event", and I doubt that'll change next week. Expect an iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus, as well as generous price drops for the existing iPhone 6 and iPhone 5S.
The new iPhones will feature stronger aluminum cases, same as the Apple Watch. They might have a new ‘rose gold’ color option. They probably have Force Touch, though I have no idea how it’ll be implemented. They’ll probably have 14-megapixel cameras, though quality shouldn’t be significantly improved from the existing cameras.
Performance-wise, they’ll have new A9 chips, which will probably give an incremental boost to CPU performance and a more significant boost to GPU performance. I have no idea about specific details, but I’m excited to see any performance improvements for iOS gaming!
Rumors suggest the iPhone will finally be getting 2 gigabytes of RAM. This is long overdue, and will make the devices feel snappier and run more apps in the background. Hopefully this RAM increase won’t be confined just to the larger iPhone 6S Plus.
Speaking of the iPhone 6S Plus, I’m hoping it gets a more powerful variant of the A9 than the regular iPhone 6. The higher resolution display of the iPhone 6 Plus requires the GPU to to render a LOT more pixels than the smaller iPhone, meaning the same hardware runs games at lower framerates. Something between an A9 and an A9X would alleviate this issue.
Speaking of display resolution, I’m expecting the iPhone 6S Plus will adopt a true 2208×1242 resolution. The current iPhone 6 Plus renders its picture at 2208×1242, then scales that picture down to it’s 1920×1080 display, resulting in reduced sharpness and contrast. Expect this hacky solution to be excised.
I'm not sure whether the current iPhone 6 Plus sticks around. The larger iPhones are Apple's most premium-priced iPhone, and I'm guessing they'll never keep last year's model around.
Similarly, I'm not sure about the iPhone 5C. My gut says it stays around. Carriers are dropping subsidies, making the actual price of iPhones apparent to US consumers for the first time. Even if the iPhone 5S drops to the "free" on-contract phone, there's a place for a phone that's cheaper than free – a phone only sold unlocked and off-contract. That's where the iPhone 5C goes.
It's also possible the iPhone 5C gets upgraded with the internals of the iPhone 5S, and occupies the "free" tier, with nothing below it.
As for whether or not we see an iPhone 6C, my guess is no. We'd be seeing parts leaks already if such a product were coming.
New iPads
Lots of other sites are predicting new iPad Mini and a brand new, extra large "iPad Pro" at this event. At first, I doubted it. But in the course of writing this article, I changed my mind.
The biggest mark against them: why show new iPads at the iPhone event, when there's more than likely going to be an actual iPad event next month?
My guess: Apple isn't going to hold a second event next month. The iPad isn't the hot new product it once was. And with particularly boring iPhone upgrades this year, consolidating everything into one event makes sense.
That's ultimately my reasoning: this year's iPhones are somewhat boring, incremental updates. Apple doesn't want that to be the story everyone focuses on, so they're going on a product release blitz.
But what do these new iPads look like? Well…
12 inch iPad Pro is Coming
This has been circling the rumor mill about as long as a new Apple TV has. And in this case, it's absolutely coming. We've seen the usual parts leaks, going back almost a year. More telling, we've seen resources and code in iOS 9 that would only be useful on a 12-inch iPad. Such as a keyboard that adds extra keys on a larger-screen iOS device.
As to what this device will contain, I have a few predictions. Based on leaked resources, the display resolution will be 2,732Ã2,048. At the same pixel density of the iPad Air, that would make for a slightly larger than 12-inch screen. Interestingly, this is twice the resolution of the iPad Air. Actually, in Landscape mode, the iPad Pro would be identical to two iPad Airs next to each other in Portrait mode – should be great for multitasking!
As for what internals this iPad Pro would contain, I have no clue. Assuming the new iPhones launch the same day with an A9 chip, it would be fitting for a simultaneously-released iPad to have an A9X chip. That would give it a theoretical performance advantage over the iPad Air 2's A8X, though gaming performance at native resolution will likely be far lower than the iPad Air 2 due to the increased pixel count.
True stereo speakers are rumored. I'm not sure about this one, but I certainly hope so! This is one place where Apple would benefit from dropping it's focus on aesthetics.
I know one thing: if the iPad Pro does come, I'll buy one immediately.
New iPad Mini 4 is (finally) coming
It's been 2 years since the iPad Mini was updated. No, I'm not counting last year's update, which added TouchID and literally nothing else.
The Mini is long overdue for an update. It'll get slimmer – parts leaks confirm that.
Performance-wise, It'll get a processor boost. I expect an A8 or A9, but not an X-series processor, which will be reserved for bigger, more expensive iPads, with larger batteries.
Hopefully, the display will finally be upgraded. The current iPad Mini 2 and iPad Mini 3 have Retina displays already, but these Retina displays are inferior to those of the iPad Air series. Color gamut and contrast ratio are greatly reduced, likely to preserve battery life. It's time for this to change.
The existing iPad Mini 3 will stay around, possibly with a price reduction. The iPad Mini 2 might stay around at an even further reduced price. My gut says it will, but now that the TouchID chip has been around for several years, the iPad Mini 3 presumably doesn't cost significantly more than the iPad Mini 2 for Apple to manufacture.
No New iPad Air
I'm not sure why the rumor mill is predicting this, but based on last year's iPad Mini snub, I think they're right: Apple won't launch a new iPad Air next week.
The iPad Air 2 is great. The iPad Mini isn't, but will be getting an update. The iPad Pro will occupy the high-end of Apple's iPad lineup. If there's ever been a time for skipping an update to the 10-inch model, this is it.
If you KNOW you want a 10-inch iPad, don't hesitate to buy the iPad Air 2. It'll be Apple's flagship at this size for at least the next 6 months.
An Official Keyboard Case is Coming (maybe)
Here's my oddball guess: we get an official iPad Air keyboard case, direct from Apple. Think the bottom half of the new MacBook, just without the computer.
The new MacBook's keyboard is a thoroughly inventive, original product. It's different than any other keyboard out there. Some people love it, some hate it. The point is, if Apple truly believes this is the best keyboard they've ever made, the only ones who can bring it to the iPad are Apple.
Existing keyboard cases and keyboard covers aren't great. I reviewed my favorites, but even the best of the lot isn't great, and has been discontinued by the manufacturer. Apple won't make a keyboard for a 10-inch or 8-inch iPad, but at 12 inches, the iPad Pro will be able to support a full-size, "no compromise" keyboard.
Even if I'm wrong about this one, I'm excited to see what third-party keyboard makers can do with the iPad Pro's full-size footprint. I'll be updating my Best iPad Keyboards Review accordingly.
Anyways, that's all for iPads. As for the rest of Apple's plans…
No New Macs
A 21-24 inch Retina iMac is long overdue, but it isn't coming tomorrow. Sad as it may be for a longtime mac user, the iMac just isn't important enough to warrant a slot at this event. Expect a quiet release in a few months, with a press release instead of an event.
MacBooks were updated recently, and aren't going to be refreshed at this event.
The Mac Pro is overdue for an update, but nobody cares. The only reason Apple mentioned the last update at an event was because of the fancy new enclosure – the product sells in such small numbers that a spec bump won't even warrant an off-hand remark.
No New Apple Watch, but New Bands
This is another easy prediction. The Apple Watch is fresh on the market, and there is no way Apple is refreshing it already.
They'll talk about how great the Watch is selling, show off native app functionality, and possibly launch some new watchband colors and designs for the holidays. That's it until next year.
More Information
Well that's it; I've made my predictions, placed my cards on the table. As for whether or not I'll be right, you'll have to tune in next Monday to find out.
I'll be tweeting my thoughts and reactions live on Twitter, and posting news right here in the AfterPad Forums. I hope to see you there!
