It’s Impossible To Predict What Apple Will Do

There are a lot of excited Apple customers trying to guess at what’s coming in Apple’s November event. Will we get Apple silicon? Will we get AirTags? Will we get Magsafe? Will we get something else entirely?

This happens pretty reliably for every Apple event. As soon as a possible date starts to approach, an entire cottage industry pops up around finding and disseminating Apple leaks, market analyses, and theories.

For several years, I would allow myself to get swept up in these theories. I stoked my own excitement for Apple events time and time again… only for less than half of the “predictions” to come true.

The story was always the same. Apple would include some of the stuff of rumors, not others, and usually not the thing we were all really looking forward to. Ultimately, as we would discover a few years later, for pretty good reasons.

We consumers think we know what Apple will do, but Apple frequently refuses to do even what seems obvious to consumers.

Look at the silicon MacBook. It’s been verified by Apple insiders at this point that we’re going to get an Apple silicon MacBook in November, but how many years have we gone into every October and November special event thinking “Maybe this is the year we get an Apple silicon MacBook!”

Or, for a more historical example, the destruction of the 12” MacBook. As M.G. Siegler pointed out years ago, the MacBook Air branding hasn’t made sense in some time. When the Air was released, it was the thinnest and lightest of the lineup, but for the several years the MacBook was on the scene that just wasn’t the case. To many people, the obvious thing to do was drop the “Air” moniker somehow, either by eliminating the air machine or branding them as two different sized versions of the same machine or something.

But they didn’t do either of those things. They did something nobody was anticipating: they dropped the MacBook entirely.

Now, if it does indeed come back to us with Apple silicon, it will make a little more sense why they dropped the machine. They were probably hitting some engineering limits with intel chips and figured out their only way to move forward with the hardware was their own silicon.

But if it doesn’t come back to us this November, then it’s gone forever.

I bought a MacBook shortly before it was discontinued. If you’d told me it was going to be dropped by Apple forever, I would have called you crazy, because I love my MacBook.

Leaks are not helpful either

Leaks may indicate the general direction of launches, as was the case recently with the iPhone 12 mini — leaks indicated we were going to get a tiny iPhone — but leaks don’t tell us the feature set or packaging. Was this tiny iPhone destined to round out the bottom of the product line? Was Apple going to market them as iPhone small, medium, and large? Was the hardware going to be on par with its larger-sized siblings?

Was it even going to make it to market?

We had no idea.

It seems we’re going to get Apple silicon Macs this November (Apple confirmed they would release them in 2020, and this is the last event of 2020), but that doesn’t mean we have any idea what we’re getting. We might get a bunch of features that blow our mind, like Apple chipsets and cellular on laptops and MagSafe and others we can’t predict… or we could just get the MacBook with silicon.

There’s really nothing to be gained from trying to guess. Apple always gives consumers at least a few days to decide what they want before making pre-orders available, so it’s not as if we have an advantage at pre-order if we’ve already decided what we want.

While I think trying to guess what Apple will do is a waste of time, that doesn’t mean writing about Apple is a waste.

Take the work of M.G. Siegler. Siegler stays away from pure speculation. He writes stories talking about leaks to give readers hard information about what might be coming up, and he writes about what he thinks Apple should do, or what would make sense for Apple to do, but in the four years I’ve been following his work, I don’t think he’s ever once made a claim that he knows what Apple will do.

In conclusion, excitedly crawling MacRumors is a waste of our time. We’re better off just waiting for the event to actually happen and taking it from there.

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