Sometimes it’s easy to think of Apple as above it all. The company is so big, so beloved, and so successful that surely it can’t be touched, its momentum can’t be slowed. But of course, that’s not true. Apple is of the world, not above it, and when the company warns all of us that it can’t predict the future in the era of COVID, we really ought to take it at its word.
Last year, when I predicted what 2022 would be like for the Mac, I clearly didn’t foresee how the company’s ability to assemble Macs would be sidelined by a spring pandemic lockdown. The result was that my predictions for the Mac’s ahead-of-schedule transition to Apple silicon were entirely wrong–but to be fair, Apple was taken by surprise, too.
I expected Apple to ship an iMac Pro, a Mac Pro, and a souped-up Mac mini, officially closing the door on the Intel era of Macs. But in the intervening two years since Apple announced a two-year transition to Apple silicon, enough has gone wrong in the global supply chain and in Apple’s own factories that the company is clearly behind where it expected to be.
No, Apple doesn’t preannounce products–and if a product was never announced, can it really ever be considered “delayed?” Apple’s declaration that it would finish the transition to its own processors was pretty much the closest it’ll ever come to setting a timeline for future products. And look what happened! They missed the target. See if Apple ever predicts anything ever again.
An Apple silicon replacement for the Mac Pro was not released within the two-year timeframe that Apple initially announced for its Mac transition.
IDG
If you paid attention to analyst and press reports, though, it sure seems like Apple is six to nine months behind where it had expected to be. The M2 MacBook Air, which was announced in June and shipped in July (and which I did predict, for the record!), was originally rumored to ship last fall. Whether or not Apple planned on selling it that early, it sure seems the company didn’t expect to have to wait until summer to get it out the door.
I’ll save my predictions for a column later this month, but I think it’s perhaps safe to expect that 2023 will finally be the year that Apple shows Intel the door. You know Apple doesn’t like having Intel Macs on its web pages any more than the rest of us do. It’ll get rid of them as soon as it can.
Speaking of delayed products, I have to admit that I drank the Flavor Aid when it came to Apple’s VR headset product. Surely 2022 will be the year, I thought last December, imagining a full 12 months in which Apple could finally unveil its much-rumored device. It was another whiff, as the product remains the subject of intense speculation but no actual details.
Having dined on ashes long enough, please allow me at least a little bit of back-patting. This year we did cash in on several of my predictions: the new iPhone SE exists (though I imagined Apple would ditch its Home button, which it didn’t do). The iPhone 14 was exactly as much of a minor update (but for the camera upgrades) as it seemed, leaving the …….