January is traditionally a quiet month for Apple, but that may be about to change. While the company hasn’t announced a new product in January for more than a decade, a new rumor suggests something is coming this week.
In a cryptic tweet Monday, Apple leaker Jon Prosser, via his FrontPageTech account, said to “keep an eye on apple’s newsroom tomorrow,” which likely means something new will arrive. Apple occasionally launches new products via press release, with the most recent being the 10th-gen iPad, M2 iPad Pro, and Apple TV 4K in October.
As we wrote last week, January doesn’t tend to be a big month for Apple releases. While Apple once started the year with a flurry of new products back in the Macworld San Francisco era, such as the original iPhone, which arrived 16 years ago this month, the company has moved away from January announcements in recent years.
Since January 2010, when Apple launched the iPad, we’ve seen smaller releases, such as updates to Logic (2018), GarageBand (2017), and Final Cut Pro (2012) in Januaries of the past, and the Mac App Store opened its digital doors in 2011. But for the most part, January has been the least exciting month of all.
What could this announcement be? Several Macs are rumored to be coming this year, including new 14-inch and 16-inch MacBook Pros with M2 Pro and M2 Max chips, an M2 Mac mini and higher-end Mac mini to replace the Intel model, and a 15-inch MacBook Air, as well as an Apple silicon update to the Mac Pro, though that seems less likely to arrive via press release. Rumors are also heating up about Apple’s plans for an AR/VR headset, though it will likely get its own spring event. Tuesday’s news would seem to be the sort of announcement that doesn’t rise to the level of an event.
Prosser doesn’t have the greatest track record when it comes to rumors, but he has accurately predicted these sorts of announcements in the past. In April 2020, he was right about the launch of the iPhone SE and in December 2020, he predicted the launch of the AirPods Max.