‘Peek Performance’

Early in my career I used to totally geek out about upcoming Apple events. I still do. I just generally don’t have time to watch the events live these days. Instead, at the end of the day once my wife and son are asleep, I put in my AirPods, open up my iPad Pro, and geek out until I drift off to sleep.

Even though I won’t watch tomorrow’s event live, I still get giddy with excitement. It’s amazing that Apple has been able to maintain excitement for these events over the years. For me personally, it’s been about 20 years now.

Apple has titled tomorrow’s event, “Peek Performance. I don’t follow the Apple rumor mill very closely, but because it’s fun, I’ll throw my hat in the ring with a guess as to what the name is hinting at.

Given that we haven’t yet seen the Apple silicon iMac Pro’s, I’d wager they’ll make an appearance tomorrow. This would cover the “Performance” bit of the name.

As for “Peek,” I’m going to hope it’s new stand alone displays that aren’t $5,000 (looking at you XDR). Ever since they discontinued the Apple Cinema Display, we’ve had to make do with monitors from other companies. There are many great monitors available, but given Apple’s reputation for designing the full experience, it’s been quite odd that the piece of hardware that renders the OS has been the component Apple has left up to other manufacturers. Apple Studio Display? Yes, please.

I’ll toss in one more guess. If Apple does unveil new displays, it would be quite cool if they were multi-touch displays. My reason for this is specifically for a better experience for iPad users. When using an iPad with an external display, it’s very natural to want to touch the display. But, you can’t, and it’s a bummer. I would be shocked if Apple prioritized this use case in the design of new displays, but one can hope.

Of course if they did, we’d have to see better external display support in iPad OS to accompany it. And maybe that’s where “peek” comes into play. Not only will we get to “peek” at the new displays, but we’ll get a “peek” at changes coming to iPad OS to fully utilize the new displays?

Lastly, if they do announce new displays with multi-touch, and upcoming changes to iPad OS, it seems natural that we might also see updated iPad Pros. This is probably a stretch for this event, but if they do, I’d love to see a front-facing camera at the top in landscape orientation, the USB-C connection move to a corner (similar to the charging port on a MacBook), and thinner bezels.

To recap, new products I think we’ll see tomorrow in order of confidence:

• iMac Pro (seems fairly likely)
• Studio Display (maybe?)
• iPad Pro (a bit early, but somewhat likely?)
• Peek at improved display support for iPad OS (one can hope?)
• Multi-touch support in the new displays (highly unlikely)