Apple May Shake Up Its Product Release Schedule
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For years, you’ve been able to mark your calendar almost to the day when major new Apple product releases would appear. However, that may soon change.
Apple is reportedly rethinking its annual release cycles, according to a new report from Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman. In this week’s Power On newsletter, Gurman suggests that Apple’s clockwork cycle of hardware and software releases is starting to show some “cracks.”
For example, for the past 14 years, Apple has previewed its major software updates during its June Worldwide Developers Conference (WWDC), followed by a summer beta cycle and a fall release of nearly all of them alongside its new iPhone lineup. While macOS typically lags into October, even this year’s macOS Sequoia 15.0 update landed at the same time as iOS 18 last month.
Similarly, we’ve nearly always been able to count on Apple’s latest iPhones arriving in the first half of September, with pre-orders opening on Friday of the same week as the launch event and in-store availability the following Friday. The only exceptions were the October 4th iPhone 4S event in 2011, the company’s first fall event after three years of WWDC iPhone releases, and the October 13 iPhone 12 event in 2020, which was delayed as a result of the global health pandemic (however, even that year, Apple still held a September event to show off the Apple Watch Series 6 and its redesigned fourth-generation iPad Air).
Until this year, Apple also followed an established formula for the day of the week: Apple events were always held on a Tuesday unless it was the Tuesday after Labor Day or September 11. That’s why this year’s Monday event was such a big deal — even more significant for falling on the tenth anniversary of the unveiling of the first Apple Watch at Apple’s September 9, 2014 event. That might have been a subtle nod to mark the occasion, but it didn’t bring the “anniversary edition” Apple Watch X many hoped we’d see.
Is Apple Getting Too Predictable?
To be fair, there’s more to Apple’s fall event schedule than merely tradition. As Gurman notes, Apple chose a post-summer schedule years ago to create the most impact, ensuring reporters and other media folks were back from summer vacation but hadn’t yet gotten distracted by anything else. Even iPod events stuck to the same fall schedule until the iPhone effectively usurped them.
This was even more crucial when Apple held in-person events in San Francisco and Cupertino. The shifts to Wednesdays to avoid Labor Day were expressly for that purpose — so members of the press wouldn’t have to travel on a holiday Monday to be on deck for Tuesday morning. That part may merely be a tradition that stuck after Apple moved to virtual events, but there’s still something to be said for giving people a day to recover after a long weekend, even when they’re only watching in front of their computer.
Apple’s predictable schedule also provided a regular flow for investors and the stock market, giving it a reliable and consistent bump right before the holiday quarter. This part is so significant that Apple announced the iPhone 12 launch delay during its July quarterly earnings call to ensure investors were warned that the company’s fourth-quarter revenue would be lower than expected.
Despite its secretive nature, Apple doesn’t mind this predictability. The company doesn’t even confirm or deny it’s holding a September event until it sends out media invites a week or two before, but it’s happy to let folks assume these will occur at the same time every year.
Apple’s product lineup has become more diverse and active in recent years. The pace of Apple silicon has it pushing out new Macs on a much more rapid cycle—we’ve gone from the M1 MacBook Air to the upcoming M4 MacBook Pro in four years—and an iPad family that’s now comprised of four unique models is making for a busier time than ever.
We’ve already seen the results of this. Apple’s iPads and Macs are already arriving on a far less predictable schedule than they once did. We’ve already had the M3 MacBook Air lineup arrive quietly in early March and the M4 iPad Pro and M2 iPad Air in May. Some of these would have undoubtedly been held back to WWDC in prior years, but Apple no longer sees the need for such artificial delays.
However, Gurman says that this is just the beginning of what he calls a more “fluid” approach:
It seems like Apple will have to go further toward a more fluid approach, where it releases products when they’re ready and doesn’t release them if they’re not.Mark Gurman
Part of the challenge is that Apple doesn’t organize its teams based on specific products but instead does so “functionally.” Audio engineers work on everything from AirPods and HomePods to the speakers and mice in your MacBook and iPhone, and the same team of optical engineers that builds the triple-lens camera system on the iPhone 16 Pro Max is also responsible for the FaceTime HD camera on the MacBook Air.
Similarly, Apple’s software engineering teams work collaboratively on iOS, iPadOS, macOS, visionOS, tvOS, and watchOS. Some teams may be more focused on only one of those operating systems, but that’s usually more a result of the application than the OS. For example, a team developing fitness and workout algorithms would naturally be honed in on the Apple Watch, but they may still need to contribute to the Health app on the iPhone and iPad.
The need to get all of these software updates out the door at the same time — and in time for Apple’s hardware releases — results in a strain that we’re beginning to see in software quality. iPadOS 18 had relatively few new features but still included a bug that bricked some of Apple’s latest and flashiest M4 iPad Pro models.
Then there’s Apple Intelligence. While Apple never promised it would be ready for iOS 18.0, that was certainly implied during its WWDC announcements. It stated that Apple Intelligence would be released as a US-English-only “beta” in the fall. Still, the only features it mentioned were “coming later” were ChatGPT integration and some personal context features in Siri. Reading between the lines, it feels like Apple didn’t want things to slip into October, but in the end, it had no choice but to delay its AI features until they were sufficiently polished and space them out across several iOS 18 point releases.
It’s not the first time Apple has done this. Since at least iOS 10, there’s been an increasing sense that Apple’s WWDC announcements represent a sort of roadmap for the entire software lifecycle over the course of the following year, not what to expect in the initial point-zero release. In 2016, we didn’t see Portrait Mode on the new iPhone 7 until iOS 10.1 arrived, and iOS 11 saw promised features like AirPlay 2 and Messages in the Cloud delayed until iOS 11.3 and iOS 11.4 the following spring. While Apple Intelligence is arguably a much bigger deal than those ancillary features, it’s not an entirely new playbook — just a sign that we’ll see more of these phased rollouts going forward.
The good news is, Apple has clearly realized that there’s an issue. Pursuing a big fall launch for most of its new hardware and software offerings has become too much of a toll — and the company is ever-so-slightly inching away from that path.Mark Gurman
Gurman suggests that Apple will need to “abandon the mad scramble to get OS features ready for release in September” and move even more toward this staggered approach in hopes of making its releases more stable and perhaps increasing its level of innovation.
While Apple isn’t likely to shift away from its annual iPhone releases anytime soon — it’s too big of a product for that, no matter how many pundits complain about incremental updates — other products will likely move to more staggered releases. The Apple Watch Ultra is one example of this, with a third-generation model next year likely setting a two-year pace for Apple’s extreme wearable.