Gurman: 2025 Will Be a ‘Stepping Stone’ for Apple Products (Here’s What’s Coming)
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From everything we’ve heard over the last few months, it looks like this will be an exciting year for new Apple products. We’re expecting no less than five new iPhones — at least two of which could get entirely new designs — a slate of M4 Macs of all flavors, and new devices for the living room.
However, despite some pretty ambitious undertakings, Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman suggests that this year’s product lineup is simply the first wave of greater things to come.
In this week’s Power On newsletter, Gurman noted that the 2025 lineup may be exciting at the outset, but when we look back on it in a few years, it will “be remembered as a stepping stone toward more revolutionary products — rather than a year of remarkable innovation.”
Read on for 7+ new products we're expecting from Apple this year.
The M4 MacBook Air
Apple is also expected to ease into 2025. Despite an unusually plausible rumor that a next-generation iPhone SE could launch this month (a report that Gurman quickly refuted), Apple’s first new product out of the gate will likely be the M4-powered MacBook Air family. These are expected to come in the usual 13- and 15-inch varieties with no physical design changes to speak of.
Gurman confirmed today that these are already in production overseas, with codenames of J713 and J715. The M4 chip is a given, considering Apple’s late 2023 and early 2024 release schedule. That will mean better power efficiency and longer battery life, and a base memory configuration of 16 GB. It’s unclear whether they’ll get other improvements from Apple’s recent M4 MacBook Pro models, such as the new 12-megapixel Center Stage camera or a nano-texture glass coating option. These are possibilities, but Gurman doesn’t have anything to say either way, and the rest of the rumor mill has been pretty quiet on this front.
The ‘iPhone SE 4’
Either way, the new M4 MacBook Air lineup will be relatively pedestrian compared to some of the other things Apple has in store. The “iPhone SE 4” is still on track for a March or April release, codenamed V59. That’s expected to get a big redesign — at least for an iPhone SE. Leaving the bezelled home button style behind, the new iPhone SE should look nearly identical to an iPhone 14, except that it will feature a single camera on the back and a USB-C port on the bottom, plus an A18 chip and 8 GB of RAM inside to support Apple Intelligence.
None of this is too surprising as it follows Apple’s playbook for the first two generations of iPhone SE, each of which took a 2.5-year-old design and modernized it with the latest-generation silicon — the 2016 iPhone SE was essentially a 2013 iPhone 5s with a 2015 A9 chip, and the 2020 iPhone SE was a replica of the 2017 iPhone 8 with the 2019 A13 chip. The 2022 iPhone SE was an outlier here, with virtually no design changes on the outside, merely an upgrade to the 2021 A15 chip and a 5G modem. However, many feel this one was an interim release designed entirely to bring 5G to the budget iPhone.
So, a 2025 iPhone SE that uses the 2022 iPhone 14 design and the 2024 A18 chip is perfectly in line with the tradition of Apple’s budget phones. Unlike its predecessor, this one won’t look exactly the same due to the single camera, but it’s expected to be pretty close. Reports that it would go with a Dynamic Island and have an iPhone 16 Action button have since been quashed, which makes us skeptical of a recent report that Apple will call it the “iPhone 16E.”
New iPads
Apple is also expected to unveil a new eleventh-generation iPad and M4-powered iPad Air. The standard iPad will get a chip capable of Apple Intelligence; some early reports hinted at an M1 chip, but Gurman suggests that Apple is more likely to go with the same A17 Pro that it used in the most recent iPad mini.
Gurman also says he “wouldn’t be terribly surprised” to see the new iPad Air skip the M3 and go all the way to the M4. After all, the MacBook Pro and MacBook Air use the same chip families, so why should the iPads be any different, he muses.
However, that also aligns with what we predicted last May, since the other catch is the transition nature of the M3 chip. The M3 (and the A17 Pro) used an early “N3B” 3-nanometer production process that wasn’t quite ready for prime time. Yields weren’t great, and Apple had only planned to use this as a stopgap to get a head start on its rivals in moving to a 3nm node. By contrast, Qualcomm waited a year until the more stable “N3E” process was ready, which is the same one used for the A18 and M4 chip families.
While the iPad mini 7 went with an A17 Pro, it’s notable that this is a “binned” version of the chip that was never used in an iPhone 15 Pro — it has one less GPU core. The N3B process was known for having yield problems, which means Apple likely got a lot of binned chips off the lineup that didn’t make the cut. Rather than discard these, it decided it likely had enough to meet the demand for the iPad mini, so it used them there. If Gurman’s information is accurate, it also has enough for the new 11th-generation iPad.
That wasn’t so much the case for the M3 chips, which already had binned versions used in the entry-level MacBook Air — something Apple has been doing since its first M1 models in 2020. Hence, a move to an M4 chip makes a lot more sense. Apple may still go with “binned” M4 chips for the lower-end iPad Air versus what it puts in the iPad Pro, but they’ll all be in the same ballpark.
Other M4 Macs
Apple skipped releasing an M3 Mac mini, Mac Studio, or Mac Pro last year — possibly another hint that the M3 chip was little more than an interim solution. However, it plans to rectify that with M4 versions of all this year. These will likely arrive in the first half of 2025, possibly around the time of Apple’s June Worldwide Developer’s Conference (WWDC), as was the case with their M2 predecessors.
This also means we can expect to see the ultimate M4 Ultra chip, which should be a healthy upgrade from the two-year-old M2 Ultra. It will also mark the first time Apple’s entire Mac lineup has been on the same generation of Apple silicon, since the 24-inch iMac skipped the M2 chip.
The ‘iPhone 17 Air’
The rumor mill has also been abuzz over the past few months about a replacement for the iPhone Plus that will represent an entirely new direction for Apple: an ultra-slim “iPhone 17 Air.”
As Gurman notes, Apple plans to use its “miniaturization skills and its push into new types of silicon to make the thinnest iPhone to date.” Like the iPhone mini and iPhone Plus, this is still an experiment on Apple’s part, but it hopes that it will fare better than those two iPhone sizes, which never caught on.
It’s still an open question how thin the iPhone Air will be. Last week, analyst Ming-Chi Kuo suggested it could get as low as 5.5mm, and Gurman believes Apple will shave about 2 millimeters off its existing iPhones, which would put it in the 5.8mm to 6.25mm range, depending on which iPhone 16 model you measure that against.
The other three iPhone models are expected to have less dramatic design changes. Gurman doesn’t comment on recent reports about new Google Pixel-like camera arrays, which suggests those three will be business as usual. However, the “iPhone 17 Air” is not only expected to create some buzz but also serve as a proving ground for new technologies, from Apple’s new in-house 5G modem and Wi-Fi chips to miniaturization technologies that could serve its foray into foldable iPhones.
Three New Apple Watches
After skipping the Apple Watch SE and Apple Watch Ultra in 2024, we'll likely see a return to the threefold Apple Watch lineup. The Apple Watch Series 11 and Ultra 3 models are expected to retain their same visual appearance — don’t expect any late anniversary edition releases — but the Ultra 3 could get satellite connectivity and 5G support.
Apple may also finally be released to release blood pressure monitoring on this year’s Apple Watch models — at least the Series 11 and Ultra 3. As we’ve reported before, don’t expect this to provide accurate numbers; it’s more likely to alert users to hypertension (abnormally high blood pressure), prompting them to get it properly tested with a standard blood pressure cuff.
Gurman expects the lower-end Apple Watch SE to “sport a new look,” although he doesn’t hint at what that might be. The feature set will likely remain the same, with premium health monitoring reserved for the standard and Ultra models.
New Home Products + More
Perhaps the most interesting thing we expect this year is a watershed moment in Apple’s home ambitions.
In addition to a new HomePod mini and Apple TV 4K, both of which are likely to be minor spec bumps, Apple also plans a new home hub with a seven-inch screen that can be mounted on a wall or placed on a counter. This was initially believed to be launching in the first half of 2025, but Gurman now thinks it could arrive later as it’s “heavily tied to App Intents features coming in iOS 18.4 and iOS 19.”
It still might make the cut for 2025, but Apple’s other new home products — a security camera and smart doorbell with Face ID — aren’t likely to show up before 2026.
Apple is also expected to release an “AirTag 2” this year that will feature better safety measures and greater range, although we’re still expecting removable batteries and a very similar design to the current AirTags.
These are all expected to come later this year, but one product that won’t be showing up is any new version of the Vision Pro — either a second-gen model or a lower-cost version. Apple is prioritizing the latter, and there’s a slight possibility it might announce something, but it’s not going to be ready until at least 2026.