Apple’s Big Spring Event Could Be a Product Extravaganza

Tablets, laptops, M1, oh my

Apple CEO Tim Cook at a product launch in 2018. (Credit: Lance Ulanoff)

Apple will hold this year’s highly anticipated spring product event on April 20, 1 p.m. ET, entirely online. As anticipated as spring blooms themselves, this year’s event promises to be one of Apple’s richest in terms of product strategy and device number.

Among the categories on the table are:

• Laptops
• Desktops
• Tablets
• Custom Silicon
• Tracking Tiles
• Content

The surest bet is tablets. Most people expect Apple to update its iPad Pro line, which last saw a major update in March 2020 that added trackpad support, LiDAR, and the peppy A12Z Bionic CPU.

That silicon is now a few paces out of date with all of Apple’s iPhone 12s and even the latest iPad Air running the zippy A14 Bionic (and that added Touch ID to the edge). The iPad Pros, which I assume will come in 11-inch and 12.9-inch options, could feature new screen technology, specifically MicroLED. This nonorganic screen technology should, with its individually controlled trio of LEDs per pixel, change the game on contrast and overall image quality. Such things matter to the artists who use iPad Pros to draw, edit photos, and make…