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Apple Announces ‘Let Loose’ Event on May 7, Presumably to Announce New iPad Lineup from Daring Fireball RSS feed.

Apple Announces ‘Let Loose’ Event on May 7, Presumably to Announce New iPad Lineup

Joe Rossignol, MacRumors:

Apple has announced it will be holding a special event on Tuesday, May 7 at 7 a.m. Pacific Time (10 a.m. Eastern Time), with a live stream to be available on Apple.com and on YouTube as usual. The event invitation has a tagline of “Let Loose” and shows an artistic render of an Apple Pencil, suggesting that iPads will be a focus of the event.

Tim Cook, on Twitter/X:

Pencil us in for May 7! ✏️ #AppleEvent

The entirety of the iPad lineup is due for updates, and the rumor mill expects a new model, a 13-inch-ish iPad Air. It seems clear a new Apple Pencil is forthcoming. The Pencil 2 launched in 2018, alongside the 3rd-gen iPads Pro, which sport A12X chips that benchmark comparably to the then-fastest MacBook Pros available. Those were fantastic iPads that foretold the Apple silicon revolution. My personal iPad remains a 2018 11-inch iPad Pro.

Also rumored: a new Magic Keyboard, with a more MacBook-like (and hopefully more durable) aluminum body and a larger trackpad. The current Magic Keyboards are now four years old. Apple might be settling all iPad family business in two weeks.

What I hope to see:

  • New Pencil and new Magic Keyboards (11- and 13-inch) that work with all new iPads, Air and Pro alike. The Pencil compatibility situation has been a mess the last few years; now is the time to clean that up with a Pencil 3 that works across all new iPads.
  • All new iPads with the front-facing camera on the long side, optimized for use in landscape/laptop orientation.
  • Face ID replacing top-button Touch ID in the iPad Airs.

Why they’re showing the video at 7am PT / 10am ET, I don’t know. (Glad I’ll be on the East Coast though.)