This week, we finally know when Apple will announce their next batch of new products, and iOS 27 might be a more muted affair this year...

The first Apple Event of the year is almost here...

Invites landed this week for what Apple is calling a "special Apple Experience" on 4 March, with simultaneous gatherings planned in New York, London and Shanghai. Note the choice of words. This isn't being billed as a traditional Apple Event with a live-streamed keynote and a stage at Apple Park. It's something smaller, more intimate, and more hands-on. Journalists and creators have been invited to attend in person, which strongly suggests there will be new hardware to touch, hold and test on the day.

So what's actually being announced? According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, Apple is likely to roll out new products across the entire first week of March, with press releases dropping day by day from Monday 2 March through to the Wednesday experience itself. Think iPhone on Monday, iPads on Tuesday, Macs on Wednesday. It's a format Apple has used before and it keeps each product in its own news cycle rather than having everything compete for attention in a single keynote.

The headliner for most people will be the iPhone 17e, the successor to last year's 16e. It's expected to be a sensible spec bump rather than a dramatic redesign: the same 6.1-inch OLED display and single 48-megapixel camera, but with the newer A19 chip under the hood along with Apple's second-generation C1X modem and N1 wireless chip. Crucially, it's also tipped to finally gain MagSafe, which was a glaring omission from the previous model. Pricing should hold at around $599/£599, keeping it firmly in "affordable iPhone" territory, but it will be interesting to see whether or not this model improves on the value proposition. 

On the Mac side, there are two stories worth watching. First, the long-awaited MacBook Pro models with M5 Pro and M5 Max chips should arrive, bringing PCIe 5.0 support for faster SSD speeds. But the more intriguing announcement could be a brand-new low-cost MacBook powered by the A18 Pro chip. It's reportedly aimed squarely at Chromebooks and budget Windows laptops, and here's the fun detail: the invite graphic features a 3D Apple logo in yellow, green and blue, which multiple sources say corresponds to the colour options for this new machine. If Apple really does launch a colourful, affordable MacBook, it could be one of the most interesting Macs in years, opening up an entirely new budget demographic to the Mac ecosystem. 

iPads are in the mix too, though the updates look more routine. The eighth-generation iPad Air is expected to jump from the M3 to the M4 chip, while the 12th-generation base iPad should move to the A18, finally bringing Apple Intelligence to the entry-level tablet. Neither is likely to see a design change, but the chip upgrades matter for keeping the whole lineup AI-capable going forward.

A few other possibilities are floating around, including a refreshed Apple TV, an updated HomePod mini and potentially a new Studio Display, but most sources suggest those are more likely to land later in 2026. For now, the first week of March looks set to be all about the portable lineup. There's also the software angle: iOS 26.4 is expected to enter beta around the same time, bringing an updated Siri experience with deeper conversational abilities and Google Gemini integration.

It's shaping up to be a properly busy week for Apple. I'll have full coverage of everything announced, along with the usual breakdown of what it all means and whether any of it is worth your money. Stay tuned.

Your iPhone is WAY more capable

You search for something simple on your iPhone and twenty minutes later you're three videos deep, none of them quite right, and the one that looked promising was made in 2019 for a model you don't even own. It's exhausting. And it shouldn't be this hard.

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Apple might play it safe with iOS 27

If you've been quietly hoping Apple would take a breath this year and just fix things, you might be in luck. According to Bloomberg's Mark Gurman, whose track record on Apple software rumours is about as reliable as it gets, iOS 27 and its sibling updates across macOS, iPadOS, and watchOS are shaping up to be a very different kind of release. Less spectacle, more substance.

The comparison being made in pretty much every tech corner right now is to Mac OS X Snow Leopard. Back in 2009, Apple did something unusual: it shipped an update that didn't lead with flashy new features. Instead, it quietly rewrote chunks of code, cleaned house under the bonnet, and made the whole system feel faster and more reliable. It was quietly brilliant, and many Mac users still talk about it fondly. That's the template Apple is reportedly working from for the OS 27 generation.

Gurman describes Apple's engineering teams as "combing through" the operating systems, hunting for bloat to cut and bugs to eliminate. After iOS 26 arrived with the sweeping visual overhaul of Liquid Glass, and with some users finding elements of that redesign confusing or even hard to read, the need for a tidying-up year makes a lot of sense. Apple even had to add an option to dial back some of the more extreme Liquid Glass effects following complaints, which isn't a great look for a company that prides itself on considered design.

The headline feature for iOS 27 looks likely to be a refreshed Siri, although the constant delays mean my confidence in this decreases by the day. Beyond that, Gurman has been clear that WWDC 2026 will be "a fairly muted affair." That's quite a statement given how much Apple usually leans into its summer showcase.

In terms of timing, nothing unusual is expected here. WWDC will likely be held in the first or second week of June, with developer betas dropping straight after the keynote. A public beta should follow in July, and the final release will land alongside the new iPhone lineup in September, as usual.

For everyday users, this could genuinely be good news. The past couple of software cycles have introduced some frustrating rough edges: things not working quite as expected, performance feeling heavier than it should, and the sense that the annual feature race had started to outpace Apple's ability to ship polished software. A year focused on quality rather than quantity won't generate the same headlines, but it could quietly restore a lot of trust.

That said, it's worth tempering expectations slightly. We've heard similar promises before, and the reality is that shipping a major OS update across billions of devices while also building out Apple Intelligence features and preparing the platform for future foldable hardware is an enormous undertaking. Whether Apple can truly nail stability while doing all of that simultaneously remains to be seen. But the intention, at least, sounds like exactly what many users have been asking for.

Tip of the week

Did you know, if you're in an area with no WiFi, and you need to connect a device like your iPad or MacBook to the internet, you can use the cellular signal from your iPhone to create a HotSpot?

To do this, head into Settings, then choose Personal Hotspot. Any devices that are on your Apple ID should see your iPhone automatically and be able to connect, but you can also enable Allow Others to Join if you like, and share the Wi-Fi Password.

Just remember to check that your network allows you to do this, and won't charge you extra. 

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