After this past week, it may feel like we’re in a topsy-turvy world of cheap Apple products. For those reading this article on their shiny new, bottom-end MacBook Neos, I’ll try not to include anything that eats away needlessly at your 8GB of RAM. But according to Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman, bargain shoppers had better not get used to Apple Populism.
In his latest column, Gurman calls the Neo “an outlier, not the start of a broader move toward low-end devices.” And says more “superpremium tier” products are coming soon for the Apple One Percenters.
Gurman is wishy-washy about whether all of these gadgets will literally use the Apple “Ultra” branding like the CarPlay Ultra and Apple Watch Ultra, but says, in short, these will at least have Ultra vibes:
The touchscreen display for the MacBook Pro that Apple watchers already strongly suspect is in the pipeline will not be standard equipment, but a product in a splash-out tier of its own, and it will “likely sit above the current M5 Pro and M5 Max MacBook Pro models, rather than replace them,” Gurman claims.
The foldable iPhone “may be” branded the iPhone Ultra, but at an estimated $2,000, it will at any rate be the Ultra-tier device in the phone category, Gurman’s secret sources suggest to him.
There might or might not be an “AirPods Ultra” product release, but there will be a premium tier AirPods product above the Pro, and perhaps Max, tiers when Apple releases it’s otherworldly-sounding AI-enhanced AirPods, according to Gurman. These, he says, will feature cameras that aren’t for taking pictures, but are purely for feeding information to the onboard AI. Sounds like an impending Ultra-tier privacy controversy to me.
So if you’re filthy rich, enjoy the new toys that are apparently coming soon to your toy pile. Or, if you’re a normal MacBook Neo user like the rest of us, but you’re looking to throw away your tax refund before your wages start getting garnished this year by the Department of Education and your splurge window closes, these sound like they’ll be some very luxe ways to get rid of cash fast.
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