The invite went out Tuesday. Swirly colored graphic, one word underneath it: "Unleashed." Apple does this thing where the invite art is supposed to be a clue and everyone on every forum spends four days arguing about what a purple-and-orange smear of light is secretly telling us. I don't really buy into that part of it, but I'll admit I've refreshed a couple of rumor sites more times this week than I'd like to admit out loud.
The event is Monday. Two days from now, 10am Pacific, which means I'll be watching it at 1pm with a lukewarm coffee, probably still in the same hoodie I'm wearing right now. And I want to talk about why I actually care this time, because normally I roll my eyes at Apple event day content. Everybody and their cousin will have a "what to expect" post up by Sunday night anyway.
Here's my actual stake in this: I am typing this on a 2017 13-inch MacBook Pro, the Touch Bar model, and I resent it a little more every single day. Four years old this month, still going, but barely. The keyboard is the butterfly-switch generation, and yes, I had the free repair done back in 2019 when my "e" key started registering double letters at random. It happened again about six weeks ago and I just... live with it now. I proofread everything twice. It's fine. It's not fine.
The Touch Bar itself I've made peace with hating. I use it maybe twice a week, usually by accident, usually to mute something I meant to just click on. Every rumor report this week says it's getting replaced with actual physical function keys, and if that's true I will not miss it for one single second. I know some video editors swear by it. I am not a video editor. I write blog posts and answer email and occasionally open Photoshop to crop something, and for that workflow the Touch Bar has been a solution to a problem nobody asked it to solve.
The bigger stuff being rumored is the ports. MagSafe coming back, apparently, plus an actual HDMI port and an SD card slot, which would mean retiring the dongle situation I've had crammed in my bag for four years. I own three separate USB-C hubs at this point because I keep losing them or leaving one at a coffee shop. If Apple genuinely puts an SD card slot back on a MacBook Pro I will actually laugh out loud, because it took them removing it in the first place to make me appreciate having it.
Nobody seems to know yet what the new chip is actually going to be called. Most of what I've read just says "M1X" as a placeholder, which is a little funny given how confident everyone sounded about it a month ago. Mini-LED screen, higher refresh rate, and apparently a notch at the top for the camera, which is going to generate about a thousand jokes within the first hour of the keynote. I'm mildly annoyed by the idea of a notch on a laptop screen and mildly annoyed at myself for being annoyed, since it's obviously just there for a slightly better webcam and a thin bezel.
Unrelated tangent, but I've also spent most of this week watching Squid Game, like apparently everyone else on the planet has been doing for the last month. I'm only four episodes in, no spoilers please, and I have opinions about the marble game episode that I'm saving for a separate post once I've actually finished it. I bring it up here mostly because I keep getting distracted from actual writing by two entirely different things happening in the same week, and that feels like a very 2021 problem to have.
Anyway. I've set a reminder for 1pm Monday, and I'm trying not to get my hopes up too high about pricing, because a redesigned Pro with more ports is probably not going to be cheap. If it fixes my keyboard problem and gets rid of the dongle bag I will pay for it out of pure spite toward this laptop's letter "e" key. We'll see what actually gets announced instead of what forty different rumor bloggers think is getting announced. Two days.