The latest rumors suggest that Apple will release a new iPad Pro and iPad mini 6 in March, but it looks like the company will also have some new products for April. Mac Otakara’s supply chain sources let the website know that Apple is currently working on AirPods Pro 2 and the iPhone SE 3 for a spring release.
Details are pretty thin on the ground for both, but there are slightly more details for the AirPods Pro 2, which according to the website has a chest of drawers with a new look measuring 21 x 46 x 54 mm. By comparison, the current AirPods Pro drawer is 21 x 45.2 x 60.6 mm, so this is a small but noticeable difference.
This may indicate a change in the design of the earplugs themselves, and this is what has been suggested previously. Back in October, it was reported that AirPods 2 would dip the stem and mimic a rounder, overfill design to the Amazon Echo Buds and Samsung Galaxy Buds Plus.
The report stressed that design changes were not final, thanks to the difficulty of packing AirPods Pro’s inside into a smaller package, and the barely changed height of the case suggests that the stems may remain in some form unless Apple they plan to sit differently than they load.
Then there is the iPhone SE 3, but unfortunately the only new information here is that it is expected in April, without any clues about the design or internal specifications. This is nevertheless very encouraging in itself, given the four-year gap between the first iPhone SE in 2016 and the follow-up to last year.
Interestingly, this contradicts what we previously heard from Apple analyst Ming-Chi Kuo, who predicted that a new iPhone SE would only appear in the latter half of the year, but perhaps Apple is responding to rumors of poor sales figures of the company’s other small phone, the iPhone 12 mini.
Another alternative is that the two sources could discuss intersecting purposes, while Kuo refers to a true iPhone SE 3 and Mac Otakara discussing the rumors of iPhone SE Plus – a larger entry-level phone based on the iPhone 8 frame Plus.
Either way, it looks like Apple is planning a tight spring release schedule, and that’s before we reach the company’s Global Developer Conference in June where new hardware sometimes pops up. With a spate of releases by the end of 2020, including new Apple Watches, M1 MacBooks and AirPods Max, it looks like Ming-Chi Kuo was correct, and the company also got the Covid-19 related supply chain issues that brought the iPhone 12 back a few weeks.