Apple’s clever (and kind of risky) plan to dominate the week before its big event

Image: Heng Qi / VCG via Getty Images

After years of doing things one way, Apple is changing things up a bit. The company has a special broadcast planned for Monday, but instead of dropping everything at once, it’s been releasing a steady trickle of hardware news all week. 

Apple has spotlighted minor, but still noticeable, hardware upgrades each day. On Monday, we got two new iPad models with Apple Pencil support and upgraded chips for better performance. Tuesday brought us beefy iMac performance enhancements nearly two years after the last iMac upgrades. Finally, Apple started Wednesday by showing off the new generation of AirPods with hands-free Siri integration.

With two business days left in the week and talk of an impending new iPod Touch model courtesy of MacRumors, Apple probably isn’t done. The ultimate effect of this unusual news rollout is that Apple managed to dominate tech news each day this week by the time many people were sitting down at work. 

This isn’t how Apple usually operates. The normal approach is to announce everything at one press conference before waiting several months for the next one. 

It’s a sign that Apple may be modernizing its approach a bit. Rather than make everything the focus of a bombastic stage show, these announcements were more casual. Tim Cook even teased the new AirPods on Wednesday morning by utilizing a meme from Monday’s iPad announcement.

That’s probably not how Steve Jobs would have done it.

It’s a smart move, but also potentially a risky one. While none of this week’s announcements were big enough to warrant events of their own, they still felt necessary. The previous generations of AirPods and iMacs, in particular, were getting a little long in the tooth and needed updates.

Apple’s launch events frequently approach or even eclipse two hours. A decent amount of that time on Monday could have been filled by hardware announcements. Now, there is a lot more pressure on Apple’s impending video and news subscription services to wow the public. 

That is, unless there is somehow even more hardware to talk about during the event. Seems unlikely, but who knows?

It’s not clear if this week’s odd pace has any long-term implications for Apple, but it might. As Apple starts focusing more and more on subscription services, smaller hardware announcements could be relegated to weekday news blasts in the future. 

As far as Apple is concerned, maybe upgraded iPads and AirPods are just means to consume an oncoming wave of original TV shows. This could all be a prelude to a world where Apple is a media company as much as it’s a tech company.