You might want to make sure you’re sitting down before you read this, but 2020 is almost over. The year in which most of us were forced to stay indoors and do nothing for months on end has, to the surprise of nobody, passed in the blink of an eye. With no new memories being created and nothing of note – besides the obvious – happening, 2020 has accelerated past us at an incredible speed, and now there are less than three months of it left. That isn’t much time for any company to do anything that isn’t already public knowledge, but Apple isn’t like most companies. According to everything we’ve seen, they’re planning to see out 2020 in style. 

Very soon, Apple will be making its Fall announcement. Historically, this has always been the time of year that Apple makes its biggest announcements regarding new hardware and software innovations. This year isn’t expected to be any exception. Most people already expect the announcement to contain news of the release date of the iPhone 12, as well as the long-awaited technical specification of that product. The fact that it’s 5G ready is one of the worst-kept secrets in the whole technology industry, and Bloomberg says it’s seen a leaked internal memo that contains a forecast of between seventy and eighty million units of the phone sold before the year ends. That’s a huge (and seemingly) optimistic number, but it’s far from the only interesting thing that Bloomberg has picked up on. 

If the reports are to be believed, Apple has far more than just another iPhone up its sleeve. While most people’s attention will undoubtedly be on the phone handset, there will also be two brand-new Apple Watch designs and a new version of the iPhone Air to chew over, too. It would be one thing of Bloomberg was the only outlet reporting this news, but it’s been picked up by Engadget as well, who go as far as saying that there will be four new versions of the iPhone released between now and the end of the year. With interest in all of these products expected to be at high, the company will be hoping that the fourth quarter of 2020 will make up for some disappointments elsewhere scattered across the rest of the year. 

Apple’s strength during the past year has been hardware. Software products and alternative platforms have struggled to keep up. Amazon Music has been pushed almost to the point of irrelevance by Spotify and Amazon. Apple TV is heading for yet another relaunch. There’s also been a near-total strategic rethink of Apple Arcade, which is Apple’s take on a sort of online slots website equivalent for casual gamers. It follows the same design strategy as an online slots website, i.e., putting multiple Online Slots UK in the same place with one point of access and no demand placed on a user’s hardware, but appears to have failed to take into account what separates the average online slots websites from the good ones, which is the variety of games. If you check out any of the most popular online slots websites, you’ll find games there from every genre imaginable and every theme you could name. Apple Arcade games have, so far at least, been much of a family-orientated muchness with no single standout title. None of Apple Music, Apple TV, or Apple Arcade should be described as a failure – not yet, at least – but all of them have been disappointments, and a strong finish to the year on the hardware and gadgets front might help to make up for that disappointment. 

While all of the news about the new Apple gadgets is yet to be officially announced, here’s what (we think) we know. The new iPad Air is said to be similar in design to the iPad Pro and will come with a 10.8-inch screen and slim bezels, with a fingerprint touch ID security system attached to the power button. This is the same device for which you might have seen an alleged user manual circulating on social media during the past week. As you would expect it to be, the first new Apple Watch is the Apple Watch Series 6. No technical details about that are available at the time of writing. What most people won’t be expecting is a budget second Apple Watch, which is said to be comparable to the Series 3 but much cheaper. We can safely assume it will have neither the performance nor the features of the Series 6, but if the objective is to get more people interested in the concept of ‘smart’ watches, than we can think of few better candidates to do so that a modernized version of the Series 3 Apple Watch. 

The chief differences between the (anticipated) four iPhone versions will largely be cosmetic and based on size. According to the same sources we cited earlier, the iPhone 12 will come with screen sizes of 5.4 inches, 6.1 inches, and 6.7 inches. The 6.1-inch version of the phone will come in either standard or ‘Pro’ formats, with the ‘Pro’ version coming in a steel case. It’s widely thought that the new iPhone will break with recent tradition and feature a square-edged design, and will also come in dark blue as well as the usual white or black. 

The majority of headlines you’ll read after the fall event is over will relate to these major new products, but it’s not all about in-hand technology. A new HomePod speaker is also in the pipeline, and may finally give Apple a better foothold in a market that’s dominated by Amazon’s Alexa and Google’s Next. Thinking even smaller scale, we’ve also heard that there will be some new Apple headphones coming before the end of December, and they’ll feature the Apple logo rather than that of ‘Beats,’ which might be on the verge of being phased out as a brand. One place those headphones won’t turn up, though, is in the iPhone 12 box. The phone is thought to come without chargers or headphones, or a case. 

We don’t know when the Apple fall event will be scheduled for yet, and we won’t know how accurate these reports are until it happens, but there might be an easy way to tell. The same Bloomberg article that prompted all of this speculation says that iOS 14 will go live this month. If we reach the end of September without that happening, you can probably disregard the rest of the reporting. If, however, iOS 14 arrives between now and the day September ends, perhaps there might just be something to the rest of it, too.