Apple has decided not to wait for WWDC to shake things up in 2026. Instead, the company is pulling together a “special Apple experience” on March 4th, and it’s doing it far away from the usual big-stage comfort of Apple Park. This time, select press and creators are being invited to in-person sessions in New York City, London, and Shanghai, all kicking off simultaneously at 9 am ET, in what looks like a deliberately more intimate, hands-on showcase rather than a classic keynote with Tim Cook on stage and a livestream beamed around the world.

Invites have already started landing in inboxes. They carry a simple “You’re invited” tagline and a stylized Apple logo made of segmented discs in yellow, green, and blue — a color palette that’s immediately being read as a wink toward a new low-cost MacBook line rumored to come in playful finishes. There’s no slogan like “Wonderlust” or “Peek Performance” this time, no overt hint about the product category Apple wants to spotlight. Instead, the wording — “special Apple experience” — is doing a lot of heavy lifting. It implies this isn’t just something you watch; it’s something you walk through, poke at, and live with for a few hours.

The timing is interesting, too. March 4th sits right in the middle of Mobile World Congress in Barcelona, where most of the industry will be talking foldables, AI phones, and network gear. Apple notoriously skips MWC, but this year it’s picking the same window to pull attention toward itself with an event that spans three major cities, all synced to the same moment. That choice alone signals that whatever is coming is important enough that Apple wants the story told in person, by people who’ve had hands-on time, rather than just via a press release quietly dropped on its website.

So what actually shows up on March 4th? Officially, Apple isn’t saying. Unofficially, the rumor mill is unusually aligned. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman has been outlining a packed hardware slate “over the course of the next several weeks,” and the March 4th event fits neatly into that window. Front and center is a new low-cost MacBook — a machine that reportedly ditches the familiar M‑series Mac chips in favor of an A‑series processor, the same class of silicon you’d expect in an iPhone. According to multiple reports, this laptop is expected to be priced “well under” the current 13‑inch MacBook Air’s $999 entry point, with a slightly smaller display just under 13 inches and potentially the A18 Pro chip that’s tipped for higher-end iPhone 16 models.

That move would be a pretty big philosophical swing for Apple’s Mac lineup. Since the first M1 MacBook Air in 2020, the story of the Mac has been about bringing custom Mac-class chips to every price point. Dropping an A‑series chip into a MacBook suggests Apple is trying to carve out a true budget tier — something squarely aimed at students, schools, and maybe even the Chromebook market, but with Apple’s hardware polish and macOS on top. The colorful logo on the invite, combined with reports of more playful colors for this cheaper model, only fuels the sense that this is meant to be the approachable Mac: less “pro workstation,” more “first laptop.”

This low-cost machine is not expected to arrive alone. Gurman and others have flagged a broader Mac refresh, including new MacBook Air models with M5 chips, and updated MacBook Pro configurations with M5 Pro and M5 Max silicon, extending the chips that first appeared in high-end Pro machines last year down into more of the line. New Apple displays are also in the mix — likely iterative updates rather than a complete rethink, but still notable at a time when more people are turning their laptops into full desktop setups with external monitors. Apple has a history of quietly updating pro displays without a huge spotlight, so folding them into a broader “experience” event would fit the pattern.

Beyond Macs, the March 4th timing lines up almost perfectly with expectations for new iPads and a new entry-level iPhone. On the phone side, the model to watch is the iPhone 17e, a more affordable device that sits below the flagship line but tries not to feel too compromised. The “e” is expected to stand for “essential” rather than “economy,” but the idea is familiar: this is the iPhone for people who don’t care about having the absolute latest camera system or display tech, as long as the fundamentals are solid and the price is right. With older lower-cost iPhones reportedly selling out in some markets, Apple has a clear incentive to plug that gap quickly.

On tablets, a new base iPad and a refreshed iPad Air powered by an M4 chip are both heavily rumored. The Air, in particular, is becoming Apple’s sweet-spot iPad — the one that’s powerful enough for creative work and light productivity, without the “this is a laptop replacement” messaging that comes with the iPad Pro. Moving it to M4 would bring some of the latest Mac silicon benefits to a more approachable price band, something that matters as more people lean on tablets for learning, side gigs, or casual editing. A new entry-level iPad, meanwhile, would give schools and budget-conscious buyers a fresher option at the bottom of the stack, especially as older models cycle off shelves.

All of that hardware sets the stage for a bigger software story Apple has been quietly building toward: a major AI reboot, centered on Siri. Over the past year, there’s been a steady drumbeat of reporting about Apple’s internal work to overhaul Siri into something far more conversational and capable of handling multi-step tasks — think “find that podcast my friend sent me last month and play it,” rather than just “play the latest episode.” The new Siri is reportedly tied to a framework called Linwood, backed by Apple’s own foundation models and, crucially, technology from Google’s Gemini team.

Originally, parts of this Siri overhaul were expected to arrive in an iOS 26.4 update targeting March, but timelines appear to be in flux. Some features may slip into iOS 26.5 in May or even iOS 27 in September, underscoring how tricky it is to ship complex AI features at Apple’s usual standard of polish and on-device privacy. Even so, industry watchers expect 2026 to be the year Apple stops sitting on the sidelines of the AI assistant arms race and starts turning Siri into something closer to the chatbot-style interfaces that have defined the last couple of years of tech. The March 4th “experience” is an obvious candidate for at least a teaser: a demo station where you can try an early version of an AI-infused Siri on a new iPhone or Mac, even if the full feature set arrives in software updates later.

What makes this event especially intriguing is the format. Rather than a single, globally broadcast cinematic keynote, Apple is opting for three synchronized, invite-only gatherings built around the idea of an “experience.” Reports suggest these will lean heavily into extended hands-on sessions, where attendees get time to live with the new devices, try the AI features, see the color options, and test the updated Macs under real workloads. It’s a structure that plays to the strengths of modern tech coverage: short first impressions, detailed camera and battery tests, and lots of TikTok- and Reels-ready “come with me to the Apple event” content shot on the show floor.

It’s also a subtle acknowledgment that Apple’s product story in 2026 is more distributed. This isn’t a single tentpole device like the original Apple Watch or Vision Pro that demands a one-hour narrative arc and a surprise “one more thing.” Instead, it’s a cascade of updates — a cheaper MacBook, refreshed Airs and Pros, a new budget iPhone, a more capable iPad Air, and a Siri that’s finally starting to look like it belongs in an AI-first world. The “special experience” format lets Apple tie those threads together through how they feel in use: how quickly the new Mac wakes when you open it, how the AI assistant handles a messy request, how the iPhone 17e camera behaves in a dim demo room.

There’s a competitive subtext here, too. While Android OEMs flood MWC with AI-branded features and experimental hardware, Apple is staging its own counter-programming: familiar product categories, but reframed through price, accessibility, and everyday AI. A sub‑$1,000 MacBook that still feels like a Mac, a budget iPhone that’s modern enough to avoid feeling like a compromise, an iPad Air that can replace a light laptop if you want it to — all backed by a more capable Siri that’s designed to keep as much processing as possible on-device or in tightly controlled data centers. For Apple, that’s the bet: that it can sell AI not as a novelty buzzword, but as a quiet, privacy-conscious upgrade to the devices you already understand.

Of course, Apple could still surprise everyone. The company has a habit of keeping at least one card off the table until the last minute, and “experience” leaves enough semantic wiggle room for new accessories, services, or even an early peek at longer-term projects tied to AI-driven apps or creative tools. But even if the March 4th lineup sticks closely to the current rumors, the event marks an important pivot. Apple is using a smaller stage, in three cities at once, to tell a broader story: in 2026, the Mac, the iPhone, the iPad, and Siri are all going to feel a bit different — not because they’ve radically changed what they are, but because they’re being tuned for a world where AI is simply part of the furniture.