Monday morning’s collection of the best deals on Apple gear is here, and it’s a good one. We have up to $150 off the elevated configuration of the new 15-inch MacBook Air joined by a solid price drop on Apple’s latest 10-core 512GB M3 24-inch iMac in various colorways. From there, we move over to the audio side of things and the latest iteration of AirPods Pro 2 with the USB-C MagSafe charging case down at $180 and a gigantic $170 price drop on the Beats Studio Pro Wireless Bluetooth Noise Cancelling Headphones. All of that and more awaits down below in today’s 9to5Toys Lunch Break. 

Last week at the White House Correspondents Dinner, SNL’s Colin Jost joked about how The New York Times—the country’s most successful news publication—was only kept alive by Wordle and other puzzle games. The Times didn’t appreciate the remark.

Apple has clearly been paying attention to the Times’ success, though, as its latest strategy for boosting Apple News+ subscribers is a heaping dose of puzzle games. After launching crosswords last fall, another News+ game is on its way with iOS 17.5’s impending release: Quartiles.

Also noteworthy: both crosswords and Quartiles will be equipped with Game Center support in iOS 17.5. So much of Wordle’s initial popularity was tied to social sharing, and now in its own way, Apple is making it possible to play News+ games alongside your friends and in competition with others.

Will Apple’s games-focused strategy for News+ be successful? Here’s why it might.

Tomorrow, Apple will hold its first event of the year where it is expected to unveil a new generation of iPad Pro, iPad Air, and accompanying new Apple Pencil and Magic Keyboard accessories.

The Apple website may have just given us a bit more insight into what to expect. In the Japanese Apple.com source code, the homepage banner for the event describes the logo’s header image as a creator holding a “Apple Pencil Pro”. The discovery was first spotted by ribu_ap712 on X.

As we await tomorrow’s iPad event, we’re looking back at a playful Apple marketing campaign that you’ve probably never seen. That’s because it ran in a single market at the time: Japan.

It turns out Apple relied on whimsical puppetry to convince Android users to switch to iPhone for a few years. If you haven’t experienced it, the ad campaign is unlike any other marketing campaign from Apple.

Proton has been building out its suite of software with new services like Proton Pass, an end-to-end encrypted password manager, and more. Now Proton Pass is more powerful than ever with what the company calls “Pass Monitor” which has four layers of identity and credential protection.

Apple has been into a monthly release cycle for Apple Arcade launches recently and it has just announced what’s on the horizon. At the end of May and into June, we’ll see Where Cards Fall come to Vision Pro, plus Rabbids: Legends of the Multiverse, Return to Monkey Island+, and more arrive on the platform.

We’ve got a new report from Counterpoint Research today on the state of global smartphone shipments. The high-end, newest iPhone was more popular than all of the other iPhone models and was the top pick against Samsung’s flagship and mid-range smartphones.

Apple today announced its commemorative Pride Collection for 2024, featuring new wallpapers for iPhone and iPad, and a new watch face and matching band for the Apple Watch.

The new Pride Edition Braided Solo Loop band will be available to order starting May 22. The new watch face and dynamic iOS wallpapers will also be available ‘soon’, as part of iOS 17.5.

iPad Air.

The new teaser at the top of the page cycles between the various illustrations of Apple logo, with a twist that you can erase the art with your mouse pointer on Mac, or finger on your iPhone’s touchscreen. When the logo is fully erased, a new variant animates in.

Apple is ramping up its work on foldable devices, according to a new investor note seen by 9to5Mac. The report, from Haitong International Securities analyst Jeff Pu, says that Apple will begin mass production of a 20.3-inch foldable device in late 2025, followed by a foldable iPhone in late 2026.

Apple has big changes in store for next year’s iPhone 17 lineup, according to a new report from reliable Haitong International Securities analyst Jeff Pu. In an investor note seen by 9to5Mac, Pu says that the iPhone 17 models will feature a refreshed design, front-facing camera improvements, a smaller Dynamic Island, and more.

Pu also says that Apple will introduce a new “iPhone 17 Slim” model that replaces the “Plus” model in the lineup.

On Tuesday, May 7, Apple will hold its first product event of the year, ‘Let Loose’. The company is set to introduce new lineup of and iPad Air. The iPad Pro tablets will get OLED displays, a new thinner chassis, and run on the M4 chip. The iPad Air will be updated with the M2 chip, and be offered in a new larger 12.9-inch display size for the first time.

As reported today by Mark Gurman, Apple is set to announce all of this in a brisk video presentation running about 35 minutes in length. This is similar to the runtime of the October ‘Spooky Fast’ event.