*By Conor White*
Rumors are swirling about what exactly Apple will unveil at its Oct. 30 event in Brooklyn, N.Y., barely a month after the tech giant released its newest ー and most expensive ー generation of iPhones.
While the launch of an updated iPad Pro seems to be a safe bet, PC World staff writer Michael Simon said Apple ($AAPL) enthusiasts should also watch for a lower-cost MacBook.
"The rumors are kind of all over the place," Simon said. "But it does look like Apple is designing something that's low cost."
That could come as some comfort from those still smarting from the price tag of the highest-end iPhone XS Max, which runs nearly $1,500 ー more than the base model MacBook. The company's "cheaper" iPhone XR is available for pre-order beginning Friday and starts at $749.
In an interview Friday on Cheddar, Simon said no one is sure what the company will do next in the realm of laptops and computers.
"Apple's kind of in their experimental phase with the Mac," he said. "It's not quite going away yet, it's not selling nearly as much as the iPhone, so they have room to experiment."
"We're going to see if they can shore up that real low-end market that they've abandoned for a while," Simon added.
The slate of products revealed this month could suggest where Apple is heading. Mac sales in the latest quarter were down 13 percent from the previous year. And while the company has sold a quarter billion iPads since the original release in April 2010, more sophisticated and powerful smartphones have led to a global decline in tablet sales, too. Simon believes, ultimately, the products that shake out will be somewhere in the middle.
"In five to 10 years I think we're going to see some kind of a hybrid machine that isn't a computer, isn't an iPad," he said.
For full interview [click here](https://cheddar.com/videos/for-apple-no-sleep-til-brooklyn).
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