Apple might have bigger plans for next week than initially thought. The new iMac, iPad Pro, and Apple TV 4K are all set to start shipping to early preorder customers on or around May 21st, but now it seems there could be two surprise announcements: a hi-fi streaming tier of Apple Music, and maybe even AirPods 3.
The Apple Music part seems extremely likely when you factor in a report from 9to5Google. Digging into the latest Apple Music for Android beta app, they discovered direct references to high-resolution audio that didn’t exist previously
These are the prompts found in the app’s code, though they’re not user-facing quite yet:
It doesn’t get much more direct and clear than that, with Apple warning about both the higher data consumption of streaming lossless music and the added storage space that will be necessary to download it for offline listening. The fact that Apple has now added this data to its Android app suggests that this could all be happening sooner than later. I say that because Apple’s Apple One bundle showed up in Apple Music for Android just days before its public announcement.
