By Dan Moren

March 16, 2018 7:00 AM PT

Apple holding “field trip” education event on March 27

Note: This story has not been updated for several years.

Over the last few years, Apple has often held an event in March, and in that regards, this year will be no different. The company sent out invitations to press today, inviting them to an event on Tuesday, March 27. (Jason will be there!)

But in pretty much every other way, this will be a different event. For one thing, Apple’s explicitly saying that this event is about education, including the tag line “Let’s take a field trip.”

And where will that field trip take us? Well, rather than the event being held in the Bay Area, as the company usually would, or at one of its less frequent locations, like New York City, this event will be in Chicago¹, at the Lane Tech College Prep High School.

Given the education focus, we can narrow down a few of the things Apple is likely to announce. Low-cost iPads aimed at education, probably. Software improvements? A fair bet. And the last time Apple held an education-focused event—January 2012 in New York City—it also included some announcements about iBooks. There have been rumors that Apple’s e-book store and software are ripe for an update, and this would seem to point in that direction.

Other rumored announcements, like a new iPhone SE or the AirPower charging mat would seem to be less probable for this event, though it wouldn’t be out of character for Apple to release them around the same time.

This might also provide a venue for the official launch of software updates like iOS 11.3, which recently hit its fifth beta, and similar releases for Apple TV, macOS, and so on.

[Dan Moren is the East Coast Bureau Chief of Six Colors. You can find him on Twitter at @dmoren or reach him by email at dan@sixcolors.com. The latest novel in his Galactic Cold War series of sci-fi space adventures, The Nova Incident, is available now.]

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