They sometimes do this if there's nothing more than a spec bump, but also means there might be some other big releases coming soon.

Usually, those spec bumps are placeholders to allow the company to cancel more significant, riskier announcements without giving a surprisingly short presentation. Next Keynote is expected in March, which feels a bit far from now than usual for that pattern.

It could be that the recent events in China made that announcement tricky, and given the worrying speculation, Apple wanted to reassure people.

Not really -- Apple has increasingly pushed more niche updates (spec bumps and ancillary product lines like the mini) via press release, and reserves their keynotes for more notable updates like laptop redesigns and broad-appeal products like the phone and tablet.

> Is it strange these were not announced during a live event?

My conspiracy theory / gut reaction is they want to hide this launch? or at least don't want too many eyes on it? I don't know why I think this but yeah. I have no insider information. This is an unsubstantiated guess.

Extremely underwhelming improvement. The M1 to M2 general performance gap is minor at best.

To be fair it doesn't need to be a massive leap every CPU upgrade. The M1 was already a pretty damn powerful chip.

That is generally how chips go year-over-year. The Intel MacBook Pros were never that dramatic a leap either.

If I remember right the first MacBook Pro with a touch bar wasn't announced at an event either, which you'd think they'd want to demo in person.

Not really; there are no significant changes here beyond a faster processor, and they've historically usually not bothered with a live event for that.

There's this: https://youtu.be/6Ij9PiehENA

They just published an additional product introduction presentation on YouTube. I don’t think Apple did live events since Covid.

No, they have done this in the past when the upgrade is only a spec bump with no other changes. They even do this with iPads sometimes.