I’m surprised at the lack of speculation about the scheduled Apple event tomorrow. Sure, the rumor mill is going on full steam as always, but everyone is assuming tomorrow’s event is all about the iPad 2.
It certainly will be partly about that. But I think there’s more to this than most people think.
What has most people thinking “iPad only” is the invitation Apple sent out to the press, which shows a calendar date of March 2 peeled back to reveal an iPad underneath. Fair enough. Not a subtle message. But that’s just it. Since when is Apple so obvious with these things?
Now, I’m the first to dismiss most people’s pie-in-the-sky speculations about what the invite images might mean, but this time, there’s literally been almost no discussion of it. I find that really odd.
And then the tagline on that invite: “Come see what 2011 will be the year of.” Again, most people are assuming “iPad,” but last year was the year of the iPad. So that can’t be it. If anything, this is the year of the iPad knockoffs, so wouldn’t that be a great time for Apple to make it the year of something else, just to change the subject and throw the competition into another tailspin? Announce something that no one expects?
And then there’s this image I took outside the Yerba Buena Center, where the event is scheduled to take place.
What’s with the colored dots? And they aren’t just dots, either. They actually have a paper-ish kind of texture, and some of them are a bit wrinkled up. They sort of look like confetti from really close up.I have no idea what that image means, but it certainly doesn’t say “iPad” to me. Unless that’s the back on an iPad with some confetti on it. Is that it? iPad’s 1st birthday? I don’t think so. For starters, if iPad has a birthday, it would be either in January, when it was announced, or April, when it was released to the public. Not on the 2nd of March.
Next, we can consider that last week, Apple released new MacBook Pros with a brand new port (Thunderbolt), and sent developers the first preview of Lion, the next version of OS X. Two things that would have been part of a live event in themselves not so long ago, that now only get mentioned in a press release. Arguably, both Lion and Thunderbolt are more important than a simple refresh of the iPad.
These media events tend to last around 2 hours. How long does it take to do a demo of FaceTime on an iPad?
My point is that there’s more to tomorrow’s event than what most people are talking about. Apple still has the ability to throw us a curve ball at these things, no matter how many times we’ve seen them do it. Maybe tomorrow we’ll see a preview of iOS 5. That would make sense. Maybe we’ll get some more info on all these cloud services we keep hearing rumors about. There HAS to be something other than an iPad with cameras. That’s not something you want people to get on a plane to come see.
What the “other” things will be tomorrow, I have no idea. But I’d be very surprised if the iPad2 were the whole story.
