With the official announcement yesterday to all of the important members of the press – ahem, not me – came the inevitable guessing game as to what we’re going to see at this event. Now I’m not a fan of Fox News, but Clayton Morris has this to say about the big T-Day:
I spoke to a source at Apple this morning, before the invite hit my inbox, who said the event would likely focus on three projects: The tablet device, iPhone 4, and a new round of iLife 2010 software. While we won’t see new iPhone hardware just yet, we will see the next-generation software.
Apple is known to pull a last-minute rabbit out of a hat, however … and just as likely to stuff it back in again. Last September, the company surprised fans by suddenly removing the camera from latest generation iPod Touch just before the Fall iPod event. As a result, the big stories from the September keynote were Steve Jobs back on stage after liver surgery and a Nano with a camera — not a powerful new Touch.
I think that a few of these are gimmies. It’s a no-brainer that some kind of big device is coming out on the market, most likely the Unicorn Tablet we’ve been discussing forever. iLife 2010 isn’t a huge stretch either, because after all, it is 2010 and iLife is still on 2009. The 4.0 announcement I’m a bit more skeptical about. On the one hand, I think it makes sense. There’s been a lot of talk about the tablet running a version of iPhone OS, and if they introduce 4.0, it might be to show integration between the two tools. But part of me thinks that they could talk for an hour alone about 4.0, so why take the focus away from their big product reveal?
I hate to repeat myself, but January 27th will be an interesting day for all involved.