If you’ve been to Apple’s Web site or have opened the Store in iTunes this morning, you probably noticed the announcement for an event for tomorrow – and it promises to be something that we’ll “never forget.”
Marketing hyperbole aside, it’s still probably something at least marginally significant; after all, they’re announcing it both on the home page (thankfully replacing the MacBook Air promo) and on the front page of the iTMS.
Judging by the announcement itself, it is probably also of global significance. This assumption is simply due to the time of the announcement and how it’s presented. Usually, Apple announcements usually start somewhere around 10:00am, Pacific time. This time around, though, they’re pushing it a full 3 hours earlier, resulting in a broadcast during the late afternoon in Europe, rather than the early evening. More noticeably, they have announced times in London and Tokyo as well as the usual California and New York times, something Apple generally doesn’t do unless it is significant for the announced country/region.
Other than that, however, there is little to be gleaned from the announcement itself. In the absence of hard evidence, then, it’s time for the obligatory wild speculation. Here are my favorites, both from the Web and my own contributions:
iOS 4.2
Considering it’s about a week late, this had better be mentioned! However, if this is the only thing they’re coming out with tomorrow, there will be rioting in the streets around 1 Infinite Loop to rival those of the iPhone 4 Antenna fiasco.
Cloud-based iTunes Streaming
Upload music to some server and access it with your iPhone. This one has been kicked around for a while, and wouldn’t surprise me all that much. However, it would not interest me all that much, either, as about the only way it would be useful is if you had an iPhone or an iPad with a 3G connection.
Subscription-based music
There seems to be a large number of people that would be into this. Personally, I’d have a hard time getting excited about this; for the amount of music I buy from the iTMS (as opposed to CDs, vinyl, or other sources), this would not be very cost-efficient. However, I can see those who are on top of the whole “new music” scene finding this useful.
Facebook integration with Ping
The only thing I can say here is “Oh God, I hope not!”
The Beatles on iTunes
Hey… it’s an iTunes event with wild speculation, so this perennial favorite needs to make an appearance…
Apps on the AppleTV?
Jailbreakers have already done it… why not officially give the little streaming box more functionality by letting it display games onscreen. We can even go a bit further by using the iPhone/iPod Touch as a controller via WiFi!
A total ban on new “Flashlight” apps that use the iPhone’s LED flash.
Okay, that’s just my own personal pipe dream, but after Apple’s ban on “fart” applications, it’s not outside the realm of possibility. A search for “LED light” in the App Store returns 537 hits; I’ll round it down to an even 500, just to account for any that may have accidentally fallen into the search by mistake. That comes to to a little over three LED flashlight apps a day since it was released on June 24. It’s just a trend that needs to stop… now.
iPad mini?
What about those rumors of the 7″ iPad that were floating about not too long ago? An obvious holiday “must have” announcement would be explosive to announce two weeks before the holiday shopping season starts – especially if it’s “Available Today”…
One more thing?
I’m sure you folks have other guesses as to what you think/want/need Apple to announce tomorrow at its iTunes event. Let us know in the comments below.
¿ Fixed the iPhone’s DST alarm clock bug ?
Having been sorta surprised by Apple several times, each time has been a step in the current meme (desktop, networking, works, internet, …) that often was deprecated a year or two later when The Next Great Thing showed up (and when 3rd parties did it well enough/better).
So let me take the dominant memes of “Local is Global” and “Mobile is the World’s Internet” as selected by the multiple time zone thing, and suspect…
¿ V+VoIP — voice + video that works the world over from Macs and iProducts ? Yes, Facebook kinda already does this, but this could be Stage 2.
¿ Is the Facebook phone actually an iPhone ?
¿ All the iApps (iWork + iPlay) have a repository in, and sync to, the cloud ? This little complexity is the only legit justification for the miserable absence of share/sync/print services in iWork. And here I just thought it was Apple’s typical lip service to their Works applications over the years! This, of course, is a direct competitive response not just to Microsoft’s latest, but more importantly, to Google’s stronger positioning here.