Apple, as you’ve probably noticed, are quite a secretive bunch. Nine times out of ten nobody knows what Steve Jobs is going to whip out when he walks on stage, and no matter what he whips out you can bet it’s going to dominate the tech news for the next day or two – perhaps even longer. Even the recently released Verizon iPhone, which, let’s not forget, wasn’t even a new device – it was just an iPhone 4 with a very slightly different antenna – was huge news when it was finally unveiled.
Apple’s self-inflicted seclusion means speculation around the company’s next product always runs rampant. The predictions are aided somewhat by Apple’s standard one-year product lifecycle, so you can usually assume that they’re going to announce a new iPhone about a year after they announced the current version. Nonetheless, sometimes the Apple hype machine becomes almost as big a beast as the company itself, and the last fortnight has been one of those occasions.
Last Monday Cult of Mac ran a story reporting that Apple is working on an “iPhone Nano” that relies mostly on cloud services and has no local storage. No they aren’t, retorted Engadget. Next came rumours from Digitimes that the next iPhone will in fact be bigger than the current model, sporting capacious a 4″ screen. Oh, and it’ll probably support NFC with some kind of mobile payment system. Or not, whatever.
We also saw a slew of new white iPhone rumours, claiming the ethereal device would be showing up any day now (we’re still waiting). And not that we’re getting ahead of ourselves here, but oh, there’s going to be a white iPhone 5 too.
Next came the iPad rumours. These are always good. So much hype is there surrounding the new devices that one site actually did a hands on video with a case. A case. Then rumours surfaced that the unannounced tablet could sport Intel’s new Light Peak (an optical one-port-to-rule-them-all high speed transfer technology), but then again, it might not.
Somewhere along the way the iPad 2 also managed to get delayed before even being announced, causing Apple shares to dip around 3%. Then again, that might not be true at all. Who knows. We also somehow managed to hear whisperings about the iPad 3 – yes, three, as in the successor to the device that doesn’t even exist yet – and a new devices that “may be either a smaller iPad or larger iPod touch”. Got that?
So that brings us up to today. Apple are apparently now holding an event on March 2nd where they will announce the iPad 2. Or they might not be. Who really knows at this point?
If all these various speculations are to be believed we’re currently waiting on the white iPhone, a small iPhone, a bigger iPhone, a bigger white iPhone, the iPhone 5, a mid-sized tablet device (the kind Steve Jobs hates), an iPad 2 with Light Peak and an iPad 3 with a retina display, some of which will be arriving imminently, some of which are delayed, and some of which will be announced at an unannounced Apple event next week. I’m thinking of drawing up some kind of Bingo card. Then killing myself.
