This article is more than 1 year old

Apple's Oct 22 WORLD-SHAKING San Fran party: New iPads or what?

Fanboi? Dodgy ticker? That'll be a good day for a spot of yoga

Apple has confirmed rumours of a product rollout event on October 22 in San Francisco, sending invites to lucky journalists this Tuesday morning.

Invitation for Apple's October 22, 2013 product-rollout event

And exactly how many new products add up to 'a lot', Mr Cook?

As is always the case in such invitations, Apple is being a tease, saying only that they have "a lot" of things to cover at the event, which will be held at San Francisco's Yerba Buena Center for the Arts at 10am next Tuesday. Let's review the current rumor landscape and handicap the possibilities.

  • Highly likely: The iPad 5 and Retina display iPad mini; a thinner, lighter, smaller-bezel iPad and tweaked high-res iPad mini, both with an A7X processor – a big step up for the iPad mini, which is currently powered by an A5 – and both possibly with a Touch ID fingerprint sensor, a la the iPhone 5s.
  • Highly likely: MacBook Pros powered by Intel 4th Generation Core "Haswell" processors, and benefitting from better battery life much as did the Haswell MacBook Air models announced at this year's Worldwide Developers Conference. Don't expect them to have 3840-by-2160 pixel Sharp IGZO (indium gallium zinc oxide) displays, however, which some have mooted as a future possibility – it's still too early.
  • Highly likely: The announcement of the availability of OS X 10.9 Mavericks, the Golden Master of which was released on Thursday, October 3.
  • Possible: The release of the new can o' compute Mac Pro, also announced at this year's WWDC by Apple marketing honcho Phil Schiller with the now-famous line, "Can't innovate anymore, my ass." More likely, word on the street says, is that the Mac Pro–related announcement will instead be of its mid-November release date.
  • Fuggedaboutit: Any announcement relating to either the long-rumored iWatch or even longer-rumored big-screen Apple TV. It's too early for the former, and it's not at all clear yet whether Apple has lined up the content-provider support it would need to make a successful launch of the latter. We might, however, see a refresh of the current Apple TV streaming box, the third generation of which having been launched in March 2012 and tweaked in March 2013 with an upgrade from Imagination Technologies PowerVR SGX543MP2 graphics to the PowerVR SGX543MP4.

We referred above to the "lucky journos" who had received invitations to Apple's October 22 event. As longtime Reg readers know, we here at San Francisco's Vulture Annex aren't among the fortunate few so blessed by Apple – we haven't been deemed pliant worthy enough to attend their events for years.

But that won't stop us from filling our big-screen display with multiple live-blog windows and reporting our erudite perspectives on Cook & Co.'s offerings next Tuesday.

See you then. ®

More about

TIP US OFF

Send us news


Other stories you might like