Two more days. Thats how long until Apples "we have something you really have to see. And touch." event out in San Francisco, and Ive been refreshing the same three rumor sites since the invite went out last Tuesday like its going to change something. It wont. The event's on Wednesday the 7th, 10am Pacific, and by now literally everyone with a keyboard has decided its going to be an iPad 3 with a retina display. I think theyre right, for what its worth, but Ive been burned before by "sure thing" Apple rumors (remember the totally guaranteed 7-inch iPad that never happened? me neither, apparently, since I wrote three posts about it back when this blog was two weeks old).
What gets me about the invite itself is how deliberately plain the copy is. "We have something you really have to see. And touch." Thats it. No exclamation point, no logo teaser, just a stylized number thats supposedly a 3 if you squint. Steve Jobs has been gone five months now and it still feels strange watching Apple market a product without him standing on a stage in that black turtleneck telling us why we need it. Tim Cook did fine with the iPhone 4S back in October, but that was mostly a spec bump. This is the first genuinely new hardware moment under him and I dont think anyone, including maybe Apple, quite knows what tone hell strike yet.
Meanwhile, over in Barcelona last week, Mobile World Congress happened, and almost nobody I know outside actual phone nerds noticed, which is a shame, because Nokia showed off something genuinely bizarre: the 808 PureView, a phone with a 41 megapixel camera sensor. Forty. One. Megapixels. On a phone. Its running Symbian, which basically means its dead on arrival everywhere I'd actually shop for a phone, but the sensor itself is nuts, physically bigger than what's in a lot of actual point and shoot cameras. Nokia also pushed out the Lumia 610 and 900 at the same show, which is the more sensible bet long term, but of course the camera phone is what everyone's actually talking about. I keep wondering what happens once that sensor tech, not the megapixel number specifically, thats mostly a marketing headline, but the oversampling trick underneath it, shows up in something people will actually buy in the US. Probably not for a while. Nokia's timing on hardware innovation versus software relevance has been backwards for about three years running now, and its kind of sad to watch honestly.
Theres also a whole cottage industry now of blogs doing nothing but running "leaked case" photos through a comparison grid against the iPad 2 dimensions, and I'll admit I read two of those posts yesterday during lunch even though I know exactly what theyre going to say (its going to be 0.3mm thicker, or thinner, and nobody will be able to tell by holding it). Its a weird little ritual we've all built around a company that hasnt confirmed a single spec. I complain about it and then I do it anyway, which I guess says more about me than about Apple.
Anyway. Wednesday. Ill probably watch the liveblog from my desk at work again, badly, refreshing a page every few seconds while pretending to do something else on my other monitor. Last time I did this for a keynote a coworker asked if I was trading stocks. I was not trading stocks.
If it is a retina iPad, the thing I actually care about isnt the screen, its whether they bump the price. The current iPad 2 starts at $499, and if the new one launches at $599 for the base model that changes my whole plan, because I was going to get my dad one for his birthday in April and hes not going to spring for six hundred dollars no matter how good the screen looks. Hed sooner keep using the ancient Dell desktop he refuses to replace. Well see. Two days.