So the invite showed up in my inbox around 10am this morning, subject line "It's almost here," a little swirly purple and gray graphic, September 12th, Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco. Apple's doing the thing again. Everybody already knows what it is, nobody's supposed to say it, and yet here we all are, refreshing Twitter like the actual phone is going to fall out of somebody's pocket a full two weeks early.
I'll say it anyway: it's the next iPhone. Probably called the iPhone 5, though at this point I wouldn't put it past them to call it something weird just to mess with the blogs that have been typing "iPhone 5" for a year and a half. My money's still on a taller screen, that new dock connector everyone's been leaking specs about, and LTE finally showing up on a device I might actually buy. My current phone is a 4S with a screen that's had a hairline crack across the top corner since March, and honestly the crack doesn't even bother me anymore, which probably says something about my standards slipping.
What's funny is how routine this has all become. Three years ago an Apple event invite felt like an event in itself, people would screenshot it and dissect the shadow angle on the icon for clues. Now it's just calendar maintenance. I added it to my calendar between a dentist appointment and something called "renew car tags" and didn't think about it again until I sat down to write this.
I do want to talk about something else for a second, because it's been sitting with me all week and doesn't fit anywhere else on this blog. Neil Armstrong died this last weekend, and I keep thinking about it at weird moments, like while I was adding that dentist appointment. I'm not a space guy particularly, I've never watched a rocket launch live, but there's something about the fact that the first human being to stand on another world was also, by every account, kind of a quiet, private, unshowy engineer about it. He didn't do the victory lap. He went back to teaching and mostly declined interviews for forty years. Compare that to the volume of press coverage a company can generate over a font choice on an invitation graphic and it's a strange contrast to sit with. I'm not trying to make some grand point out of it, I just noticed it and wanted to write it down somewhere.
Back to the phone thing, since that's presumably why anyone's here. The elephant in the room this week is obviously the Apple-Samsung verdict from last Friday, the jury handing Apple something north of a billion dollars and finding Samsung had copied a pretty long list of design and utility patents. I'm not going to do the full recap, every other tech site on the internet has already done seventeen versions of that post and I don't think I have anything to add that isn't just repeating a Reuters headline in my own voice. What I will say is that it makes the timing of this new invite land a little differently. Apple just won a huge fight about how phones are and aren't allowed to look, and two weeks later they're about to show the industry, again, exactly how they think a phone should look. There's a confidence to that scheduling that I don't think is accidental, whether or not anyone at Apple would ever admit to caring about optics that way.
Anyway. September 12th. I'll probably watch the liveblog from my desk like everyone else, half working, refreshing a page that reloads a paragraph every ninety seconds. If the rumors about a smaller charging port are true I'm going to need a new car adapter, which is a genuinely annoying thing to have to plan for a month in advance of a purchase I haven't even confirmed I'm making. That's the real cost of these events nobody talks about, not the phone price, the accessory tax that shows up eighteen months later when the old cables stop working with anything.
Talk soon.