So my inbox did the thing this morning where it fills up with forwards before I've even had coffee. Apple sent out invites for a press event on September 12th, over at the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco, and by 9am half the tech blogs I read had already run six paragraphs on it. Nobody knows anything official yet, obviously, but the invite itself is the story right now and I'd rather talk about that than repeat the leaked-parts rumors everyone's been passing around for weeks.
The image on the invite is a shadow arrangement, little cast shadows on a plain light background that form the number 12, with "It's almost here" underneath in that thin sans-serif Apple loves. That's the whole invite. And somehow forty different sites have already written up "hidden meanings" in a picture of some shadows. One theory going around this afternoon is that the shape of the shadows hints at a longer, thinner phone body, because apparently a shadow puzzle is exactly where you'd bury a hardware leak. I don't buy it. I think somebody in Cupertino just likes making people stare at a jpeg for twenty minutes, and honestly I respect the hustle even if it's a little silly.
A quick history lesson for anyone who skipped 2010 and 2011
Apple invites almost always show a clock, and the clock is almost always set to 9:41. That's not an accident, it's a callback to Steve Jobs pulling the original iPhone out of his pocket back in January 2007, when the demo clock on stage read 9:41 in the morning. They've kept the habit going ever since, this tiny in-joke that only the obsessive Apple crowd even notices. I only know about it because I've read way too many liveblogs of these events over the years. My roommate thinks it's the dumbest trivia I own, and he might be right, but I still like knowing it.
Everyone assumes September 12th is the iPhone 5 event, and it probably is, since the rumor sites have been running hot for months on a taller screen and a smaller dock connector to replace the 30-pin one that's been around since the original iPod. The taller screen rumor especially has legs, mostly because so many case makers have leaked photos of longer shells that it's hard to believe they're all wrong at once. I'm mildly annoyed about the connector change if I'm honest, not because I love the giant 30-pin cable, but because I've got three of them scattered around my apartment and a car adapter that only takes the old one, and I already know I'm going to be buying adapters for the next year.
What's funny to me is how much theater goes into an invitation that says almost nothing. No product name. No spec. Just a date, a location, a tagline, and a picture designed to be argued about on Twitter for a week and a half. It works, obviously, because I'm sitting here writing about it too, but I do wonder sometimes if the mystery is more fun than whatever actually gets announced. Remember the iPad 2 invite with the "we have something to show you" line? Everyone speculated for a week and then it was, well, an iPad with a camera in it.
This week's been a genuinely busy one for phone news in general, not just Apple. IFA Berlin wrapped up a couple days back and Nokia's had their own event this week showing off new Lumia phones, so if you're the type who reads three tech sites a day like I am, your feed's probably a mess right now. I'm not going to pretend I have some grand unified take on the state of the smartphone market in September 2012. I just think it's a little bit funny that a photo of shadows is currently generating more traffic than most actual product reviews will this month.
Anyway. September 12th, mark it if you care. I'll probably be refreshing a liveblog on my lunch break like everyone else, pretending I'm above it while doing the exact same thing as the people I'm making fun of in this post.