So the invite showed up Thursday. You've probably already seen it forwarded around six times by now, that swirly, colorful abstract rendering of the Apple logo and the line "Wish we could say more." Cute. Very on-brand for a company that's been "leaking" its own products through blurry Weibo photos for the last two months and then acting coy about an event they scheduled themselves.
September 9th, Flint Center for the Performing Arts, Cupertino. Everybody and their cousin is writing about what's supposedly getting announced: a bigger iPhone, maybe two sizes now, and the wearable thing that half the internet is already calling the iWatch even though Apple hasn't said that word once. I'm not going to spend another 800 words guessing screen sizes off a leaked digitizer part photographed on some Shenzhen assembly line, because honestly who cares, we'll know in three days.
What actually stopped me scrolling was the venue. Flint Center isn't just some rented-out auditorium near the Apple campus. That's where Steve Jobs stood on stage in January 1984 and unveiled the original Macintosh, the one with the "hello" on screen and the famous Ridley Scott ad that ran during the Super Bowl a couple days earlier. Same building. Thirty years later, give or take a few months. I don't think that's an accident, and I don't think Apple's PR team picked it by accident either. Somebody in Cupertino has a real sense of theater.
I got curious enough to go dig around old photos of the place last night instead of doing anything productive with my evening, which is a very me way to spend a Friday. It's a decent-sized hall, seats around 2,300, built in the late 60s as part of De Anza College. Apple hasn't used it in years. Most of their recent stuff has been at Yerba Buena in San Francisco or their own Town Hall on campus. Going back to Flint Center specifically, on basically the anniversary of the Mac, for what's rumored to be their biggest hardware push in years (a new phone size AND a brand new product category on the same stage). That's not subtle. That's a company that wants you thinking about 1984 while you watch whatever's coming on the 9th.
Anyway. A few things I'll say plainly since I hate when blogs hedge every sentence into oatmeal:
I think the bigger phone is real and I think it's overdue. I've been carrying a Nexus 5 as a second device for months now specifically because the screen is bigger and I like it more for reading than my iPhone 5s, and I know I'm not the only person who's done that math. If Apple ships something in the 4.7 to 5.5 inch range on Tuesday, good, it's about time, the "one hand" argument stopped mattering to most people around 2012.
The wearable stuff I'm skeptical of, not because the tech isn't there but because nobody — not Samsung, not Motorola with the Moto 360, not Pebble even though I genuinely like my Pebble — has made a compelling case yet for why my wrist needs its own computer. I wear a Pebble because it buzzes for texts and that's legitimately useful when my phone's across the room charging. That's it. That's the whole use case I've found in eight months of owning one. If Apple's got something smarter than that, fine, show me, but I'm not assuming it just because it's Apple.
One more thing that's been bugging me and has nothing to do with any of this: can everyone please stop calling every single product rumor a "leak" like it's some grand conspiracy. Half of these are just factory workers with camera phones and forum posters who want attention. There's a difference between an actual leak and somebody in Foxconn taking a picture of a metal shell during their lunch break. Words mean things.
Tuesday morning I'll be doing what I do every one of these: coffee, the Engadget live blog open in one tab, actual work theoretically happening in another tab that I'll definitely be ignoring for two hours. Same as March, same as last September. Some rituals don't change even when the products do.