Tomorrow at 10am Pacific, Tim Cook is going to stand up at the Flint Center in Cupertino and tell us all what everybody already knows. Bigger iPhones. Probably some kind of wrist thing. Maybe a way to pay for a burrito with your phone. I've read approximately four hundred blog posts this week confidently describing a product none of them have actually seen, and I say that as someone who has, this very evening, spent forty-five minutes doing exactly the same kind of doomscrolling I'm complaining about.
The invite went out last Tuesday. "Wish we could say more." Cute. A little smug, honestly, in that Apple way where the marketing copy winks at you while giving up nothing. And of course the internet immediately went to work parsing the negative space in the invite graphic like it was a Zapruder film, because somebody decided the swirl of colored lines in the background maybe kind of looked like a watch face if you squinted. I don't know if I believe the wearable rumors are real this time or if we're all just pattern-matching off two years of "next year for sure" predictions. Either way I've stopped pretending I have some special insight nobody else has, because I don't, and neither does anyone else writing "what to expect" posts right now.
What I keep coming back to is the venue. Flint Center is where the original Mac launched in January 1984, the Ridley Scott commercial, Steve Jobs pulling it out of a bag, all that. Apple hasn't used that room in decades as far as I know, they've been doing the Yerba Buena Center thing in San Francisco for years. So either that's a deliberate bit of theater (very possible, this is a company that once buried an easter egg photo of the team inside the original Macintosh case) or somebody just liked the parking situation. Probably the theater. Apple doesn't do accidental symbolism.
Anyway. I'm not going to pretend I'll be up at 10am sharp glued to a live blog, because I have a client call at 11 that I actually need to prepare for, and my track record with "I'll just watch the keynote real quick" is bad. Two years ago I told myself the same thing about the iPhone 5 event and lost the whole afternoon to a live text stream that refreshed every four seconds and gave me a headache. This time I've already decided I'll catch the recap over lunch like a normal person with a job.
Small tangent, not really related except it's also been eating my week: my external backup drive started clicking on Thursday, that slow, evil little tick that every single person who has ever owned a spinning hard drive recognizes immediately and feels sick about. I've got maybe eighteen months of photos on there that I was, embarrassingly, not also keeping anywhere else, because I am apparently the exact person all those "you need a 3-2-1 backup strategy" posts are written for and I ignored every one of them. Spent Friday night copying everything I could rescue onto a new drive at about 40MB a minute, watching a progress bar, drinking bad coffee, genuinely unsure until about 2am whether it was going to finish before the old drive gave out entirely. It finished. Barely, I think. I'm buying a second drive this weekend and I mean it this time, unlike the four previous times I've said that exact sentence on this blog.
The part of the Apple rumor cycle that actually gets to me isn't the guessing, it's the price predictions. Every year somebody puts out a chart claiming the new phone will start at some suspiciously specific number, $299 on contract or whatever, dressed up like it's derived from supply chain data when really it's just last year's number with a note taped to it. I'd rather outlets just say "we don't know" than perform having sources. Not every tech blog needs to pretend it has a guy at Foxconn.
I'll probably write something tomorrow once the actual announcement happens, assuming there's anything worth saying that thirty other sites haven't already said better and faster. For tonight I'm mostly just tired, my backup situation is finally not an emergency, and I'd genuinely rather find out what's in that box the normal way, by watching it happen, than by reading someone's rendering of a rumor of a leak. Novel idea, I know.