14 DAY TRIAL // Despite offering an unsatisfactory streaming experience at its September 9 event, Apple hasn’t lost faith in its engineers and plans to take a new shot at live streaming its announcements next week, for its October 16 media gathering.
The confirmation comes from Apple itself. Over at apple.com/live the company clearly states, “Join us here at apple.com/live on October 16 at 10 a.m. PDT to watch our special event live.”
How to watch
If you choose to view the showcase on a computer or an iDevice, what you need to do is access www.apple.com/live using your Safari browser. The minimum system requirements, according to the mother-ship, are Safari 5.1.10 or later on OS X v10.6.8 (Snow Leopard) or later, and Safari on iOS 6.0 or later.
An alternative way to watch the event (and a more comfortable one at that) is to sit on your couch, fire up your second-generation Apple TV with software 6.2 or later installed, and look for the Special Events section that should appear on your home screen. Remember that the event kicks into gear at exactly 10 am PDT. That’s around 8:00 PM for those of us living in the south-eastern parts of Europe.
Mysterious tagline
Apple always uses catchy tag lines and short poetic descriptions of the things it markets and promotes. Keynote presentations are no different. Over the years, the company has blessed us with some really delightful tag lines that also hold some clues as to what the company might announce.
This time around, the text accompanying the press invitations reads “It’s been way too long.”
Apple could be referring to the rumored iMac revision, which is said to involve a Retina display for the uber-sized 27-inch version of the all-in-one computer. Daring Fireball’s John Gruber has even speculated that Apple might want to return to the color scheme of the original iMacs. His theory is also aided by the rainbow Apple logo that serves as the artwork for the media invitations. We wouldn’t mind him being right.
Another possibility is refreshing the Mac mini. Which is certainly less exciting for the general population, but also quite possible considering that the mini hasn’t seen a hardware upgrade in a while. Even a redesign isn’t completely out of the question. Let’s see what else.
The Apple TV might be part of the October 16 showcase as well. It’s not far-fetched to imagine that the tagline somehow references an upgrade of the Apple TV experience, though we have little to go on at this point.