Apple Planning Special Event, Maybe Even a Product Launch on May 22 - Reports

Apple is reportedly holding all-hands employee meetings on Sunday, May 22nd, across all its retail stores in the U.S. Staffers are being called in late Saturday and they will be there until mid-Sunday, another source corroborates.

“Store meetings at 7AM Sunday across United States,” a trusted source is telling MacStories. “Unusual time. Expecting some announcement. All stores, brand-wide US. Don’t know about other countries,” this person said.

There has been a lot of speculation about a potential 10th anniversary Apple retail event in the past, but now it seems it’s actually going down.

There were also rumors that the gatherings were simply targeted at training, but details obtained by The Boy Genius Report, including the extreme measures Apple is taking to keep things under wraps, seem to tell a different story.

The blog’s authors claim to have heard from their own sources that an overnight shift has been planned for around 10-15 individuals at each Apple Store.

These people will work from late Saturday all the way through mid-Sunday, during which time they will lock their cell phones in the main office.

An NDA (non disclosure agreement) will have to be signed by the visuals staff, a manager, a business team member, a few Genius team members, one back-of-house employee, and a number of generic Apple specialists, according to BGR’s source.

The stores have received crops, and more hardware is expected to arrive on Friday or Saturday.

All materials received by Apple stores are to be kept under lock and key until after Saturday night.

Black curtains will be placed on the facades of all stores to keep eyes out.

It does seem there will be some training involved, since employees have been told to download “gigabytes of data from Apple corporate labeled, ‘training’ in a password-protected zipped folder that won't [be] accessible to managers or anyone else until Saturday afternoon,” which would indicate a product launch.