Apple Store Down - 09/09/2011 [Updated] - New iPad 2 Selector

The yellow, be-back-soon sticky is up and the Apple store is down, meaning one of two things: either yesterday’s shipping times really did indicate a product refresh, or Apple is simply carrying out maintenance [Updated with new info below].

We’re not getting our hopes up too much, since the last two outages left us feeling empty on the inside, no matter how hard we speculated new products and upgrades.

While some are probably wishing upon a star that Apple is launching the iPhone 5 today, we’d advise them to save their falling commet for something more plausible, such as a Mac Pro refresh, or even an upgrade of the MacBook Pro lineup. A Logic Pro X release is not out of the question either.

It would be ironical, though, to see the third time was a charm and not get as excited as before.

However, there is one piece of evidence that something is going on internally at Apple.

Yesterday, we reported a strange extension of the shipping times for numerous Apple products through the company’s online store.

In and of itself, this change doesn’t weigh enough to confirm any new products, or even product refreshes.

Many of the products experiencing the change have either been overhauled in recent months (making it unnecessary to refresh again for some time), while others (like the iPhone or Apple’s iPod lineup) will not be replaced with new ones without an special event, as history has shown.

So the best guess is probably new Macs, and most bets are on the Mac Pro workstation.

Mac Pro (current generation model) marketing material
Credits: Apple
The reason is this: Apple this year discontinued the Xserve, leaving a big gap in the company’s server offerings, despite the existence of Mac mini Servers and Mac Pro servers.

If Apple wants to ‘serve’ the Enterprise segment, the rumored Mac Pro with a rack-mountable design and the latest Xeon E7 processors (six-core / ten-core with hyper threading) should be up next.

Did we mention this is the third time we’re speculating this scenario?

Update: Store back online. It appears that Apple has changed the way customers select an iPad configuration to order online.

We’re not sure this is new, but it appears that Apple’s web store now includes an app that allows customers to choose between the black and white iPad 2 models with their three storage options for WiFi and WiFi+3G models using selection boxes (screenshot displayed left).