So, Apple have announced another of their special events, entitled ‘Back to the Mac’ for select tech journalists. The invite is in the form a a brushed aluminium ‘card’ with a cut-out Apple logo swivelling outwards, to reveal the image of a lion. The obvious interpretation of this is a new incarnation of OSX, though I could have sworn one a the beta versions was code-named Lion. Alternatively, the invites may be a ploy by Apple to gather the less than complementary members of the press in one room before releasing a starved African feline upon them. Then again, they could be announcing on update to the “Back to my Mac’ feature of OSX that now works reliably (or at all).
Hopefully, they will also be announcing an update to iLife, which is a bit overdue by now. It would be great to see something really useful added to iPhoto, such as Photoshop style layers. A nice addition to iWeb, the ginger-haired stepchild of the iLife suite, would be an automatic mobile-friendly formating of your sites for display on iPhones and other smartphones.
Also, anticipated is an update to the Macbook Pro range, probably the minor spec bumps usually seen around this time in the product cycle (increased processor speeds, maybe a jump to more cores). The Macbook Air is definitely due to refresh, so I would not be surprised to see something more interesting that a mere processor/drive space boost in this space.
The only certainty is that no-one outside of Steve Jobs’ golden circle of trust/iron-clad non-disclosure agreement will know for sure until next Wednesday.