Team PL have a guess at what will happen
Pocket-lint is awash with Apple fever. Well, at least it would be if the "exciting announcement" regarding iTunes wasn't happening at 7am Cupertino time.
It's hardly likely to be anything major without a proper Apple launch event, at a time when even the most dedicated Apple employee is only just rolling into work.
Or could it? Could Apple be lulling us into a false sense of security, only to announce something absolutely monumental? After all, Apple is promising that tomorrow will be a day that we'll "never forget".
Here's what we at Pocket-lint towers think might happen...
Stuart Miles:
Predicting what Apple is or isn’t going to launch is sometimes tough, especially when there hasn’t been the usual rumours and circulation. However my money, for what it’s worth, is on the creation of a streaming service to compete against the likes of Microsoft’s Zune service and Spotify before it has a chance to launch into the US.?
Such a service would allow Apple to move to a subscription service, away from local stored songs, and push everything to the cloud, something it is slowly starting to do.
Rik Henderson:
The weird part about the splash page is that it states “tomorrow is just another day” full stop, “that you’ll never forget” full stop; two different sentences in preference to one continuous one.
What does that signify? Clues in each separate line? Song titles? Poor sub-editing at Apple.com?
I suspect that, with iTunes 10.1 already out (as of last Friday), it is unlikely to be a further update. Also, as all is to be revealed at 7am Californian time (3pm UK), there won’t be an actual press event, just an online fanfare. So, therefore, I seriously doubt that there will be any major new software features. Instead, I believe that it will be a content agreement and subsequent announcement. And there’s one major one that we’ve all been waiting for: The Beatles.
Either that or, looking at the two sentences closer, “Just Another Day” is a song by Oingo Boingo, who were once fronted by movie composer Danny Elfman. He also scored the theme tune to The Simpsons, which featured Leonard Nimoy (Mr Spock) in an early-ish episode. And Nimoy himself starred in a 1991 movie called “Never Forget”. Spooky. Surely that’s too big a coincidence.
Therefore, if it’s not The Beatles, it’ll be all of the Star Trek films on iTunes. Except the ones that Spock wasn’t in. Or something.
Dan Sung:
In my Magicland dreams, it will be one of three things that iTunes is going to announce tomorrow:
1) Spotify integration - no idea quite how this would work, no idea if I’d be interested in it working at all, but it’d be nice to see to massive music apps locking horns in some kind of positive mating ritual.
2) They ditch Ping - unlikely that Apple would refer to this as an “exciting announcement” but it would certainly make a thrilling refresher for Jobs Inc to come out with their hands up and say, “yeah, it’s rubbish. Sorry”.
3) Beatles on iTunes - No one actually cares if the Beatles are on iTunes or not. It’s not exactly hard to get hold of their music, but it would make an interesting story.
Of course, none of these things are going to happen. Instead it will be something along the lines of a price drop in time for Christmas to make itself more competitive as a place to download music.
Chris Hall:
I think Apple are going to change their name. The company formerly known as Apple will shoot for Lime, knowing that despite the sometimes acidic tendencies, everyone associates it with the good times.
There will be unilateral re-branding of the LimePhone, the LimeBook Air and LimePod. The Genius Bar will offer mojitos in-store to celebrate.
Libby Plummer:
My money's on the launch of a subscription-based service, that would sit alongside iTunes' existing downloadable system.
Another likely contender is the idea of Apple moving to a cloud-based system where all your music would be stored on and streamed directly from Apple's gigantic servers at its Orwellian HQ.
Or maybe we should be clinging on to the hope that tomorrow will bring the long-awaited news that The Beatles' back catalogue is coming to iTunes.
Whatever it is, Steve Jobs obviously didn't deem it important enough to bust out his jeans and black turtleneck combo, as there's no launch event planned.
Ben Crompton:
It's now pretty much a year since Apple bought Lala, and despite a lot of chatter about Apple unleashing its own streaming service nothing has yet materialised.
So it looks like this announcement will be some kind of cloud-based media streaming service to rival the likes of Spotify, a company that Apple was rumoured to be sniffing around just a few weeks ago.
Paul Lamkin:
I know it's a bit boring, because it's what everyone else has said basically, but it's got to be streaming music related.
Music via the Wi-Fi airwaves is what the kids want these days and it's unlike Apple not be riding the crest of a pop-culture wave (it usually creates them).
It's gonna be iTunes streaming, but because it's Apple don't expect it to be a carbon copy of Spotify or Zune.
It'll have its own unique spin, and it will eventually become the service that all the others aspire to be.
Yep, you can label me a fanboy, but in recent years Apple has been the innovator when it comes to tech launches - even when it is late to the table.
Tags: Software iTunes Apple iPhone iPod
iTunes "exciting announcement": Pocket-lint's predictions originally appeared on http://www.pocket-lint.com on Mon, 15 Nov 2010 16:57:00 +0000
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