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Today Apple sent out official invitations for a media event on March 7th. The event is scheduled for 10:00 AM PT (1:00PM ET) and will be held at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco. As you can see the tagline on the invitation reads “We have something you really have to see. And touch.” So if it looks like an iPad and touches like an iPad safe assumption is that this event is for the debut of the iPad 3.
This assumption very much makes sense because we’re almost exactly a year from when Apple announced the iPad 2. They usually have on year product cycles and we’ve heard so many rumors lately some of them are bound to be true. We could expect a retina display (2048×1536) and a better camera like the iPhone 4S as these seem to fully align with Apple’s product line and their buying power. We may als see Siri integrated into the iPad 3 though that’s not a given. We are not likely to see any smaller factor iPads. 4G LTE is a possibility but not likely though I’ll note that the iPhone 4S on AT&T can technically be a 4G phone due to the radio chips inside.
I’ve read some rumors that the price of the iPad 3 may be higher than the iPad 2 based on some of the components costs. I don’t see this as likely though as that doesn’t fit in Apple’s strategy. The iPad 2 will most likely be discounted. How much will depend on whether they’re shutting down the production line and trying to liquidate the inventory or whether they’ll keep the two products running simultaneously like they have with the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4S.
We also may see a revamped Apple TV and a new adaptive audio compression format used to stream music from the cloud. Rumor on the mill there is that the format will adapt to your connection and available bandwidth to adjust the streaming size to deliver the best sounding audio from the cloud.
I’l be covering the outcome of the event week so get excited. Let’s see how our predictions hold up. More Apple news to come.
