By Alex Brooks Yerba Buena Center for Arts in San Francisco adorned ahead of Apple’s September 12 Event | Image from Ekkapong T
Today is the day, the venue is set, the press are descending on San Francisco, and the rumour mill is firing on all cylinders but something isn’t right. There’s a sense of disappointment, confusion, despair in the Apple community—in fact even outside of it. The subject is, “if this is the next iPhone, then what’s so special?”
It is this subject that I’ve been throwing around in my head for some weeks now. The rumours are about as set in stone as they can get although they remain rumours; we know what the—potentially named—iPhone 5 will look like, what features it has, what accessories it comes with and possibly whether iPods will be refreshed alongside it (I suspect quietly).

So what’s the headline feature of the new iPhone? Well arguably it’ll be the larger display but that’s the most talked about and discussed feature ahead of the release. This whole situation is very similar to what happened in 2010 with the infamous iPhone 4 left in the bar situation, as I recall Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone 4 by saying “stop me if you’ve already seen this”. Then again he also introduced it as the fourth generation iPhone and touted it’s over 100 new hardware features of which only 8 were discussed.
So how does Tim Cook get up on stage and attempt to wow a world when despite outlining that he would “double down” on product leaks he has seemingly failed. Well the first start would be to not necessarily assume that we know the whole picture, there are clearly some surprises left such what Apple plans to do with the iPhone’s camera and possibly more interesting what it’ll do with software and the camera (think panoramas).
What we can safely say is that Apple loves a strict focus during its events. The theme of today’s event is clearly the iPhone (and only the iPhone) but with largely revealed hardware will Apple try and shed the limelight over another aspect. Rumours have pointed towards a strong focus on Passbook and its early large adoption and possibly major changes to AirPlay which could include direct peer-to-peer streaming between devices.
Whilst the whole premise of disappointment ahead of an event is based on speculation and conjecture one thing we can be assured is that Apple doesn’t corral the press when it doesn’t intend to impress.
Today’s Apple event will kick off today at the following times:
10:00AM – Pacific
11:00AM – Mountain
12:00PM – Central
1:00PM – Eastern
2:00PM – Rio de Janeiro
6:00PM – London
7:00PM – Paris
9:00PM – Moscow
2:00AM – Tokyo (Thursday 13th)
3:00AM – Sydney (Thursday 13th)
5:00AM – Auckland (Thursday 13th)

World of Apple will not liveblog the event but some live coverage can be found on the Twitter account or the following sites:
The Loop
The Next Web
Macworld
The Verge
Ars Technica

World of Apple will offer news and detailed analysis following the completion of the event.

Source: World of Apple