What will Apple Unveil Wednesday?

[Updates at bottom of post]

Well the rumour mill is ablaze over the past few weeks in anticipation of the Special Event that Apple has scheduled for January 27 at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts in San Francisco.

Judging from the tagline on the official invitation from Apple – “Come see our latest creation“, it sounds like they have something pretty special to unveil. Consensus appears to be that it’s a Tablet of some fashion and there are more than a few mock-up photos online of what it will look like. See here, here and here. In all probability, the real product (if it is, in fact a tablet) will have a design that is much different than anything we’ve seen in the rumour community.

John Grubber at Daring Fireball has an excellent article speculating on what the ultimate tablet product may or may not include by way of form and factor – and perhaps even more importantly, how Apple will pitch the product.

While speculation about the Wednesday event is heavily weighted to the reveal of a tablet device, there are other possibilities, such as a new iPhone model (unlikely), the announcement of the next iPhone OS (version 4.0?), the release of iLife 2010 (boring), an iTunes streaming music service or the next best iSomething-or-other (i.e. something nobody has anticipated).

Whatever ends up being announced on Wednesday – we’re all a-tingle in anticipation.

Event coverage will be available, starting at 10AM pacific time at TwitLive, Gizmodo and GDGT-Live.

UPDATE 1: Jan 26 – The iPhone Dev Center website (site for iPhone developers) is down for updates this morning. Wondering what the significance of this may be.

UPDATE 2: Jan 26 (3PM MST) – According to Terry McGraw of McGraw-Hill Publishing, as announced during an interview on CNBC today (Jan 26) Apple will announce a Tablet tomorrow and it will be based on the iPhone OS, rather than OS X. McGraw indicated that they had been working with Apple for some time to prepare their line of e-Books for the tablet. Looks like the probability of a tablet just increased significantly. (See video, below):

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