Invitation to obsession: Apple's iPad 2
Mark your calendars, Apple fans -- the iPad's second coming is slated for March 2. But it's unclear why anyone else should care
Follow @ifw_cringelySpitting into tea cups, poking goat entrails, tracing the movements of the stars across the heavens, dialing up the Psychic Friends Network -- these things pale in comparison to today's preferred method of divination: Parsing the invitations to Apple special events.
Another one came out yesterday. Mark your calendars, Apple fanboys and fangirls -- on March 2, life as we know it will change (yes, again -- if you can handle it). Naturally, bloggers the world over are doing the "CSI: Cupertino" drill, dusting the emails for latents and hoping to scrape off a scintilla of Jobs's DNA.
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This one is a bit less obtuse than most:
Could it be about anything but the (yawn) Apple iPad 2? I think not. Not only is the topic the opposite of a surprise, but details about what the iPad 2 will likely look and feel like have already been beaten to a fine paste and spread thinly over the InterWebs. Really, what's the point?
Of course, we might all be wrong. Apple may be announcing that it's getting out of the hardware business and going into the business of breeding teacup poodles, for example (but only really magical, life-changing teacup poodles). That I would pay to see.
Still, there's a big difference between this day's magical announcement and the one last year that heralded the second coming of the computer age (aka, the Year of the Tablet). This time out, the iPad has a serious competitor: the Motorola Xoom.
