Apple Event Confirmed for January 27

At least our speculation regarding the date and time of Apple’s special press event this month can now come to an end. Apple confirmed today, via invitations sent to the press, that there will indeed be a special event at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater in San Francisco on January 27 at 10AM Pacific time.

Not only that, but the promotional material for the event bears the tagline “Come see our latest creation.” For those who were still skeptical that Apple would release a tablet at all, I think you should consider yourselves quite wrong. That tagline definitely wouldn’t herald a new Core i5-based MacBook Pro, and given that Apple cannot be unaware of the hype surrounding its still-mythical slate, there’s really only one thing it could refer to. Judging by my Twitter stream, not everyone thinks it’s that obvious, though.

Some people are speculating that the evidence points to a software announcement. Creative software that could produce some kind of artistic output, possibly iLife for the iPhone? That’s a reasonable enough prediction, if you don’t take into account the fact that for years now the tablet rumors have been stacking up, and Apple would realize that announcing some lame software when everyone is thinking iSlate would absolutely destroy its stock price.

Another possibility is that this will just be an announcement of the next major iPhone OS upgrade, iPhone 4.0. If the tablet is running that platform, I think we’ll see it discussed here, but Apple is not a company to use words irresponsibly. Not to mention that the last time it held such an event was March of last year, so the timing is off, and the invitations for that event couldn’t have been more obvious about the nature of the announcement. Why be coy now, when doing so could only hurt the company in the eyes of investors?

No, if you ask me, it’s tablet time. Now that we don’t have long to wait, you may want to brush up on all the latest and greatest from the rumor mill. Honestly, if I was going to link to all of our tablet-related articles, I think every word of this article would be hyperlinked, so I’ll just do this and make it much easier for all of us. Now’s the time to start getting those last minute predictions in, so that you can point back to the comments section of this post and tell all your friends “I told you so.”

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