With Apple's return to the Mac after the mountain of mobile devices announced, it is meant to be a huge announcement. Starting at 10 am PST tomorrow, and the invite sent out to media last week, caused the entire internet to explode with predictions of what Apple is going to announce, and here is mine.

For starters, if you look at the invite above, you can see a Lion behind the Apple logo, which probably means that the next version of Mac OS will be announced as Mac OS 10.7 Lion, as all recent versions of Mac OS are named after big cats. Main features of the new version of the new Mac OS that have been floating around are touch screen support, drastic speed increases and subtle UI changes to stuff like the dock and the menu bar. The reason that touchscreen is in there, is because Apple has filed several patents about touchscreen iMacs and MacBooks, and this would be a great time for Apple to include some parts of iOS into Mac OS, i.e. the touchscreen aspect. Call me an Apple fanboy, but I cannot see what drastically new features Apple could add, as I think it is as good as it can get, yet we will find out tomorrow.

In terms of hardware, the rumours about the long overdue update to the MacBook Air are picking up again. These rumours are saying that the new MacBook Air will be smaller with a 11.6" screen, a new version of SSD that is similar to a stick of RAM that is supposedly really fast and even slimmer profile. There are also some rumours of the MacBook and the MacBook Pros being updated, but I don't think that will happen as the Mac laptops got updated around April, and the MacBook family usually have a refresh cycle of around 9-10 months. Alike the laptops, I do not think that the desktops will get updated as they got their refresh this summer.

So, not long to wait until we find out so stay tuned to the live blogs like Engadget's for all the latest stuff coming out of Cupertino. However, it is still not clear if Apple will be streaming the event itself, like the iPod event, so get ready for the Lion to come out of the cage.

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Update on 2010-10-20 16:51 by Patrick Rigby

Apple has just posted the live stream page. Check it out here.