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Come on, admit it, we’ve all been starting to get annoyed with Apple over the past year. Back in January we had the iPad announced, then we had iOS4 and the iPhone 4. This is all very well, but doesn’t it seem that Apple have abandoned (arguably) their original purpose? What about us faithful Mac users? What about all of the newly converted Mac users?

Well, we’ve thought, and Apple have responded! Next Wednesday (20th), at 10am PDT (That’s 6PM BST) Apple are holding one of their famous ‘Special Events’ entitled “Back to Mac”.

So what’s coming?

As with all Apple events it seems, we have pretty good idea of what’s going to happen. There’s plenty of speculation (including that which I do here), but also plenty of consistent aspects. Let’s have a look at consistent stuff first:

OS X 10.7

It’s pretty widely accepted that next Wednesday will be the vehicle for the announcement of a brand new ‘cat’ in the family. What’s that behind the door in the picture? It’s a Lion! This has led to pretty much every blog out there saying this one will be called ‘Lion’, and who am I to break this rather sensible observation?

What Lion will contain, however, is still up for discussion. Smaller? Faster? New exposé features? Whatever it is, we can assume that it will be awesome!

But why ‘Lion’? One has to ponder what was going through the head of Mr Jobs when he (or one of his minions) came up with the name. One theory speculates that, as a ‘Lion’ is the ‘king of the animal kingdom’, OS X 10.7 will be the ‘king of OS X’. I quite like this idea. It fits nicely and seems well though out, but the idea of moving on to OS 11 (or OS XI) is still quite a daunting prospect. Why would they do it now, and not earlier? What are they planning?

Of course, we can’t get excited just yet. When OS 10.6 was announced, we had to wait a year before it actually hit the Apple Stores. Are Apple going to repeat this? Or are they going to give us a quick announcement-to-releace as has been noticeable with the iPad, iOS, iPhone etc.

Hardware?

New hardware? We know Apple have been working quite hard on hardware this year, what with a complete overhaul of the iPod range, iPhone and of course the iPad. Could they really sneak a new Mac in there too?

Personally I don’t think we’re going to see a new or majorly update Mac on Wednesday. The MacBook range has undergone an overhaul quite recently, as has the iMac and even the Mac Pro.

Software

One thing we are definitely due is a new iWork suite!

Office 2011 has been announced, and it looks awesome! I can’t wait to have a play with it. Surely apple will counter this with a brand new iWork suite.

Another thing we’re due is a new iLife package. Both iWork and iLife were last updated in ’09, and we’re fast approaching 2011 with no update? Personally I’m really hoping for something special on the iWork front.

One More Thing…

If there’s one thing Apple seem to love doing, it’s surprising us! There’s bound to be something amazing.

What do you reckon? Speculate away! Discuss!