Big Apple News

This is big news from out of nowhere: Apple announces Mountain Lion (OS X 10.8). It hadn't even occurred to me that this would be coming soon. I mean, we're only on 10.7.3. A quick look at past releases shows that all the other recent versions have made it to at least 10.x.8. I love a good surprise from Apple.

Daring Fireball has a nice writeup. The personal announcement vs. an event is fascinating. I think Gruber is on the money regarding Apple considering the attention they get from events being a precious commodity, and most people seem to agree that there is going to be an Apple event on March 7.

Here's my real question though: what are we going to see at the March 7 event?

Obviously, the iPad 3 (that is, the new iPad, whatever it may be called), but what, specifically, are they going to fill an iPad 3 event with?

• There seems to be a strong consensus that we'll see the A6, 2048x1536 resolution, and the same basic form factor. I'm sure they will spend time on all of that.
• I would have said that the main surprise would be LTE or no LTE, but the Wall Street Journal says they already know the answer. 
• If the WSJ was saying no LTE I might take that as Apple trying to set expectations so that when they announce no LTE it isn't a big let down. However, I'm not sure what the motivation for letting the WSJ know that it will have LTE would be. Of course, maybe Apple didn't let that news out on purpose?

That still doesn't sound like a full event to me though. Maybe they have some exciting new apps to show? Updates to iOS? Something that will make more sense because we already know about Mountain Lion?

Personally, I'd love to see updates to the iPad iWork apps that would bring more feature parity with the iCloud enabled iWork Mac apps that we'll see in Mountain Lion. It is great that we'll have access to documents from iCloud on the Mac, but that only helps so much if the changes you can make on the Mac don't all work when you open the document on your iPad.