• by Thom Forbes  @tforbes, September 8, 2015

The slight breeze we felt in the midst of the Labor Day doldrums was precipitated by speculation over exactly what Apple will be announcing at its live-streamed Special Event starting at 10 a.m. PDT Wednesday from the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco. TV, the iPad, iPhones and Siri herself figure in the speculation.

With Apple opening up its TV to third-party developers, speculation has been rife that gaming will be a core component of the fourth-gen device, which is rumored to be priced at $150. Current models start at $69 at the Apple Store, and streaming competitors such as Roku, Google Chromecast and Amazon’s Fire TV Stick are also cheaper. 

How can it justify the premium?

“I think Apple’s going to create a big new category in gaming, one that others have tried and failed to create before,” Jan Dawson, chief analyst at Jackdaw Research, tells the New York Times’ Nick Wingfield. “What the Apple TV has the potential to do is to bring casual gaming to the living room and make it a much more social activity.”

Wingfield points out that “most game executives and analysts see little chance that Apple will be able to woo hard-core fans of the leading high-end game consoles, the Xbox One from Microsoft and the PlayStation 4 from Sony.” But there is potentially a large demand by “people who find traditional game controllers complicated and who enjoy lighter, less epic forms of content.”

Speaking of king content, Apple’s rumored plans for a television subscription service “may have been pushed back as the company works to cut deals with television networks,” reports Alex Fitzpatrick for Time. But Siri will be coming to the device and it will also feature a universal search function.

But there will be no perfect TV until someone comes along with truly universal search, says David Pierce for Wired. “The One True Set-Top Box will have everything. Everything. And it will make the interface so consistent and fluid that it won’t matter where something is hosted, it will just serve it up for you upon request.”  

Better yet, it will know you so well that it will serve up exactly what you want to watch as soon as you turn it on. Just like programmatic ads know exactly what you want to buy. That’s how it works, right?

“Much bigger news for Apple's business this week could be the long-rumored giant iPad,” writes David Goldman for CNN Money, pointing out that sales for the iPad have fallen for seven of the last nine quarters. 

“The general downward trend for the iPad — and tablets in general — has occurred largely as smartphone screen sizes continue to get bigger,” Goldman points out.  “… A device that fits between the iPad and a Mac could be a compelling gadget that the iPhone couldn't — cannibalize — and particularly interesting to a segment of customers that Apple has been targeting lately.” 

That would be business, of course, as was reaffirmed by the collaboration it announced last week with Cisco to pave a fast lane for iOS devices in the corporate world.

But make no mistake about where it’s making its big bucks today.

“The iPhone shows no signs of losing its position as Apple's most lucrative product,” write Bloomberg’s Adam Satariano and Alex Tribou. “If anything, its importance is increasing as sales of the iPad decline and while Apple Watch is still a young, if promising, niche product.”

The most alluring feature of the 6S reportedly will be the pressure-sensitive technology called Force Touch that was introduced on the Apple Watch, Jefferson Graham tells us in a video preview for USA Today. It may be thinner, too, and have a better screen resolution and camera.

“Unit sales grew more than 30% in each of the past three quarters, compared with the year-ago period,” reports Jon Swartz in USA Today. Many analysts say those numbers are unsustainable but “a couple of new Digitimes reports say that iPhone 6s suppliers are already seeing massive iPhone 6s orders ahead of the phone’s launch,” reports Chris Smith for BGR.

Apple watchers, as always, have their eyes on what’s beyond tomorrow’s unveilings. Apple Insider’s Neil Hughes reveals that KGI Securities analyst Ming-Chi Kuo shared details on next year's so-called ‘iPhone 7’ upgrade Sunday in a note to investors. His sources indicated Apple is planning to make the next iPhone between 6.0 and 6.5 millimeters thick — “in line with Apple's current iPod touch and iPad Air 2...”

Meanwhile, Apple has had a little fun on itself in its announcement, which says: “Hey Siri, give us a hint.” If you’ve access to an iPhone or iPad, keep asking the question. Siri doesn’t break, of course, but she does offer up a stream of amusing responses.