Crews are putting up banners, signs, and other decorations to transform the Yerba Buena Center in San Francisco into an Apple auditorium for the March 9 "Spring Forward" event, where Apple is expected to offer a general update on its various initiatives as well as formally debut the Apple Watch, which will arrive in stores some time in April. As
reported earlier, Apple is also building on an extension to the center that will likely serve as a showcase room for the press to try out the new Apple Watch.
Also as
reported previously, Apple has invited a number of developers to come to its HQ in Cupertino to finish up apps it plans to showcase during the presentation, cleverly both providing top-flight technical help from actual Apple Watch engineers and keeping the developers sequestered to cut down on leaks. It remains unknown if Apple will use the occasion to make any announcements other than the Apple Watch, such as the possibility of refreshed MacBook Airs or other products. The event will be
streamed live on the Internet beginning at 10AM PT/1PM ET on Monday, March 9.
MacNN and
Electronista will be providing complete coverage and analysis.
Photo by Jim Merithew, Cult of Mac
The team behind iTunes has
made some changes and restored some previous tweaks to how it handles the presentation of music on its store, with a return to an emphasis on staff-curated recommendations rather than a sales-based algorithm to determine what albums were featured on the main page, in part responding to the concerns of independent labels. Other changes that favored the most popular artists or albums -- such as counting pre-orders as first-day sales, thus rocketing popular albums to the top of the charts -- have also been rolled back.
Apple will likely continue to tinker with the mechanics of the store in preparation for future changes that
may incorporate Beats Music later this year. Currently, the subscription service operates as wholly separate from both the iTunes Store and iTunes Radio, but is likely to be consolidated under the entire iTunes roof. The company is also backtracking on a system that methodically removed song duplicates from display pages, even when both versions complied with all iTunes rules.
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