Apple has sent out its invites for the Oct. 22 iPad event, which it hopes will influence its global product demand.
The Apple invites, which said "We still have a lot to cover," were sent out in San Francisco Tuesday. The event will be held at the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts Theater.
People are expecting releases of the new versions of the iPad 5 and iPad mini 2 during the event. Speculations suggest that iPad mini2 will be equipped with the Retina display which is already featured in earlier tablet models.
New and upgraded OS X Mavericks are also expected to be unveiled together with its latest MAC computers.
Apparently, this event is one of Apple's moves to respond to the growing pressure from its investors. The tech giant is under pressure to develop new gadgets to halt the declining company performance and propel the company's growth rate.
Recently, the iPhone launch was able to generate a strong global demand for the iPhone 5S and 5C. Despite this increase in demand, Wall Street believes that the iPhone 5C was not cheap enough for the price-sensitive customers from the emerging markets.
"While this is happening, tablet share for Apple continues to drop because of decent offerings from Amazon and Google at lower price points," BGC Partners analyst Colin Gillis told USA Today.
It is expected though that with this new event, the demand will probably be high for the new versions of the iPad. Based on a recent survey conducted by Piper Jaffray analyst Gene Munster, 50 percent of the current iPad users are planning to upgrade their tablets by next year.
Moreover, out of the remaining 30 percent of those who bought iPhone 5S but have no iPads yet, 38 percent of them are likely to buy an Apple tablet in 2014. According to Munster, this is an improvement compared to the survey done last year when Apple released the iPhone 5.
Gillis, however, is not so optimistic about Apple's growth. "While (CEO) Tim Cook has said to expect an amazing year, the reality is that we've just seen iterative refreshes," he said. With all the iteration efforts, he believes that it won't "necessarily propel the stock to the heights it was once at."
