There's been a lot of talk lately about the tenth anniversary of the tenth anniversary of Apple's retail stores coming up pretty soon. An exclusive report from BGR details the possible plans for a new product launch of some sort coming within a couple of weeks. Just to quote an excerpt of what they had to say:

Apple stores have apparently already received hardware to install, and are expecting more hardware to come on Friday or Saturday. All materials that Apple stores have received have been instructed to be under lock and key until after close on Saturday night.

It is also said that certain Apple employees from each store have been asked to work a night shift from this Saturday into mid-Sunday. Whatever is coming appears to be very high profile. The last time there was this much hype over an Apple mystery was when Gizmodo got their hands on an iPhone 4 prototype in April of last year. So what is it going to be?

PCWorld just published a list of five predictions for what they think it could be. At the top of the list is a regular ol' MacBook. Makes sense. It's due for a refresh and is still moderately popular. A MacBook certainly wouldn't live up to all this hype though, unless of course it had a generous price tag -- perhaps an extremely-unlike-Apple generous price tag. $799 in celebration of the Apple retail stores? Nice.

Next is iCloud and NFC. I wouldn't bet money on these. If anything at all, iCloud will likely be unveiled at WWDC in June because it would fit in perfectly with any iOS announcements Apple plans on making there. NFC in Apple stores would require an iPhone 5 which isn't expected until September, so it's probably not coming any time soon.

After those two is another interesting thought: a limited edition iPod classic. 2011 does mark ten years of the iPod so it's certainly possible to give that outdated iPod some temporary spotlight. Still, it makes more sense to keep iPod announcements at the iPod event that usually takes place each September.

The last thing on PCWorld's list is nothing. So I will write nothing.

Here's what I think. No new products are coming. Instead, Apple will have a big sale at the retail stores on all of the major products just for a day or two. Apple rarely has sales so this could be bigger than it sounds, plus they benefit in almost every way possible. Big sales mean big lines (which is nothing new for Apple) and big lines mean big publicity and big publicity means even more customers and even more customers means big profit. The problem with my theory would only be Apple's possible inability to keep up with demand.