“Apple special events are nothing new. The company will send out an invitation, rumor sites will post images of the invite, Mac users everywhere will speculate about what’s going to happen and what Apple will announce, and on the day of the event, news sites faithfully report on the special event. Apple has just such an event planned for the last day of February, but with a twist: in invitations sent out to journalists, the company says journalists are invited to ‘come see some fun new products from Apple’ without giving hints as to what they might be.”
Built specially for OSX 🙂
Wake me up when Apple stops prancing around and actually just makes the announcement.
Apple complain that sites such as thinksecret have broken the rules, but its okay for them to song and dance with own rumours.
Your apples stink!
I completely agree… this whole production of releasing products to market is juvenile and really getting tired.
Agreed. I love Apple, but christ they need to grow the hell up.
I understood that’s what they were doing lately…;-)
Perhaps, but the thing is it works. As long as it works and gets them plenty of free advertising why should the stop?
Yes, they want the ability to perform the “song and dance.” Leaking information to the press removes the mystique. The press is supposed to come, and the company is supposed to get up on its stage and do its little dance, and then the press is supposed to go back and write about how supermagnificentwonderful the show was. It’s all part of having a cool brand or some such.
iBook replacement anyone? Perhaps under the snazzy name “Macbook.” Or something much less interesting. Apple’s self-confident mating-ritual has already succeeded.
I hope its a phone. All existing cell phones suck, IMHO, and MSFT is looking into doing phones, which will, inevitably, make cell phone suck even WORSE.
It’ll come with less buttons and a glossy white shell in the shape of a clam. Entries in the phone book will grow larger the closer to the currently selected number they are. It’ll come with a fixed-focus camera meant to take pictures of the user’s face from 4″ away. It will sync with iTunes and iPhoto. It will contain a built-in battery that is not user-replaceable to adequately fit the size and shape of the device. The case will scratch if you put it in your pocket, so a variety of brightly-colored carrying cases will be available for additional purchase.
Well, I like the first half of your post, minus the cynical latter half.
It’ll come with less buttons and a glossy white shell in the shape of a clam. Entries in the phone book will grow larger the closer to the currently selected number they are. It’ll come with a fixed-focus camera meant to take pictures of the user’s face from 4″ away. It will sync with iTunes and iPhoto. It will contain a built-in battery that is not user-replaceable to adequately fit the size and shape of the device. The case will scratch if you put it in your pocket, so a variety of brightly-colored carrying cases will be available for additional purchase.
Yeh, and they’ll sell like hot cakes….
Well there is already windows for phones. My friend has a T-Mobile SDA (http://www.t-mobile.com/products/overview.asp?phoneid=611918&class=…) which is the worst phone I have ever seen. The Windows OS on there is awful. (Why is there a start menu on my phone?) I can only imagine Microsoft making a worse hardware interface than the SDA.
Maybe if they do make a phone they will use their keyboard division to make it.
>I completely agree… this whole production of releasing
>products to market is juvenile and really getting tired.
Oh yea?
Just wait until Microsoft gets their Vista release engine going. It’s gonna drive you crazy. they will be 1000x worse and more cheezy than anything Apple does.
You might want to discuss medication options with your doctor now.
What, you mean the “leak” of Vista information wasn’t part of Microsoft’s song and dance?
Geez, first major OS release in 5 years? I’d say MS is welcome to make a big deal about it.
I’d say MS is welcome to make a big deal about it.
And Apple isn’t??
They’re the masters, after all it’s just how they work… accept it
yeah it will.
/ordering some meds now :-p
I hate whenever Apple makes an announcement like this because everyone is going to be expecting something big, like the Intel iBooks or Minis, and then Apple lets us down when they just release something like “Spring Time Color iPods”
The way I see it, this “event” is really just an attempt by Apple to get their stock AAPL back up to the $80 range it was a few weeks ago. I will be expecting news about the Intel Mini that I thought was coming back in January, and instead I will get news about a purple iPod.
Remeber Windows ’95? Or at you too young?
I remember the big cover story on MacWorld: Windows 95–So What? Little did we know that ’95 would be “just good enough” to enable IT depts across the country to attack the user population and drag away all the Macs. I guess, compared to Win3.x it must have seemed almost usable to the IT trogs.
The facts are a little different. “Those who do not know history are condemned to repeat it”. Take a careful look at
http://www.pegasus3d.com/total_share.html
In fact, before there even were Macs, PCs had reached 25% share. Macs came out and bumped around without making much of an impact on share till about 1991-2, which was the first time they got over 10%. But by then the PC dominance was total. By then PCs had between 80 and 90% share. Macs then went into a gentle decline without the aid of W95, and when W95 came out, share collapsed. Collapsing is relative. It was collapsing from not much over 10% down to the low single figures. The total dominance of Wintel has been constant since around 1985, when it exceeded 50%.
Apples gains and losses in market share were important to Apple, but pretty much noise in terms of the total market.
You don’t just see this in the market share numbers. If you look at the topmost coloured chart showing absolute numbers sold, you see the phenomenon even more clearly.
This is what happened.
The silly thing about that Macworld headline was, it was totally out of touch with this reality. Think about it. Your favoured platform and that of your readers has never had much more than 10% share, despite obviously being more user friendly and considerably more elegant. Now, something new comes out from the dominant player, and you can see at first glance that this is a step change for them. Its far more usable, its more elegant, if not really elegant. Its being greeted by all the media and pundits as the bees knees. And your reaction? No worries, you say.
Talk about head firmly buried in the sand! What had happened was that a huge usability gap had not prevented slow leakage of share. So what did they expect would happen when the usability gap got quite small? Or at least, much much smaller?
Which it duly did, and share, predictably, headed south, while Cupertino sat there like a rabbit in the headlights.
“Cupertino sat there like a rabbit in the headlights.”
Apple as a company had real problems at that point. The Copland Project was doomed and it took them another two years to realize that, and another 2 after that to do something about it, by acquiring NeXT (also correcting one of the most collassally stupid business decisions of all time -firing Steve Jobs in 1985).
Don’t bash MacWorld so much, though. We Mac users were concerned at the time that Win95 would suck in more NEW users, but we didn’t fully anticipate how it would devastate EXISTING Mac companies. I think part of it was the double whammy– Windows got ’95 and APPEARED to be moving forward (to NT, 2000, etc); Apple appeared to be stuck in the mud.
Also, there’s a dishonest tendency to confuse market share with installed user base. They aren’t the same thing.
Amelio was good at getting Apple’s board to wake up and smell the coffee and quit pretending everything was wonderful. I’m not 100% convinced had Jobs not been ousted, he wouldn’t have been living in a similar denial by that point. NeXT was a good reality check for him, and an entry point for Unix we probably would never have seen otherwise.
As far as Macworld is concerned, we generally read it for the reviews and tips, and ignored the editorials which were marginally less stupid than the mainstream PC mags’. I said “marginally.”
“Amelio was good at getting Apple’s board to wake up and smell the coffee and quit pretending everything was wonderful. I’m not 100% convinced had Jobs not been ousted, he wouldn’t have been living in a similar denial by that point.”
I agree about Amelio. I think he DID start the process of turning around the company. I think he deserves much credit. As for whether Jobs would have been as effective if he had not been fired from Apple– who can say? You raise an interesting point.
As for Macworld: I get it; I like it for the reviews. It’s still a decent magazine, though the web has supplanted a large part of computer magazines’missions— on the PC side as well.
The release of Windows 95 was major. I don’t think MS marketing overdid themselves on it one bit.
World’s most successful Trojan Horse. Malware disguised as a complete operating system.
You’re not detached from reality or anything.
It might not happen but I would like to see the rumor on the touch-screen video iPod come to fruition. It would be the next step in the evolution of the iPod that would keep it from becoming stale (how many small iterations can you make before kids get bored?).
*crosses fingers*
G5 Powerbooks and an Apple PDA!!!!
Maybe hardware, I dont know – considering that the 15″ powerbook was just taken off their product listing (on the applestore anyway).
I really don’t get some of you nay-sayers around here. What Apple sells is not a computer, it’s perceived to be style, cool, a life-style, a statement. This whole dog and pony show that is going on is to generate hype, to get the media to talk about speculations, and get users (or would be users) psyched. If apple were to release “just another laptop” or “just another widget” – then people would pay no attention, and it would go unnoticed, and it would make apple no profits.
Apple is probably not announcing an iPod (at least not a small iteration of an iPod). It just released a new iPod with no fan fare.
My personal prediction is some sort of “improved” front row app. I dont want to say “media center” because it might not be. I don’t want to say a new “videoPod” because there are factors that prohibit a new videoPod from being released.
Just wait a week and see what it is – no need getting too excited 😉
I often wonder how far along we are in the computer revolution– beginning, middle, or end game. I tend to think closer to the beginning. Sometimes things come along that just surprise you and change your life. Mosaic in ’94. The idea of podcasting more recently. Even as a Mac fan, I was ho-hum on the whole MP3 player thing– I have a bunch of CD’s I listen to, after all– until I got an iPod as a gift and discovered the joy of Podcasting–basically time-shifting amateur radio. I suppose TiVo-ites feel the same way about that product.
I much prefer Apple’s way of waiting to announce a product until it’s ready to ship in a grand unveiling, versus Microsoft’s way of announcing a product that they plan to ship three years from now, that may or may not ever actually ship.
Yeah, being able to plan purchasing decisions ahead of time is way overrated. Dealing with potential features not making it to release is way worse than being kept out of the loop until the last moment. The business world would rejoice if Microsoft simply shipped its new operating system lineup and let everyone know everything about it the same day it went on sale. That would in no way at all result in any sort of outcry.
A lot of Microsoft’s products aren’t sexy. They don’t obtain any advantage from treating releases like fashion shows. A lot of them involve a lot of ISVs and some of them IHVs, who like to be aware of where the platform is going in time to actually develop for it.
I’m just really tired of Microsoft outright lying about what they’re working on, what they’re going to release, what features it’s going to have, and when they’re going to release it. Maybe you like being jerked around. I don’t.
I don’t think Microsoft is lying to me about what they’re working on. At least not in that context. They might intentionally inflate their intended goals, but it seems more likely that they simply run into cost and time constraints that causes reprioritizations that starve projects than it is that they’re jerking me around. Dropping features or extending the deadline doesn’t make Microsoft look good, but that sort of thing occurs in essentially any large development process. I would much rather Microsoft tell me its intentions ahead of time, even if they don’t live up to them. I want API documentation for platform frameworks, and optimally beta builds of the frameworks to develop against. I want to know if I’m going to require new hardware. I want to know what sort of ugly mess they intend to replace their previous eyesore Luna with. I want to know what kind of DRM they’re planning on providing. I want to know Microsoft’s actual plans for x86-64. I could go on, and on, and branch into every other technology company.