Peeve Farm

g r o t t o 1 1

Peeve Farm
Breeding peeves for show, not just to keep as pets

  Blog \Blôg\, n. [Jrg, fr. Jrg. "Web-log".
     See {Blogger, BlogSpot, LiveJournal}.]
     A stream-of-consciousness Web journal, containing
     links, commentary, and pointless drivel.

On My Blog Menu:

InstaPundit
USS Clueless
James Lileks
Little Green Footballs
As the Apple Turns
Entropicana
Cold Fury
Capitalist Lion
Red Letter Day
Eric S. Raymond
Tal G in Jerusalem
Secular Islam
Aziz Poonawalla
Corsair the Rational Pirate
.clue

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12/24/2001 - 12/30/2001
12/17/2001 - 12/23/2001

Tuesday, January 1, 2002
15:35 - Okay, now what's Apple up to? http://www.apple.com	(top)
"6 days to Macworld San Francisco. Count the days. Count the minutes. Count on being blown away." That's the current slogan on Apple's main page, and it's different from yesterday's ("This one is big. Even by our standards."). So it looks like they're going to be doing a different stir-up-the-masses slogan every day for the coming week, and promoting an active "countdown"-- something they haven't done since the release of Mac OS X in March. So what are they thinking? For at least the last two MacWorld expos, they've been burned by pre-show rumors flooding the Mac Web, inflating themselves all out of proportion with any possible reality, and setting everyone up for disappointment when the actual keynote announcements were made. New York in July was the worst example: instead of the expected LCD iMac, Mac OS X 10.1, "Apollo" G4 towers in the gigahertz-plus range, PDA, web-pad, upgraded TiBook, and other figments of wishful thinking, we got a modest speed-bump and redesigned case for the G4 towers. And a bunch of software demos and talk. Steve Jobs was reportedly as crestfallen with the audience's lukewarm reaction as the audience was with the tepid offering. He's been said to have flagellated himself over the fiasco numerous times, often casting (well-deserved) aspersion on the nature of the rumor-mongering that takes place on the Mac Web. And he wasn't the only one. Mac opinion columnists and rumor sites have taken the same stand in recent months, trying voluntarily to keep us from getting our hopes up too high. We've been disappointed, yes, but it's our own fault. If we let the rumors get out of hand, then no realistic announcement will be able to match them. We're bound to be disappointed, no matter how cool the keynote is. So lately Apple's tactic has been to keep the rumors bottled up as much as possible, not giving any indication of what some new whispered-about item will be. The first indication of a new product in November was the "Breakthrough digital device" sound bite that was fed to the press just a few days before the cover was whipped off the iPod, which gave the Mac Web only a week or so to develop its crackpot theories. But even that was too much time, because by the time the iPod was unveiled, enough people had theorized about wirelessly-connected streaming audio/video players with PDA functionality that when it was revealed to be simply an MP3 player-- a damn fine one, with lots of potential, but still just an MP3 player-- the sentiment from the Mac Web was let-down rage as much as it was the hoped-for lustful interest. In retrospect it seems churlish for us to have expected more for that announcement. But at the time the backlash was very volatile and dangerous for Apple. So now we have this countdown for MWSF. What could be their plan? They know full well the dangers of playing up the potential for rumors. Maybe they're banking on the fact that this time it's a whole expo, something too wide and non-specific for anyone to get their hands on, with no "Breakthrough digital device"-esque seed available to germinate into impossibly inflated rumors. Maybe they're counting on the rumor sites having done enough chastised self-policing that they won't allow their own expectations and those of their readers to run away with them. Or, indeed, maybe they've in fact got something so undeniably cool to unveil that they're confident that it will do justice to any inflated rumors. To draw a parallel: With Lord of the Rings, even the most demanding fans were blown away by the movie. It exceeded all of our expectations. So we know that it's not a problem endemic to the Internet. We're not all so jaded that nothing will impress us that we hadn't already predicted. Some of my friends refuse to take part in any rumor-mongering or speculation about upcoming Apple announcements, purely in order to protect against disappointment. I'm a bit more free-and-easy with my wish lists. But that doesn't mean I'm prepared to guess what will show up at MWSF. I will say that I think it's the third possibility above, though. I think they'll blow us away.