| Thursday, January 6, 2005 |
15:24 - Great, now everybody gets to see what freaks we are
http://ravishinglight.blogspot.com/2005/01/well-call-me-hick-and-sue-me.html
|
(top)  |
Paul Denton notes that the story of Apple suing Think Secret over the purported mini-Mac has been broken by Drudge; if that doesn't mean Apple is big news now, I don't know what is.
Paul is worried, though, that this kind of corporate heavy-handedness on Apple's part is not good for their business. Maybe it is, but Apple's business doesn't quite follow the same rules everyone else's does. As I wrote in his comments:
Actually this isn't really an unusual thing, for Apple. They've sued over leaks before. And frankly, this is the kind of thing everyone pretty much expects them to pursue diligently.
More so than any other tech company (probably), Apple trades in secrecy. It's become part of their very trade dress, in fact: they refuse point-blank to ever engage in speculative talk about upcoming products, so much so that interviewers have pretty much stopped asking. When there's a leak, it's far more damaging to Apple's business than, say, word getting out about the next movie Disney is working on or the next car Saturn will release: those companies are in industries where speculation and futures-trading is commonplace, and rumors are hard to keep quashed. But Apple's stock in trade is the showmanship that comes with the keynote product unveilings, and Steve is as disappointed in people finding out in advance what he'd wanted to surprise them with as a parent would be to find that the kids had snuck under the bed and found the Christmas presents hidden there.
The Mac community is just ever-so-quirky that way: we generally like to see a surprise unveiled with all the fanfare in a keynote, something that catches us all off-guard like a movie that defies all the trailers. And yet we can't help ourselves when a rumor becomes apparent: we've just got to know, if the knowledge is to be had. On one side we live for the showmanship, and on the other we can't wait for the surprise; we cover our eyes, but we peek through our fingers.
For that reason, Mac users don't blame Apple for aggressively pursuing leaks and leakers, whether of the mini-Mac story or of Tiger screenshots. When ATI leaked news a few years ago that it had secured the deal to provide Apple's video cards for the next upcoming models, Steve flew into a rage and cancelled the contract and gave it to NVidia. When the G5 was announced, the Apple Store website showed the G5's specs the day before the keynote and was on t-shirts by the time he actually showed off the box; the entire Web staff was sacked within the week and six new job openings were posted. Do Mac users resent that? Nah, we see it as part of the spectacle.
It really is different over here. And yet no one can be told what the Mactrix is; you have to see it for yourself...
|
|
Brian Tiemann
