How Apple Rumors Became Reality

Lucas123 writes "Computerworld has a story on how bloggers, rumormongers and Web sleuths pulled together the story of the MacBook Air several days before Steve Jobs unveiled the laptop on stage on Tuesday, something that is nearly unprecedented in the annals of Apple announcements. 'Remember the sturm und drang that erupted after Think Secret revealed the coming of the Mac Mini, prompting Apple to take legal action to silence Think Secret? Is Apple off its game on keeping secrets now? Why was this year's secret leak different? In a word: teamwork.' This seems to be good case study on how to use information from sites like AppleInsider, 9to5mac.com and Ars Technica get a peek under the covers on future talks."

Re:Rumors become reality?

[sayfawa]

Obviously, you haven't seen the Apple Product Cycle [misterbg.org].

Re:Pulled Together?

[ZombieRoboNinja]

>>One of the best things about community driven FOSS projects is the lack of BS words like "revolutionary".

Google the following:
"Openoffice+revolutionary": 174,000 results.
"Bittorrent+revolutionary": 249,000
"Firefox+revolutionary": 435,000
"Linux+revolutionary": 441,000
"Richard+Stallman+revolutionary": 167,000

Whatever positive attributes the open-source movement might have, lack of hyperbole is not high among them.

Um, leaks?

[rtechie]

I work across the street from Apple and I heard Apple employees talking about the "thinbook" (that's that they were calling it) at the coffee shop. Just because Apple has a reputation for stopping leaks, that doesn't mean Apple doesn't leak. iTunes leaked too.

isights had it.

[shmlco]

Actually, on the 9th I posted an article predicting that Apple would use 1.8" notebook drives, as SSDs of any reasonable size were still commanding a premium price. To be fair, however, I also predicted that they'd add 16GB or so of on-board flash in order to cache system and application files. Nailed the first, missed the cache.

Then the day before MacWorld I did an article on The Totally Wireless MacBook [isights.org], describing a machine with no ports whatsoever and that did everything via Wi-Fi and Bluetooth.

And then we got a wireless machine with Wi-Fi and Bluetooth and which dropped almost all of the ports except for one USB port, one micro-DVI port (for presentations), and a headphone jack.

Still no SuperDrive docking station though. Drat.

Re:Googling the Adium logs

[Breakfast Pants]

That's a bit revisionist. The MacBook Pro came before the MacBook, and it was a replacement for the PowerBook, not the iBook. The reason for the name change only tangentially was for "[making sure that consumers knew that] even though it's Intel based, it still has the Mac OS"; the real reason was to avoid having "Power" in the name since it no longer used the "PowerPC" architecture.

Re:Googling the Adium logs

[hemp]

That's a bit revisionist. The MacBook Pro came before the MacBook, and it was a replacement for the PowerBook, not the iBook. The reason for the name change only tangentially was for "[making sure that consumers knew that] even though it's Intel based, it still has the Mac OS"; the real reason was to avoid having "Power" in the name since it no longer used the "PowerPC" architecture.

But the PowerBook name was used prior to the use of the PowerPC architecture. The PowerBook Duo 210 came out in 1992 and used Motorola 68030.