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:Seriously....

[superskippy]

At the risk of stating the completely obvious, launches of new Apple kit in a keynote is a big deal. It allows Apple to stage manage the launch, and it also creates a buzz that no-one else in consumer electronics gets. I was there pressing reload on the live blogs from the keynote, and I'm far from a fanboy- I've never bought anything from Apple.

If everyone knows the secrets, all of this is lost. However, just like the kid shaking the presents before Christmas morning, everyone wants to know what they are going to get. And besides, if you've got a secret, everybody always wants to know what it is- it's human nature. Once you know it of course, it's not so interesting.

Re:Googling the Adium logs

[tirerim]

Sort of: after the log entry was revealed, the owner of macrumors.com registered macbookair.com (and then said that he would be happy to transfer it to Apple gratis if they wanted it); this apparently triggered the registration of all the other macbookair domains by Apple, but the company that does their domain registrations offers a service of automatically registering potentially trademarked domains, so there was speculation that this was not a particular decision by Apple. And it should be noted that Apple doesn't normally bother to register domains named after their computer lines.

It's really not that impressive...

[twitchingbug]

when you piece it together 3 days before the keynote because of the very posters that Apple themselves put up for everyone to see. Come back to me, when you figure out something 3 months in advance of a keynote. That'll be something.

Re:Peek under Jobs' covers

[ChrisA90278]

"Count me out. I'm not THAT big of a fanboy."

Fanboys don't work so hard. Investment analysts sometimes do. The point is that if you can predict the future you can make a killing in the stock market. Apple's stock is very volitile. It goes up and down. If you can predict those little bumps you can get rich.
Just think: If you KNEW 100% that some long awaited announcement would result in disappointment and a $11 loss in the stock price you'd short Apple. So there is a whole ecosystem built around trying to predict what will happen to Apple.