“Just a few months after Tim Cook pledged to ‘double down’ on the company’s already tight secrecy policies, Apple Inc. unveiled its most important product of the year — and managed to surprise no one,” Therese Poletti writes for MarketWatch. “And while a corporate chieftain like Cook might easily bemoan the legions of press hounds, bloggers and analysts constantly digging for tidbits on the company, it’s worth considering the alternative. What if Apple spent months developing some great product, and no one cared?”
Poletti writes, “Which is another way of saying that the leaks and slips that now effectively ruin the surprise at the company’s popular events are indicative of the company’s runaway success, and not a hinderance to it. Apple unveiled its iPhone 5 on Wednesday at one of its typically packed press events in San Francisco. Even though nearly every detail of the new iPhone 5 had been predicted and pontificated upon for weeks in advance, the tech press, pundits and even a former vice president still flocked to the scene.”
“It seems too early to say whether the Steve Jobs-inspired culture that kept staffers mum has really changed. Apple’s secretive culture is still likened to both the CIA and the Kremlin, an issue that reared its head when Jobs’s health worsened and he tried to keep the details private — with some success,” Poletti writes. “Secrecy and the art of saying nothing seems to be so ingrained in the DNA of Apple employees that it would be hard to imagine any of them being forthcoming on any topic. There is still a lot of mystique associated with not saying much at all. Even so, as the hordes line up for the new iPhone on Sept. 21, will anyone seriously be thinking, ‘Oh, I am not going to buy the iPhone 5 because it’s exactly what everyone said it would be.’ I don’t think so.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Money. There’s so much money in AAPL now, that to keep something like iPhone 5 largely a secret is virtually impossible. And, for the most part, it’s not Apple employees who are leaking, it’s the third-party assemblers in China. This ship isn’t leaking from the top. If Cook wants to stop the leaks, he’ll need the strict cooperation of Apple’s assemblers and suppliers. If anything, we’re surprised future Apple products don’t leak out of China even more than they do now.
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