“I roll my eyes every time Tim Cook or other Apple wonk knowingly smiles and tries to feign a twinkle in their eye, and say they ‘don’t comment on future products’ — yea, that’s because everyone else does, so they don’t need to bother,” John Kheit writes for The Mac Observer. “As such, Apple should just give up on its pretense of secrecy. I know I have.”
“It’s been forever since Apple has actually surprised us with a secret it could keep. Basically, almost every hardware update is known about with morbid accuracy well in advance of any announcements mostly because Apple’s Chinese suppliers leak everything,” Kheit writes. “A surprise these days, is the exception, not the norm, but this wasn’t the case back during the Steve Jobs era. Steve knew how to control these leaks better.”
“Apple needs to put up and actually surprise us, or shut up about its supposed ‘culture of secrecy,’ because right now, it comes off like they’re talking to their imaginary friend,” Kheit writes. “But I’m not holding my breath.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: It’s one thing to know there’s likely a Watch coming, it’s another to know exactly how it works, what it does, etc. Also, it was less than 24 months ago, at WWDC 2014, that Apple surprised everyone with Swift.
We’re really looking forward to WWDC 2016!
Apple’s not just proud of the rumours it does ship, but also the ones it doesn’t ship. And you better believe that some of the things it is working on aren’t even glimmers in a rumour monger’s eyes, just yet.
Yes, I’ve long suspected that the rumours based on leaks were either tolerated or planted by Apple as red herrings. Management by subterfuge! It’s tricky to pull off but easier than sending out an army of little Dutch boys to plug the leaks, which never worked too well for Steve Jobs. And remember the iPhone 4 prototype left in a tavern? Internal leaks were just as bad.
Remember when they trademarked iSlate?
Yep
How about the 64 bit SOC!!
Maybe consumers were not taken aback, but competitors were completely dumbfounded.
The desktop Mac Pro was a surprise too.
The point is that the rumours all come from the supply chain. Something like Swift was developed entirely within Apple and the developers kept their mouths shut. When it was announced, nobody had predicted that it was coming.
It’s much more difficult with hardware. You need a lot of non-Apple people to produce that hardware and it’s not impossible to borrow an item and photograph it.
Oddly enough, one of the minor advantages of robotic assembly will be that there will be far fewer workers on the production lines with the opportunity of sneakily taking a sample for the rumour sites as the robots should know exactly where each item is as it progresses through the assembly process and would flag up any unexpected component shortages.
At this point it is impossible for Apple to keep most hardware initiatives confidential, and it’s not the fault of Apple. Like MJ recalled, the Mac Pro turbine design is assembled in the U.S. by a much smaller production team, which allowed Apple to surprise us with it.
My thought is the best Apple can do with products like iPhone is create confusion, which we’ve seen lately with the rumors about iPhone 7 being scattered around.
You can’t protect from leaks if you’re lazy.
You don’t gouge loyal Apple users for adapters and inflated storage costs unless you’re greedy!
You don’t:
Collapse your own stock
Hire and fire all the wrong executives
Create overpriced and worthless new products and services
Spend more time fighting for gay rights and keeping your face in the spotlight than running the company you are paid to do
Allow the iPad and the iPhone to fall into stagnation because of sheer laziness
Destroy QA and Apple’s reputation in the process
Brand Apple as a gay company to the world
Release buggy software, with bulit in nagware every few seconds, forcing users to install software that bricks their device
You can’t do all these things unless you’re distracted, apathetic to Apple user concerns, and comprehensively incompetent!
While I understand and appreciate some of your points here, they are wildly off-topic and have little to do with the subject of the article. (Yes, that is deliberately repetitively redundant. On purpose!)
You’re SO boring, One Note. Well… hmmm… actually, you’re not boring. You’re too trivial to be boring.
You know the answer… there are plenty of other computers, phones and tablets to buy.
Now please ask yer Mummy for some pocket-money to go buy some candy. Then spend the rest of the day sucking on that (rather than bothering us).
Apple is many multitudes larger than it was back in the days when it could release entirely new products that nobody new anything about. With the first iPhone they made tiny numbers of them by today’s standards so it was relatively easy to maintain secrecy, when you’re having to manufacture tens of millions in advance and faced with the entire world trying to get hold of even the tiniest detail then of course there is going to be a difference. They may have decided that the resources required to maintain the secrecy they used to when they were a much smaller company just isn’t worth it.
Also, since when have Apple actually talked about their own “culture of secrecy”? If they did have one then they wouldn’t have even talked about it. The media labelled them as having one and are now complaining about it.
Exactly, an invention, the media double-standard echo chamber at its finest. Samsung, Samsung, HTC, and the rest are even more non-disclosing but their ink isn’t hot.
Every time I read one of these pundits I’m reminded of the old say about “keeping one’s mouth shut and being thought a fool, or opening it and removing any doubt”.
I miss the days when Jobs was actually able to keep secrets until the event.
Except often he wasn’t. Leaks were commonplace back then as well, and they were more-or-less on the same scale. Back then (when iPhone just got released), iPhone was selling a few millions of devices; today, they sell hundreds of millions. Back then, they were gunning for DELL’s market capitalisation; today, they are the largest market cap in the world.
Leaks have simply proportionately grown with the scope and size of the company. It is simply impossible to control that many foreign entities involved with your manufacturing.
Wrong.
Leaks were very generalized.
‘Apple may be working on a phone.’
Fine.
Now we get pictures and schematics, its entirely different.
The last 3 events were total snoozefests. No surprises, no excitement and absolutely zero buzz.
That’s what you get when you have a visionless, charisma-free numbers guy in charge.
Wrong.
We saw pictures of the iPhone before Steve announced it. We saw iPhone 4 (that the guy left in a pub). We saw iPad Air before Steve pulled it out of a manila envelope.
There is nothing different, just the scale. While Steve was in charge, Apple was a small company, trying to eclipse DELL’s market cap. With Cook, Apple is the largest market cap in the world, with over $200 Billion (with a ‘B’) in cash.
You clearly have a selective memory. Time does that, though, in all fairness. Everyone likes to forget Steve’s duds (Cube, hockey puck mouse, MobileMe…), the way everyone likes to make JFK the greatest US president (only because he got shot dead while in office)…
Most profound surprise that I remember was Steve redeveloping a complete OS from PowerPC to Intel chips.
How do you keep a complete OS rewrite silent? That is huge as it gets.
The thing is the switch to Intel was all aver the net. Steve did his One Last Thing by saying “It’s true” with the e in True as an Intel graphic.
Quite right — that is exactly how it worked, We had been discussing it for around three years at that point. This anti cook thing is all about a different kind of bigotry,
What, the iPhone was a secret until people learned to start watching the supply chain? And that is now somehow Cook’s fault? Give me a break…
iPod Nano Gen1.. the best kept secret hidden in a Levi’s 501 small pocket.
If these ‘leaks’ are intentional, Apple management can’t really blame Wallstreet as hard for the weird movement of AAPL during rumor or reveal stages.
Why is this a big deal? Who cares!
If “Apple pretending to be secretive” bothers you, you need to get a life.