Apple rumor postmortem: what didn't happen today


Love it or hate it, the time before an Apple announcement is a time for rumors. They flutter about the flame of credibility, at the very boundary of reasonable doubt, and then, come the event, are cruelly incinerated by the harsh heat of truth. Actually, it’s not nearly so picturesque; it’s more like “people want pageviews so they propagate the most fanciful BS ever to hit the tip line.” So in the wake of Apple’s eventful announcement today, let’s see what was floating around in past weeks that did not come to pass.

The Amazing $800 Apple
I had hopes like everyone else, but in the back of my mind lurked doubt. Was it to be a netbook? A tablet? Just a cost reduction for a basic MacBook? Nobody knew for sure, but for some reason the number 800 just stuck in people’s minds. We heard otherwise towards the end. As it turns out, they kept the same pricing scheme almost exactly — and really, $1000 isn’t that much more.

Touchscreen Trackpad
How awesome/retarded would this have been? This kind of hybrid isn’t Apple’s style, but that doesn’t mean we won’t see the idea used somewhere else. I could use a little touchscreen to complement my desktop, so why not include one stuck onto my laptop?

The “Mystery Port”
Ha! I totally nailed this one. Everyone was freaking out about this ambiguous-looking port on the front left corner, saying oh it’s a dock, oh it’s a robot port, etc. Only I was a bastion of skepticism, saying it was nothing at all. Only I! And some commenters, I guess, who I got the idea from. Actually, it’s a battery indicator thing, so it’s not exactly nothing, but it sure ain’t what all them folks said it were.

Blu-Ray all up in there
I can’t believe anyone took this one seriously. Apple is about downloads. They’ve capitalized so much on the iTunes store and the digital distribution model so much that to make a commitment to a new disc format would be ridiculous. Furthermore, people don’t want Blu-Ray on their laptops. Not only is the better picture less appreciable than on a big screen, but most people still want to make regular DVDs of their iMovies and such. They don’t need, or want, the capability to write 50GB to a disc over like half an hour.

Other than that, the other rumors turned out pretty much right. Brick manufacturing process, no 17″ update, new MacBooks (with black/metallic color scheme), new Cinema Display.

So… what’s coming in January, then?