“It turns out we were almost all wrong.” A concerned public servant once said about the existence of illicit weapons in a certain Middle Eastern country. That same quote now applies to Apple’s Worldwide Developer’s Conference 2007, where nearly every single rumor that circulated around the Internet was completely wrong. No new iMacs; no new iPods; the 17-inch iMac and Mac mini are still for sale; nothing.
These rampant and apparently baseless rumors are beginning to hurt Apple’s image, methinks.
The general consensus on this year’s WWDC, at least going by the response of a few message boards I’ve cruised and our own professional opinion, is that WWDC stunk. Nothing happened. The headline is “Apple Releases Safari for Windows.” That could have happened any other day of the year and it would’ve been fine. But nope, ’twas hype that killed WWDC.
For what seems like the past 200 years, we’ve been reading and passing the word along about rumor after rumor about what was going to be released at WWDC. There were early rumors of a black iMac, but a quick look at the new Apple Store shows no such computer. Neither will you find a newly designed iMac. And last I checked, the 17-inch iMac is still with us.
There were no “top secret” Leopard announcements, unless, of course, you consider the improvements to iChat “top secret” new features. We don’t.
No Wi-Fi iPhone, no 3G iPhone. Nothing.
Essentially, all the hype created by the endless stream of rumors sorta killed this year’s WWDC for us. Sure, Safari is cool and all (well, about as “cool” as a Web browser can be), but isn’t it funny that the “one more thing” wasn’t even so much as hinted in all these rumors?
Where the hell do these rumors come from?
And why do we all get so hot and bothered by them?