Today is one of those magical days when an Apple rumor you thought you’d never hear the end of finally comes true. Like “Apple is making a phone” or “Macs are going to use Intel chips” or “The Beatles are coming to iTunes”, “Verizon will get the iPhone” has been around since about ten minutes after the original iPhone was announced.
These rumors are special, because they are the kinds of rumors that are obviously going to come true eventually, but they are completely unlikely to happen at the time of their origin. It’s like saying that someday, Apple will replace Steve Jobs as CEO. Well, sure, that HAS to happen eventually, unless Jobs really is an alien cyborg of some kind. But it’s not going to happen this year, or probably even for the next few years.
People play these rumors to death because they know that eventually they have to come true. And then they can claim they were right all along. They hope people will forget that they originally included an arrival date along with their prediction. Six months from now, by next June, sometime next year—the latest two were “just after Christmas” and “by Valentine’s Day.”
When you’re dealing in rumors that have to come true eventually, the date you attach to the rumor becomes the rumor itself, guys. So sorry, you’ve been wrong up until now. Well, the Valentine’s Day people are technically correct, but they were hedging a bit.
The only people who can kill such rumors are the people at Apple. And they can only kill them by making them come true. So today, we get to see the Verizon iPhone rumor die, once and for all. I wonder what ironclad rumor will replace it? That Apple will stop making Macs, perhaps?
(On a side note: Can you imagine if Verizon DIDN’T announce an iPhone today? They call a post-CES conference, let the speculation come to a boil, and then announce some new Android phone instead? Heck, they could announce world peace at this point, and people would be disappointed for months.)
