Just when the cycle of new Apple announcements seems fairly predictable and risks becoming downright boring, Apple throws a monkey wrench in the works and generates a free press frenzy. Brilliant.
Talk about turning lemons into lemonade. Apple is both downplaying expectations and letting people’s imaginations run wild at the same time.
For the record, I personally don’t think that mere sentence suggested ANYTHING, other than that we surely weren’t going to be getting a preview of iOS 5 in April this year. It makes logical sense, then, to assume that without a new iOS 5 to be released in June, a new iPhone 5 at WWDC would be less likely, too.
But taking that and extrapolating it into “iPhone 5 coming this fall with LTE 4G, a cloud-based OS, artificial intelligence that can read your mind, and a built-in swiss army knife” is exactly the sort of thing that sets people up for self-disappointment. Last week, everyone was assuming that the iPhone 5 would be a 3GS-kind of upgrade; a minor bump to a faster processor, maybe more RAM. That sort of thing. But at the rate we’re going now, by the time it gets announced, it’ll be rumored to be able to launch spacecraft.
But that’s the genius of Apple marketing. Because no matter what people speculate, the beauty of it is that they’re speculating. Keep them guessing. Keep the intrigue going. So the story that otherwise would have been “Apple falls behind on its expected delivery of a minor upgrade to the iPhone” (which would have been an unreasonable but not unexpected reaction from the press) turned into “The phone Apple ships this fall will be groundbreaking, spectacular, and mind-blowing. And never mind that it won’t be here in the summer, like usual.”
Personally, I think Apple just needed to finish up on Lion before letting that release slip too much further, and so the iOS team is busy helping the Lion team (which share many of the same people). And so the entire product cycle is being shifted slightly to accommodate. No big deal.
You can only get so many hours out of a small group of engineers.
This goes back to why Apple stopped doing conferences like Macworld in the first place. Release on your own schedule, rather than catering to someone else’s, right? What good does that do you if you’re just as rigid with your own release schedule as the third parties you were catering to before were?
