"Beyond the rumor sites. Way beyond."
That's the catchphrase Apple was sporting on its website on Wednesday; it was the third such ad-speak tagline in as many days promoting Macworld Expo, which begins in San Francisco next week with a two-and-a-half hour long keynote address by CEO Steve Jobs.
On Monday the site boasted, "This one is big. Even by our standards." And on Tuesday, the line was "Count the days. Count the minutes. Count on being blown away."
Such pre-show hucksterism is uncharacteristic of Apple, which usually neither confirms nor denies the existence of this or that rumored product or innovation. Unlike most other tech firms, only on rare occasion does Apple even say that something will be coming next week or next month, preferring, in the words of one Mac watcher, to "let the event sell itself."
"The hype machine is certainly now in overdrive," added that fellow, Matthew Rothenberg, who used to be an editor at Macweek and who now writes a weekly Mac column for eWeek magazine. "That's pretty unusual -- obviously Steve Jobs is the master of the big blowout events, and he's managed to make what from any other PC company would seem like a small announcement seem like a dramatic experience. But they've typically been a lot more terse about these things ahead of time."
Wednesday's teaser that the announcement would outdo the rumor sites was particularly mouth-watering to Mac enthusiasts, as the Mac rumor sites have long fantasized over some pretty radical ideas. The teaser seemed to egg them on some more.
For example, a poster on Mac discussion site called robodweeb MacSlash half-jokingly theorized that since "Carrying around a Powerbook, PDA, iPad, or whatever is too clunky," Apple will move "the focus of the user experience to ... the user her/him-self ... to create a 'personal' area network (PAN) that is physically distributed over the human body. This takes advantage of long growing trends of mobility and ubiquity and, with Apple's flair, should be a big hit." This "PAN" would include LCD-screen eyeglasses and a CPU hidden in the belt.
The apparent frontrunner theory, amidst the speculation, is a redesign of the iMac, the company's "consumer" desktop; the smart money seems to believe that a version of that machine will replace the clunky old CRT display with a sleek (and presumably more expensive) flat-panel screen.
But "would that be a 'paradigm shift'? Would that live up to the hype?" Rothenberg asked. "Not in my opinion."
Rothenberg guesses there is some kind of portable "consumer electronics" device in the works at the Apple campus, something so secret that even most of the employees don't know about it. This thing might resemble a PDA in some way -- Rothenberg has it on good information that Apple is working on "advanced" handwriting-recognition capabilities -- but it would also have multimedia capabilities.
"But it depends on what you mean by 'breakthrough,'" Rothenberg said, referring to the postcards Apple sent out to journalists late last year promising some unnamed pie-in-the-sky device. "This coming Tuesday, Apple invites you to the unveiling of a breakthrough digital device," the cards said. That vague promise prompted frenzied speculation, with people wondering whether Apple would release Dean Kamen's then-mysterious secret invention -- but in the end, the thing turned out to be a mere MP3 player.
"I was pleased and charmed by the iPod," Rothenberg said. "The Firewire interface was a slick thing, and they seemed to have sold pretty respectably, which must mean some people liked them. But I mean, is your mind blown by that?"
Rothenberg didn't think so. Still, he did see some sort of a big thing, maybe, in the fact that Jobs was making his address the day before the convention begins. "Maybe that's to reduce to the number of people on the show floor," he said. "The rumor sites and stuff will hang by their feet from bungee cords to get a peek at this stuff."
But David Morgenstern, another former Macweek editor, said that the rumors were to be expected, and he didn't think that Apple was really cultivating any more hype than it usually does. "They're just saying, 'come to the keynote.' The rumors around any kind of Apple event, whether it's just for the press, a board meeting, the keynote, whatever it is, that hype -- you could go to the moon and back on that hype. Whatever Apple has ever announced is usually less than that. It's a self-fulfilling prophecy."
Macworld: Rumors, Myth and Truth
