iPhone: I Find Paul Boutin's Lack of Faith Disturbing

Paul Boutin lifts up the skirts of sullen Macworld reporters boozing in San Francisco after yesterday's iPhone explosion, allegorical journalists debating why Jobs would show off a product a full six months before it's ready to launch. From Vallywag:

Why unveil the iPhone today instead of June? Because the competition are doing the same thing, same day as they've done every year with their own infurating "sign up to learn more" preview campaigns. By holding his own mini-CES 500 miles away, Jobs literally stole the show. As I sit here typing in a sulk, an NPR stringer in Vegas just messaged, "CES is dead because iphone is all that mattered today. there is a mood of -- like everyone here went to the wrong party."

Also amusing—at least to me, a Gawker veteran—is Boutin's namedrop of Engadget, the site on which he has liveblogged the Macworld announcements for the last couple of years, on Valleywag. ("If this is the new face of Macworld, I can stay home and read it on Engadget.") Surely Boutin was aware of the dissonance. (Gawker Media also publishes Engadget arch-rival Gizmodo). Good-natured tweak or something more?

When Did Steve Start Showing Vaporware? [Valleywag]

See also: Apple's New calling: The iPhone [TIME]

Update: Fortune is saying Apple tipped their hand because they needed to file with the FCC, which would make those documents public. But I'm pretty sure the FCC has a process which allows those filings to remain secret until the product launches. (Or maybe it's just the details that remain secret.) The FCC all seem to be out of the office - probably at CES! - so I couldn't get any clarification.