History is Bound to Repeat Itself

benjaminstein:

I get secret joy out of watching people speculate about upcoming Apple products.  What amuses me is that people have a really hard time innovating themselves, and more importantly, a hard time believing that Apple can innovate.

Of the thousands of predictions about the Tablet/iSlate, they pretty much all boil down to two possibilities: a MacBook running OS X without a keyboard or a large iPhone.

Honestly folks, what are the chances that Steve Jobs is going to get on stage and announce a form factor change of a 3 year old phone?

Leading up to the iPhone announcement, the pundits were sure it was going to look like a click wheel iPod with a dial pad. No one even imagined what was eventually announced.

If you think you know what’s coming, I’d like to refer you to the most widely accepted iPhone rumor a few weeks before the announcement.  The one everyone was positive we were going to see:

  • January launch on “all” providers, both CDMA and GSM
  • Extremely small form factor
  • Two battery design (with single charger) — one for playing music, the other for phone functions
  • Flash memory: 4GB for $249, 8GB for $449
  • “Slide-out keyboard”
  • Possibly touchscreen

with a slight update from Engadget:

“it’s pretty safe to say it won’t have a QWERTY keyboard (although it may be a slider), touchscreen is out, and it’s only going to be GSM with 3G at launch”

Wow! That’s actually a worse track record than the New Jersey Nets.

You can learn a lot from history.  So please bloggers, keep the rumors flowing.  We secretly love to read them.  But just keep in mind, we’re going to see something awesome in 2 weeks. And if it looks anything remotely like a 7” iPhone, I’ll eat my hat.

I actually love the Apple rumor mill. About half the time they’re wrong and the other half they’re comically off. Apple’s veil of secrecy is one of their best skills and assets (after building amazing products).

If I recall, the only thing the rumor mill has guessed near-correctly is when they have hardware updates. But that’s not hard to predict. If an Apple product becomes scarce and MacWorld Expo is within the next 30 days, it’s likely you’re going to see an upgrade. Apply some industry spec changes and viola, you have your product upgrade prediction.

Source: benjaminstein

130 notes

  1. boneforget reblogged this from benjaminstein and added:
    I cannot wait to see what Apple puts out!
  2. wendyokoopa reblogged this from benjaminstein
  3. misterfalcon reblogged this from benjaminstein and added:
    And if it’s good as the eventual Microsoft Courier, I’ll eat your hat.
  4. shlewkin reblogged this from benjaminstein and added:
    I don’t care much for the tablet, but this is funny.
  5. amberrl reblogged this from benjaminstein
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