My theory: Apple has nothing to announce. And when you’re diminishing the role of Steve Jobs as the public face of Apple, you don’t use him to roll out a 17″ MBP and a Mac Pro speedbump. Even a new Mac mini probably doesn’t rise to the new threshold of Steve-ness. Some entirely new product that nobody was thinking about? Sure. Is there one on the horizon? Unless you buy into the netbook hype, nothing really springs to mind.
Now as to why they waited so long…maybe they did have something to announce, something big, and it’s not going to be ready. But again, I can’t think of anything that would be big enough to warrant the shift up that wouldn’t have all its Ts crossed and Is dotted by now if it were rolling out at MWSF. No…I think that for the first time in a long, long time, the cupboard is bare, and Phil gets to roll out there and put a brave face on it.
At least he has the Sharks, though. I’m not going to challenge him on anything hockey THIS year.
How about this…
Things Apple, Inc. (or, as we like to call it, Steve Jobs) is tired of:
1. Product announcement leaks
2. Health Speculation regarding CEO
3. Stock price plummet as profit takers sell immediately after product announcement events
4. Rumor sites inflating expectations
5. Rumor sites and product leaks giving a head start to competing products
6. Jeans/Black turtleneck jokes
So, really, if your stock is getting pummeled (relatively speaking) after each of these events, and the way things are going now with the economy, do you want to keep stacking those pebbles (the stock drops) when things seem to go downhill in a hurry? I don’t. I think pulling out of the 2009 event might have been a good idea for this reason, except that might have even caused more rumormongering about CEO health/company health/being out of products.
I don’t know that the cupboard will be bare. Steve has pulled off a good sell job on some bare cupboards, and managed to keep the fans in line. Schiller doesn’t have the RDF working for him, so unless it’s just going to be an exercise in flopsweat, he needs some product backing him up. I have absolutely no idea what that would be, though.
Plus, you can’t win with January product releases. The people who just bought the swag for Christmas get bitter, you don’t get the big end-of-the-year cash infusion, and people who didn’t buy your stuff at Christmas probably did buy other stuff, leaving them with less money to spend on your stuff. With its relatively low pipeline overhead, it seems like Apple should release .edu stuff in the late spring/summer, consumer gee-gaws December 1, and Pro stuff somewhere ahead of NAB.
Then again, there are several reasons I’m not director of marketing for, well, anything.
MacPros, until they ready a new front side bus, will probably stick with the dual quad-core setup. Over 8 cores apparently hinders performance. So, same with XServes. I am still holding out for the killer SuperPro setup with a complete computer in the house to which you can plug in your laptop, access both HDs, and utilize both processor sets, as well as, in 10.6, the GPUs, for computation. The design and architecture of this is left as an exercise for the people with actual talent for that sort of thing.
The laptop line will be rounded out at some point. If this involves a tiny little laptop, so be it, but the 13″ MacBook is not exactly weighing me down.