Thursday, January 06, 2005

How Not to Keep a Secret

by Tom Bozzo

Sue the web site carrying rumors of your new product announcements, claiming that an article describing a "G4-based iMac without display" improperly discloses trade secrets. (Additional details here. My favorite is a respondent's pseudonym, "Nick de Plume.")

Conclusion: a 'headless' iMac will likely be announced next week at Macworld San Francisco (rumor is, it will run about $500). I'm generally glad I resisted the siren song of the aluminum PowerBook on my futile search last week for a Titanium battery.

Addendum: If the rumor is true, Apple will finally reprise (in a way) my favorite computer after the PowerBook — my slim 1993 Centris 610, later upgraded to a PowerMac, which carried me through about 75% of my dissertation research. Of course, I thought the G4 Cube was really cool, too, and never got one, though the Cube was a lot more than $500.

Fun Activity Monitor fact, how times have changed department: as of this moment, Firefox is using 3.14 times more memory (real + virtual) than the old Centris had combined RAM plus hard disk space.
Comments:
It's true that Apple sues - or threatens to - rumors that are right in the end, but they also sue the some of the false rumors. I wouldn't take for granted this cheap headless Mac for granted, since it's been a long-term fantasy of Apple fans but agains't Steve Jobs' philosophy.

A PowerBook user,
 
Mozza, that's a useful caveat, and I did try to stop short of offering a Macworld wager.

One possible indicator of a completely new product is that there don't seem to be any channel-clearing discounts on offer (in the U.S.) for any of the existing lines, except for the displays. I haven't read anything about product availability in the existing lines, which would be another imperfect signal.

While Steve Jobs has pooh-poohed the entry-level market, much of the iMac G5 engineering would carry over to an elegant small system. This may be a test of how stung he was by the failure in the market of the Cube.

Reports of PowerBook G5 test articles have been in the rumor mill for some time, too, as you may well be aware. I do think that he had better announce either the PowerBook G5, a headless iMac, or perhaps both, or face a large reduction in the value of his Apple restricted stock holdings!
 
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