It never ceases to amaze me just how often Apple rumours and predictions get it wrong. Sure, trying to guess what is happening in secretive 1 Infinite Loop is tricky, but in many cases it is immediately that the rumour cannot be true. It doesn't seem to matter all that much whether it is an Apple rumour site or an established news outlet. To wit:
- A Mac tablet, if it ever appears, will not, repeat not, have a DVD drive. Slot loading or otherwise. Apple always tries to get rid of as much functionality as possible, without harming a products' core functionality. More broadly, Apple as tries to limit the number of overall design concepts. A concept introduced once is likely to find its way into as many products as feasible. This makes designing a new product easier, as it will have to conform to these kinds of "current practices". For the user this encourages a kind of unconscious, instant familiarity with new Apple product. In this case, the Macbook Air shows the way: exit DVD drive.
- No Apple product will ever split itself into multiple, independently useable parts. Fancy design concepts not withstanding, not single Apple product has ever done this. It's fidgety and prone to breakage. Apple always focuses on providing simple tools that do a limited number of things really well and communicate with other products for those functions peripheral to it's raison d'être but not core enough to make it into to core featureset. Example: iTunes on the desktop supporting the iPod and iPhone and Pages using iLife's media browser. This focus on simple devices run counter to the idea of click-clack component systems, which will always be more complicated then near-single-purpose devices.
- On a similar note, Apple doesn't like moving parts. If it moves it introduces design complexity, a multitude of additional parts to assemble and again the risk of breakage. This is why Apple jumped on slot-loading DVD drives early on for example and why it replacing the wheel on the original iPod with the current version, which doesn't physically rotate. So say goodbye to the idea of clamshell or slider iPhones with - gasp - keyboards. Notebooks with hinged screens that close on top of the keyboard are probably seen by Apple as a necessary evil, just like the "home-button" on the iPhone.
- Apple doesn't care about market-imposed limits and does and don'ts. Just because flashram is expensive and not available in sizes similar to todays laptop HDs doesn't mean they're not usable in a product. See the Air again. Therefore, trying to imagine next-gen Apple products based on todays constraints is often an exercise in futility.
- You're not the target audience. This is a harsh truth for many hardcore Apple fans and analysts alike. Apple's amazing blend of high-tech, user-friendliness and flawless execution has won it many fans in the tech sector. If you are reading this, the chances are you are one of them. But as important as these early-adopters and tech-freaks can be to Apple, their core audience is average Joe, the user. A person who uses computers largely because he has to and who buys devices either because they are either cool or understandibly practical. He is happy for any functionality he can actually understand and has little or no need for advanced-"anything". This silent-majority of buyers is what primarily accounts for Apple's revenue, not über-geek blogger X. It is therefore easy to find blog-posts decrying the lack of certain features in Apple products. This however, never seems to stop people buying them anyway and Apple obviously knows this. Many rumours go wrong here, by adding endless potential features to the rumoured device. Strip away half the features or more and you're often a lot closer to the truth.
- Just because a concept has been tried in vain in the past (by Apple or others), it doesn't mean Apple won't try it again. Apple is often late to market with their products. iPods weren't close to being the first MP3 player. Just the first really sensible one. iPhone wasn't the first mobile phone or even the first with a big touch-screen or installable software. Just a really good execution of the concept, built when the time was right. As big a buzz as there was around PDAs, they are now all but extinct and subsumed by smartphones. That doesn't stop the iPod Touch from selling, eventhough it can do most of what a regular PDA used to do. Often looking back at failures of the past or even things that weren't practical at the time, gives more insight than merely extrapolating today's successes.
Sure enough, many more reasons can be given. Most of these are really just common sense mixed with a dash of computing history. Still, analysts and rumour-mongers (the one is often the other, but not always the other way around) would do well to give their predictions a once-over based on these and similar rules.
