Anil Sharma

My take on the Apple iMac, Mac Pro and Cinema Display updates

While it’s exciting to see Apple update a major part of its hardware lines, I won’t talk about the newly released hardware and their specifications etc – you can easily check that information on all tech sites right now. What I’ll talk about is the way the buildup happens to these launches, leaving a lot of people excited and some, disappointed.

If you’re a regular Apple fan, you will know by now that Apple is highly secretive of its new products and makes no announcements ever of what it intends to launch. This has created a whole ecosystem that thrives on rumors, primary amongst them being sites like www.appleinsider.com, www.macrumors.com etc. In fact, these sites monitor all releases of products and help potential customers make informed decisions about buying Apple products. Like all Apple fans, I visit them regularly and keep a track of what they post.

They were able to predict today’s launch of new iMac’s, Mac Pro and Cinema Displays well in advance. However, a few of their predictions were 100% wrong, a few things that were announced were never predicted and some of what they predicted turned out to be true.

Here’s an example :

On 16th July 2010, www.macrumors.com predicted that the new iMac and Mac Pro range would get USB 3.0 and Firewire 1600. These are powerful features, when the new range was launched today, both these features were missing from the new models.

Instead, the new iMac range got an upgraded graphics card, higher speed Ram and an advanced SDXC slot – none of which were predicted by any of the rumor mongers.

The only part that these rumor sites got correct were that fact there updates were expected and the processors would be of higher speed – something that Moore predicted in the year 1965

Apple also launched the new Magic Trackpad today. No one was aware of this impending launch till a day before the launch when John Gruber predicted it.

What these sites manage to do is raise expectations in the market place, build up the noise and create an environment where Apple fans go crazy. It’s exciting to see these new products. However, it’s disappointing to note that fake expectations raised by some of these free sites leave a bad taste. If Apple worked towards a better strategy of announcing new products will in advance, it would probably keep staunch customers satisfied.

As far as I am concerned, I love the new iMac’s. The 27″ iMac with a faster quad core i5 processor, 1GB Graphics card upgraded from the previous 512 and a faster 1333 Mhz RAM for the same price I was willing to pay 2 weeks ago – sure !

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