Rumor Roundup: The 150-pound iWatch

Here's a riddle for you: what weighs as much as 150 pounds, but might also not exist at all? No, it's not your "girlfriend who lives in Canada." We'll ponder the real answer to this question later on.

Apple to deliver OS X 10.8.5 with Mail, screen saver fixes as soon as today (AppleInsider)

This article was posted August 26. It's September 3 as I write this, and 10.8.5 still hasn't been made publicly available. You're only 8 days off (so far), AppleInsider. Excuse me, "sometimes reliable" AppleInsider.

Retina iPad mini housing leaks in huge photo gallery (BGR)

"The case looks a lot like the current-generation iPad mini housing of course, though there are some subtle differences." Don't feel like you need to actually point those differences out or anything. If you did, you might actually lend some credibility to this rumor, and we just can't have that.

High-res photos claim to show iPad 5 front panel (9to5 Mac)

"The photos are consistent with what we're all expecting: essentially a scaled-up iPad Mini, with thinner bezels on the sides." Because this is consistent with what we're all expecting, you can also expect pundits to go frothing-mouthed insane once this product is announced. Minus 4000 quatloos to the first moron who unironically says, "It's just a big iPad mini."

Apple's September 10 iPhone Media Event Said to Also Include New iPads (MacRumors)

Hahahaha... nope.

More evidence points to iPhone 5S, iPhone 5C launch on September 20th (BGR)

Said "evidence" is really just mobile carriers like T-Mobile blacking out vacation days. Now here's a question: do these companies actually know the official launch date for these products, or are they just making an educated guess?

EXCLUSIVE -- iPhone 5S, iPhone 5C launch date seemingly confirmed by AT&T vacation blackout (BGR)

BGR eventually removed the "EXCLUSIVE" from this article after commenters pointed out that other outlets had published this story days earlier, but I've included it here "for the purposes of discussion." By which I mean "pointing and laughing at them."

And now for this week's biggest thing: leaked photos of the low-cost iPhone.

Analyst rantings and ravings aren't worth the pixels they're printed on, and "sources from the Far East" are flat-out wrong with hilarious regularity. Yet even though it can be faked, to me photographic evidence is usually the next best thing to having an Apple exec debuting an item onstage at an event. All this is a roundabout way of saying I'm convinced: the iPhone 5C is a happening thing.

With that out of the way, let's move back into the realm of pointless speculation and brain-damaged fantasy.

Apple projected to ship nearly 65M 'iWatch' units priced at $199 in first year (AppleInsider)

Some analyst floats some nonsense numbers for a completely speculative product. For some reason, this is reported like it's actual news. Attention AppleInsider and the rest of you rumor blogs: please just accept that these so-called "analysts" know precisely Jacques-merde about Apple and stop polluting the Internet with their re-reported nonsense.

Apple iWatch rumored for 2H 2014 launch, priced between $149-$229 (BGR)

Hey, speaking of sources not worth paying the least bit of serious attention to, "Digitimes cites an analyst" --BZZZZT, super-duper-mega-ultra-fail. Next!

The Boy Genius Report: The Apple TV that no one understands and the reinvention of television (BGR)

"It's not a rumor, but a fact that Apple is looking at bringing a game-changing TV experience out of Cupertino." Oh really? And your evidence is... what exactly?

*crickets*

I thought so.

"you can only fit so many 150-pound televisions in boxes on a plane"

Someone please remind BGR that this is the year 2013. Even today's biggest flatscreen TVs don't weigh nearly this much. Hell, I have a 40-inch LCD, and I can carry it in one arm easily. The issue isn't the weight, but the unwieldy size of the thing.

Mudslinging temporarily aside, I must take this opportunity to reiterate that Apple making its own HDTV makes absolutely no sense. BGR is mostly wrong about why it doesn't make sense, but at least they're making the effort to dust off their critical thinking caps.

And now, let me share with you what is hands down the dumbest thing I read in all of August.

What if Apple's iWatch is... a TV? (TNW)

Immediately after finishing this article, I wrote this on Twitter: "There's so much concentrated stupid in this article that it's hard to know where to begin."

Let's start at the very beginning: a very bad place to start.

"We are allured to the newest devices on offer because of some minor improvement that was actually invented many years ago, but we just weren't allowed to have it before."

Yes. This is exactly how technology works. It has nothing at all to do with optimising technological developments for mass production and making them cost-effective to deploy on a wide scale. It definitely has nothing to do with testing these things thoroughly before unleashing them on eager but fickle consumers. No; companies selfishly hold back their innovations until they're damn good and ready to release them. Right now, Google has a fully-fledged holodeck in its basement in Mountain View, but the jerks won't actually release it to the public until 2037.

"Over the past few years, [Apple's] stream of 'awe-inspiring' products seems to have dried up a bit, or at least hit a blockage in the pipe of creativity and innovation."

MEME ALERT: Apple can't innovate anymore. A touchscreen computer that fits in your pocket and is more powerful than a Mac Pro G5? Yawn. Another touchscreen computer the size of a paperback book that requires zero training to use it? Whatever, innovate faster. A notebook computer that weighs less than a kilogram with all-day battery life? MEH.

"Is it just me who feels this? No. The Internet speaks about it all the time – there's volumes of discussions out there"

And we all know that the vast, dramatically idiotic echo chamber that constitutes the Internet is the ultimate authority on Truth with a capital T. YouTube comments are where I usually go for my daily dose of "discussion."

"Apple's share value has consequently taken the hit as a direct result."

No. Apple's stock price has tanked due to a combination of analysts having unrealistic expectations for continually and exponentially increasing financial performance, a media obsessed with trying to distort every last fact about Apple to fit its "how the mighty have fallen" narrative, and (likely) a dash of good old-fashioned stock manipulation by some shady characters.

"Why is it that a company that has more resources than it has ever had cannot compete on the stock market with Google and Amazon, whose shares continue to rise?"

Because the stock market has become completely decoupled from anything resembling logic or sanity. Apple continually turns in earnings that any company would be overjoyed to report -- including Google and Amazon. Yet because the inmates are running the asylum in the USA's financial institutions, companies who are turning in modest profits see their stocks rise while Apple, turning in record profits quarter after quarter, sees its stock price tank. There's your answer for "why": stupidity, plain and simple.

"Apple doesn't do niche products, as they would tarnish its overall reputation."

Um, what? Here's a short and by no means all-encompassing list of products Apple has introduced over the years that started out as niche products. You may have heard of them:

• The Apple I


• The Macintosh


• The iPod


• The iPhone

And those are just the ones that succeeded. We'd be here all day if I listed all the niche products Apple has ever released. Hilariously, the most arguably "niche" product Apple sells right now is -- wait for it -- the Apple TV.

"TV [...] taps into a $39 billion market. A watch couldn't command even 1% of that market's earnings."

Apple reported quarterly revenue of $35 billion over the three-month period ending in late June. In three months, Apple's revenues nearly equalled those of the entire TV industry. Tell me again why Apple should give a rat's rear about the TV market?

"Many households have more than one TV. It's a gold mine."

No it's not. It's a boondoggle. People don't view televisions as a disposable, commodity product. The same consumers who'll happily upgrade to a new iPhone every other year will hold onto a television until it dies. I'm about as big of a technology hound as you'll find, yet I've owned a grand total of three television sets in the past 18 years. Meanwhile, I've owned four iPhones since 2009. Tell me again why Apple should get into the TV market?

"So let us imagine you are Apple and you're going to bring out a TV that actually profits mainly from its content."

In other words, let us imagine that Apple completely upends its hardware-centric profit model and decides to operate more like a video game company, or Google, or Amazon, or Microsoft. Let us also imagine that anyone who floats this as a serious idea has any clue what they're talking about when it comes to Apple's business model.

As for what this guy expects the Apple HDTV to be like, here's how it breaks down:

• Gesture-based interface (like the Kinect) -- no remote


• 65 inches


• "simply invisible and unobtrusive"


• "screen technology will most certainly be OLED"


• "It's likely to be a 4K resolution screen"


• "The unique selling point in terms of design could be a curved screen"


• Priced at "a level that others cannot match"


• Made in the USA -- even though it's more expensive

In other words, a bunch of hugely expensive technology that Apple has shown no interest in adopting, slammed together in the USA (somehow) and offered for less than the $10,000 that existing televisions using these technologies are selling for.

There's "magical thinking," and then there's this.

"A 65" TV is a rather large object to ship in and distribute. If it's made in the US, then suddenly the cost of shipping decreases which goes towards counteracting any extra labor costs."

Sure -- unless you want to ship this product to that niche market known as the rest of the world outside of the United States of America.

"If Apple doesn't act NOW, it will miss the biggest chance of its corporate lifetime."

Yes. Grabbing a thin slice of a highly-competitive, low-profit market with limited opportunities for consumer turnover is the biggest chance of Apple's corporate lifetime.

"I certainly am not one of those loudmouth, one-sided online trolls and to many people's surprise, given my love for technology, I have never owned or bought an Apple product in my lifetime."

I am shocked, shocked that someone who has never owned an Apple product has been able to demonstrate such "insightful" knowledge of the company's likely future direction. Please, tell me more.

"I have no intentions of doing so, either. The principal reason is due to Apple's eagerness to be separate and monopolistic which suffocates future innovation."

MEME ALERT: Apple is Big Brother, "walled garden," etc. ad infinitum ad nauseaum.

"[Apple] can turn things around beyond these minor innovations and has the potential for a massive profit gain from this TV – a TV called the iWatch."

No. Just no.

Here's the good news. This article was terrible enough that its writer has an extremely promising career ahead of him as an Apple analyst.
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via TUAW - The Unofficial Apple Weblog http://www.tuaw.com/2013/09/03/rumor-roundup-the-150-pound-iwatch/