Actually, as I mulled over today’s new iPad event and its implications, I’m struck by how little of the conventional wisdom about these rollouts feels like wisdom. Much of it is crude, out of date or just plain wrong. Including some of my own assumptions.
So here are seven things that a lot of people seem to believe they know about Apple’s events. The more attention you pay, the less they ring true. I think of them as, well, mythperceptions.
Conventional wisdom: Apple is astoundingly good at keeping its secrets secret. Everybody knows that Apple goes to absurd lengths to prevent anyone from knowing about its product plans until it’s ready to reveal them at an event like today’s bash. Except…it’s now the norm for most of the raw facts about new Apple hardware to leak ahead of time. A rational observer who knows which reporters to trust can usually figure out the gist of the news a day or three ahead of time.
The major points about the new iPad? It’s got a Retina display, LTE, a better camera and a faster chip, and the case design and battery life are holdovers from the iPad 2. All reported by reliable sources in recent days.
I’m not saying that Apple has lost its capacity to startle. As far as I can tell, nobody figured out ahead of time that it was planning to announce OS X Mountain Lion last month. But if you assume that these Apple events are interesting because they’re jam-packed with surprises, you’re not doing your homework.
Conventional wisdom: Apple events are always amazing. The original Mac was amazing. The iPhone was amazing. Possibly the first iPod and the first iPad. And I do recall my eyeballs popping out of my head when I saw the impossibly tiny original iPod Nano.
Most of the new Apple products announced at these events, however, are revisions to existing products. And revisions are rarely amazing — even if they, like the new iPad, sport multiple major improvements. And even if Steve Jobs was prone to treating routine updates as epoch-shifting breakthroughs.
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