It seems like every year, Apple waits until just before the Mobile World Congress to find someone to leak some information to that overshadows the entire convention, and this year is certainly no exception. And this year the news is not that there will be a cheap iPhone 4 for sale, of that they will only be selling their products via penny auctions, but it’s almost as good. And even though we never know the exact details of what is going on in Steve Job’s funny little head until sometime in the summer, it’s always exciting to get a little bit of a taste of what is to come.
This time it was the Wall Street Journal that came forward and said that they might have managed to get some super top secret information from someone at Apple who is well ensconced in the company and is privy to all kinds of information, the likes of which would blow the minds of mere mortals if they were to even hear mention of the types of products that are being built over there in California. However, every now and then, someone manages to whisper in a little bird’s ear about a few of the things that we might be seeing in the future, and this time it was the notion of a smaller version of the iPhone, or an iPhone “Nano,” if you will. They even had a codename for this bad boy and everything: the N97.
Just the fact that they managed to come up with such a cool codename gives this story a sense of legitimacy, but as soon as the Wall Street Journal broke this story, the New York Times, loathe to be outdone by a bunch of beltway bozos, printed a story that all but debunked the previous notion of a smaller iPhone, and they say that they are in possession of information that points to a cheaper version of the iPhone 4, which will be of a similar size, but with seemingly inferior parts, or something like that.
This is one of the beauties of the Apple marketing machine. They release just a little bit of information that may or may not true, and when they’re able to keep their engineers from losing their prototype devices in bars, they manage to keep everyone completely in the dark about what is actually happening. But everyone loves to speculate, and everyone wants to be able to point back at a story that they wrote and say, “See, I told you so. I told you people that I knew what was going on before anyone else even had the slightest inkling of what Apple was planning, and so I am, therefore, the best computer-guessing guy that there ever was. Worship me.”
It’s fun to speculate, but it is also a lot of fun to actually use all of these products that Apple comes up with every year. From the iPod to the iPad, I’ve had fun with all of their products, and can’t wait to see what they come up with next.
