One thing I'm surprised about (or maybe annoyed actually) is how, with time, the rumored Apple tablet has become something certain to compare other products to. Even though nobody has ever seen one.
Specially publications with articles like "Microsoft's Secret Plans To Kill Apple Revealed". I've never seen so much linkbait crammed into seven words.
People aren't, in their minds, comparing anything to a fully-realized "Apple Tablet"—they're just comparing things to their vision of a 8.5x11" iPhone, however close or far that is from the truth.
It's a page straight out of Microsoft's playbook. Microsoft pulled the same shenanigans with Cairo and we're still hearing about how some of the features promised back then (WinFS) are right around the corner. It's really not a bad strategy at all. You assume very little risk by not having to actually produce anything, chip away at any foothold a leader might establish and then release your own incremental improvement if your competitor shows there's a viable market.
In Apple's defense they haven't announced anything and I doubt the leaks we've seen were planned by Apple (since they're all over the place in regards to features). Microsoft would actually announce the product and then not deliver when their competitors folded.
There's no need to defend Apple. It's not necessarily a bad thing. It may annoy some people, but it's hard to argue its effectiveness. So-called leaks are another good method. You get to see which ideas resonate with consumers before investing in their development.
I remember a Joel article (at least I think it was Joel) about a slightly similar concept. He talked about putting a link in a web application to some feature that didn't exist yet. Then you would track the number of 404 hits on the link to gauge interest.
I see what you're saying and I don't really disagree. I'm just not sure that's what Apple's doing. The problem with Apple is many of their fans are so rabid that they'll fall for even the most ridiculous leak. Steve Jobs says his Toilet paper's scratchy and there will be fake Apple toilet paper leaks on the Web by sundown. So it's hard to tell when Apple's actually leaking and when it's just everyone going crazy.
> Intel squeezed AMD very hard with a lot of "Merced" hype, and look what happened.
Intel started taking market share back from AMD when they returned to delivering CPUs with better $/performance, and $/watt/performance, in 2007. While AMD was building better mousetraps, they steadily took market share; nobody outside of HPC was taking IA-64 seriously beyond about 2004 anyway.
