Archive for February, 2008

Digitimes… Now An Accurate Source of Apple Information

Friday, February 29th, 2008

Last year, I wrote an article about how Digitime’s accuracy with relation to Apple-related rumors had been very poor. It based on their historic results at the time. Things have changed considerably, however, and I try to give credit where credit is due.

Over the past year, Digitime’s accuracy has been remarkably good with respect to Apple related rumors, and I now pay close attention to their reports. All the following reports turned out to be true:

Leopard Delayed
LED Apple Notebooks
Wifi/Flash iPod
13.3″ Screens for upcoming Apple Laptop (ended up being the Air)
September iPods

So, good job Digitimes…

Posted in Mac Web, MacRumors.com | No Comments »

I Wish Articles Would Make Sense

Thursday, February 21st, 2008

As MacRumors editor, I read a lot of random articles…. and one of the most frustrating things is finding what sounds like a good relevant article… which at first glance seems fine, in the end, doesn’t quite make sense.

Here’s one I found yesterday:

Why Apple’s secretive approach is so effective – some researchers studied the effects of pre-announcing and not pre-announcing products and how that affected consumer spending.

It’s this pre-release hype makes people much more careful about what they buy. If you tell them that something is coming at some point in the future, they will evaluate everything that’s out there very carefully. But if you just drop something into their laps, all they’ll think about is the brand. And if they like that, ker-ching!

To sum up:

Pre-release announcement = more cautious buying habits
Immediate release = impulse buying

The article presumes that Apple takes advantage of this psychological tendency. The problem lies in the exact definition of “immediate release”. The research article isn’t published yet, so we have to rely on a press release.

If you define “immediate release” as actually available in stores (to see and touch), then Apple’s brand new products rarely fall in this category. Apple TV, Apple TV 2.0, iPhone, MacBook Air all had week to month lead times before they were available. The iPhone, itself, was 6 months from release, and no pre-orders were possible.

So how does this help prove the author’s point? I don’t think it does at all.

Now if you redefine “immediate release” to “can preorder immediately”, then an argument can be made for the MacBook Air. Apple announced the Air, and you could impulsively buy it, without doing research. Ok sure…

But what about Apple TV? The original one (codenamed iTV) was pre-announced months in advance, even before it adopted the “Apple TV” name. So, this would argue that Apple suffered (not benefited) from this pre-announce strategy.

What about the iPhone? Apple pre-announced the iPhone on January 9, 2007. No pre-orders were available and it wasn’t available until June 2007.

It was a nice theory, with some actual research to back it up, but in the end Apple’s “secretive approach” seems to have no correlation with this research.

Posted in Mac Web, MacRumors.com | 8 Comments »

Understanding Sites. Hurdle to adoption?

Sunday, February 3rd, 2008

Besides my usual website activities, I tend to pay a lot of attention to the nature of the websites, and like to explore what’s been popular and what’s not. For personal interest as well as research for potential new projects.

In particular, I’ve had an interest in news sites in particular. Be it, full articles, or just headline/link aggregators. I tend to look at a lot of sites and have a my own opinions on whether a site “works” or not.

I think for the geekly oriented, Slashdot probably represented one of the first regular news site that many of us visited with any regularity on the internet. It’s no secret that MacRumors was modeled after Slashdot’s look and feel… and for good reason. Slashdot made sense. Stories posted in reverse chronological order with the “best” stories posted to the top and moved down sequentially. I suppose it didn’t have to happen that way… but that’s the popularized format (and I’m not necessarily saying Slashdot established it, but it was my first real exposure).

The problem is that there’s a lot of the new sites I’ve seen is that I feel don’t make sense. But it wasn’t until I read a blog post about the relaunch of a site called Topix.net that I’d ever seen it articulated.

In researching how their site “sucked”, they actually did focus groups on their site. And what did they learn? That their pages “didn’t conform to any standard web page metaphor”.

People don’t lean forward and squint at web pages to figure out how they work anymore. They instantly recognize — within 100 milliseconds — which class of site a page belong to — search result, retail browse, blog, newspaper, spam site, message board, etc. And if they don’t recognize what kind of page they’re on, they generally give up and hit the back button.

Now, this isn’t to say there isn’t room for innovation, and doesn’t explain the skyrocketing success for a site like MySpace, but it does make you reconsider when trying to launch or design a new site.

It also explains some frustration that I’ve run into when trying out the newest Web 2.0 sites that pop up every day. If the site doesn’t immediately make sense, I don’t generally spend too much time to try to figure it out. No matter how great your site really is, capturing the attention of your audience is your first hurdle.

Posted in Business | 2 Comments »