Apple has come a long way from the time when not even the engineering team working on a product would know what it really was until Steve Jobs unveiled it on stage. Now everything gets leaked like at every other company.
Before the GM leak, we had no idea how the status bar and face recognition would operate. Now we know all of it.
Unless Apple has other hardware in the pipeline or another hardware feature for the TV or Watch, there will be no surprises. I'm sure the execs are pissed, as they want people to watch the keynote completely unspoiled.
Just because Apple has a reputation for being secretive doesn't mean they are in this case. Most companies don't go around advertising plans to open a new office or their CEO's meeting schedule.
Really doesn't. Apple has never actively released who works for them except their leadership team, they never put up fake web pages, they never prerelease products.
This would be a complete 180 in terms of their style and behaviour.
I've always heard that Apple culture is secretive to the point where multiple people working on the same product can be talking about the same thing without realizing it (since each team has different codenames for the same product).
If you don't write favorably about Apple, then they don't invite you to the press releases. So their hands are no cleaner, just far more transparent and public.
I think that's because whenever Apple releases a major new product, it's Jobs who personally announces it in a high-profile presentation. And because Jobs is well known as the CEO of Apple, the press prefers to simply state that Jobs announced or introduced the product. Partly because it's more factually accurate, and partly because Jobs is less abstract an entity than Apple while just as familiar, which is always preferred in writing for large audiences.
Other companies, in contrast, don't have well known CEOs and/or their CEOs don't bother to personally do the announcing. It seems like most tech products get announced with a press release. Maybe there's a press kit if they want to get fancy.
I don’t think there’s any secrecy left nowadays with Apple’s hardware, just a theatre. Their presentations are the least surprising of all tech firms - partly due leaks part due to super conservative feature development (if any).
Parsing exec shuffles from PR-speak is hardly specific to Apple. What I'm looking forward to are the "anonymous" leaks to All Things D (or whoever) over the next couple days.
Any evidence for that? We don't get to see the counterfactual of Apple being far more public about what they are building. And we have no idea whether their focus on secrecy is causation or correlation to their success.
I wonder how happy Apple is about a CEO from a partner company effectively pre-announcing their efforts here. Sure, it wasn't secret, but it was also not covered by the press before.
"But the only way this is possible is if every single Apple employee is able to hold every single Apple product line in their head at the same time."
Ridiculous. Apple has an incredible amount of secrecy across its different departments. Functional orgs don't require the hoi polloi to know everything, as long as mgmt does.
Yeah, I think Steve Jobs was the one that put in "fashion" the paranoidal "paradigm".
I think its a "well played" move on both ends, this guarantees apple that their projects will be kept hidden until they find "trustable employees" within their ranks and also every time they are about to release something new they create such "drama" that people get interested months before the release.
I have a friend that works at an Apple Store and yeah, they keep thinks really hidden and secured until the release data.
Everyone knows who the CEO and key executives are since they are visible at every product release.
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