Editorial

Posted on 10 Aug 2009 at 17:30

 

Gallery

...say nothing. Except when Apple says nothing it usually means something.

Apple is famously shy. It's one of those clichés that's also a truism. Case in point, an email we received a couple of weeks ago explained that on one particular day, one of its employees could be quoted as an Apple spokesperson. And only on that day. After that they're just an employee again. So, get your questions in quick. Blink and you've missed it.

Frustrating though it might sometimes be, you have to admit that it works. Apple is still one of the most talked-about names in tech, despite the fact that it rarely talks about itself. If you don't believe me, just think about the way it can generate a lot of headlines for itself simply by saying nothing at all.

As we put this issue together, it updated Final Cut Studio and the Logic family. More than 100 new features, faster editing, camera framing and plenty of niceties to tempt the cash from our pockets. Yada. And how did it announce it? The loudest way it could. It pulled down the whole of the online Apple Store. It sounds like a toys-out-of-pram tantrum, or a glitch, but it's actually a genius marketing ploy.

Any online store that actually did need to be shut down to have two new products added would be a pretty poor show. Imagine if you'd bought an off-the-shelf retail application only to find you had to turn away your customers for a full three hours whenever you shipped a new product. You'd be demanding a refund. Unless you were Apple.

Updates usually take place late on a Tuesday morning, UK time, and every time they do there's a Twitter ripple, a bit of forum chit-chat and some Facebook speculation as word gets around that the Apple Store is down. The usual faces have a guess at what it might mean and all goes quiet until the unveiling.

But this time around the store went down on a Thursday. Highly significant? Nobody knew until it went back up, but in the hours it took for whoever controls the publish button to upload two pictures and a few blocks of text, supposition and desperate hope was coursing through the Mac-using social network space.

No other company could so successfully launch a product without gathering at least a hundred journalists in a stuffy room, running through an hour of PowerPoint slides and sending them home with a sheaf of key points and a disc of box shots and screen grabs.

All Apple needs to do is say... nothing. That's how admired a brand it is. That's how cool a company it is. And that's what it's doing next time you spot that the Store is down.

Just don't tell anyone: they know about it already.

Author: Nik Rawlinson