When The Press Does The Work For You
Posted by scottjduffy on June 5, 2008
Everyone and their grandmother is now expecting Apple to release a new iPhone in the coming days – dubbed the 3G iPhone. Expect thousands of old, Edge-network iPhones to show up on Craig’s List or eBay the moment the new phone is announced.
The remarkable thing about this event is that we are even talking about it. Honestly, how jealous is Motorola and Nokia right now at Apple? Motorola can come out with the RAZR2 and barely get a mention in the technology press. Sure, they can get a few mentions when the product officially rolls out… but can they get this?
From Forbes:
The real action, however, took place behind the building–and could only be seen from the parking lot of an adjacent company on the other side of a shallow creek. Workers hustled to maneuver pallets of the brown boxes around trucks from FedEx and Advanced Logistics. The area was crowded with more than a dozen empty trailers from “Xtra Lease” and others.
All around the trucks, workers wheeled around pallets of the plain brown boxes, some using forklifts, others with hydraulic dollies. A security guard working for the company across the creek from Quanta’s facility approached this reporter before a thorough survey could be made.
…
The plain brown boxes could contain almost anything, of course: Apple’s mysterious new tablet computers, new Apple notebooks, even a product for one of Quanta’s other customers. Or the boxes could be bursting with dozens of the stylish cartons Apple wraps around its iPhones.
Reporters are actually staking out the warehouses of anonymous suppliers for Apple. Seeing dozens of unmarked brown boxes, they automatically begin speculating on the contents. Could be another Apple device other than an iPhone, or it could be from other customers. But of course, the reporter is only there because he wants the scoop that it’s the new iPhone.
How does Apple pull this off? A combination of huge demand for it’s products (10 million iPhones sold) and their notorious secrecy. Most companies are trying to announce their products weeks in advance, to get people excited at the prospect of owning one. Apple doesn’t even mention it, doesn’t even leak any bits, announces the product at a developer’s conference and there will be line ups around the block the next day. Genius.
