Apple’s silence is louder than most companies’ announcements

Macworld

Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized roundup. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to give it a read during lunch or dinner hours too.

The sound of silence

Consternation in Macworld’s virtual workspace last week, as editors clashed over how we should cover the earth-shattering news that Apple… had tweeted a photo of a lugubrious Adam Scott. As it happened, we decided in the end to largely ignore it (other than this article, I suppose… whoops!), and I can live with that. But it did make me think about the power of knowing when to keep quiet.

For the record, you see, I was in favor of writing about the Scott shot for the simple reason that it came from Apple itself. Sure, the tweet contained no actual announcements at all, and almost certainly referred to the simple news that the eagerly awaited Severance season 2 (as was confirmed elsewhere by director Ben Stiller) is back in production after multiple delays. Or maybe Apple just wanted to remind people that the show exists. Or maybe it was simply praise for Scott, who was nominated for best actor at least year’s Golden Globes and Primetime Emmy Awards but lost.

We’ll never know, because Apple basically never comments on launches that haven’t happened yet—even seasons of popular TV shows—and the fact it was doing so, even cryptically, felt somehow momentous. Can’t we take this as an indication that the new season will be here soon, I tearfully begged my colleague Jason, but he was adamant that it did not mean that, no matter how much I wanted it to. And he was right.

Still, it’s amazing how much more people pay attention when you’re not constantly tugging on their sleeves. Apple in this regard is a sort of reverse boy-who-cried-wolf. Imagine if the boy never ever commented on the whereabouts of the wolf over a period of years, and indeed became known for his obsessive secrecy as regards wolf sightings, sending around paranoid memos about leaks and refusing to allow his sheep to work from home for fear they might spill the beans to their loved ones. In that context, you’d figure the villagers would be hanging on the boy’s every word, right? They’d be eager for wolf news, desperate to hear the latest wolf info. There would probably be a healthy ecosystem of websites devoted to the latest rumors about when the next wolf will appear, as well as its likely design changes and new wolf features.

Compare Apple’s strategy to those of rival tech giants. Ahead of I/O 2023, for example, Google straight-up confirmed that its Pixel Fold would be discussed at the event. It didn’t send round invitations with the not-so-cryptic tagline, “Folding Money,” or have Sundar Pichai mention in an earnings call that he thinks foldables are a promising market, it just gave out the information using normal words. That’s not how you generate rumor buzz, guys. Learn from the best.

I’ve moaned quite a few times about last year’s lack of major Apple announcements, as Vision Pro caused a resource drain for other products. But I wonder now if Apple played it about right. It ran the obligatory events—you couldn’t go a full calendar year with no iPhone launch without tanking the stock price, and WWDC is relevant in ways that go beyond new products—but it kept them short and sweet, skipped the spring event altogether, and generally played things cool. When Vision Pro arrives, Apple watchers will be hungry for something big to chew on, rather than bloated after filling up on bread. And if the company can still trigger a rumorganza by tweeting a photo of a melancholy actor, its groundbreaking new wolf–sorry, I mean mixed-reality platform–is sure to get a lively reception.

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And with that, we’re done for this week’s Apple Breakfast. If you’d like to get regular roundups, sign up for our newsletters. You can also follow us on Facebook, Threads, or Twitter for discussion of breaking Apple news stories. See you next Monday, and stay Appley.

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