MacComedy

Webmasters who thought nothing would happen left stunned

Beyond the rumor sites. Way beyond.

This was one of the many tease phrases Apple posted on its web site in the days before Steve Jobs’ keynote speech at MacWorld San Francisco. Dozens of webmasters and editors at popular Macintosh rumor sites laughed, saying they knew perfectly well that nothing new would be annouced January 7.

Boy were they wrong.

At the keynote, Jobs annouced not one, not two, but three new products: a new iBook with a 14-inch screen, a new consumer application to easily organize and share digital photos called iPhoto, and the biggest surprise of all, a brand new iMac.

The new iMac was not only faster than earlier models, but actually sported a brand new casing which featured an LCD display — something that before Monday morning many people thought was only science fiction.

One keynote attendee couldn’t believe his eyes.

“An LCD display?” he said. “That’s amazing! It’s like we’re on the f***ing Starship Enterprise! The iMac is going where no PC has gone before.”

“It’s like a backstage pass to the future,” said another.

Some webmasters tried to figure out what could be “beyond” their imagination.

“When I first saw Apple say the Expo would be ‘way beyond’ the rumor sites, that really got me thinking,” said Ryan Meader of iSecrets.net. “I thought ‘What’s beyond nothing?’ Something more than nothing. Or maybe less. Then it was obvious. Not only was Apple not going to annouce anything, they were going to take something away. I thought for sure they were going to discontinue the PowerMac line. I wrote an article about it for my site.”

The day of Jobs’ keynote, Meader’s house was egged and his dog mysteriously disappeared, but it’s unclear as to whether those events are related.

“The biggest news we broke was about a week before the keynote,” said Nick dePlume, editor and webmaster of MacObvious.com. “We had an inside scoop that Steve [Jobs] would be wearing a black mock-turtle neck. We thought maybe jeans as well, but we weren’t sure.”

MacObvious.com has been leaking rumors about Jobs’ keynote attire since 1998 and has never been wrong.

Of course, there were the radicals. Some sites were ranting about a flat-screen iMac and some PDA called the iWalk. But most thought those sites were just trying to gather people’s e-mail addresses to sell to Internet pornography mailing lists for a quick buck. No one dared think they were telling the truth. (or half truth)

Many Mac rumor sites are now planning to take more risks with their predictions and “insider reports”.

“We’re planning to take more risks with our predictions and ‘insider reports’,” said Bengy April of AppleAppleHushHush.cc. “While most rumor sites are saying that the PowerMacs won’t be updated until sometime in late 2003, we’re going to go on record as saying we think they’ll be updated before the end of this year.”