With disappointments like these, who needs successes?
Will someone please page the lithesome yet strong-handed nymphs whose job it is to massage the furry one's scalp right between the antlers? The Macalope's got a headache again. — What's causing it this time?
Context & Ripple Effects
The Macalope has spent the second half of 2007 working the same seam: rebutting the argument that Apple-adjacent technology is perpetually not good enough yet. In September the furry one ridiculed David Berlind's claim that consumers should always hold off until something better than 3G arrives, and in October TidBITS' Leopard Moan gave the disappointment camp its fullest catalogue of grievances against OS X 10.5.
This column lands just as the 2008 expectation-setting cycle begins — Piper Jaffray's year-ahead outlook, picked up by AppleInsider, frames the coming year around iTunes rentals and a new breed of iPod touch games. The headline's rhetorical question reads as a jab at that genre: a year that produced those products still gets narrated as a letdown, and the Macalope wants to know by what standard.
First-order effects
- The column hands Apple's defenders a ready-made rebuttal to the disappointment framing, directly contesting the analyst-driven narrative that Piper Jaffray's 2008 forecast exemplifies.
- Commentators in the 'always wait for something better' school — the position the Macalope mocked in September — face renewed pressure to defend waiting as advice rather than reflex.
Second-order effects
- Rival bloggers and analysts have to engage the success-versus-disappointment question on its merits, since the counterargument now cites concrete shipped products rather than vague future promise.
- The exchange sharpens the split in Mac commentary between expectation-setters (analysts publishing year-ahead forecasts) and rebuttal voices, making each side's framing more explicit.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, annual product cycles get judged less by what shipped and more by which narrative — shortfall or triumph — wins the commentary war first, with analyst forecasts and partisan rebuttal blogs locked in a recurring seasonal duel.
The trend: Tech punditry is settling into a yearly rhythm in which analyst forecasts script the next year's Apple narrative and rebuttal bloggers contest whether the year just ended was actually a disappointment.