Great. Expectations.
There's a delicate balance to Stevenote expectations. The hype drives us all to pursue every shred of information leaking out about the big day, right up to mere moments before Jobs takes the stage. The rumors, the patent filing, the retail store stock levels …
Context & Ripple Effects
This piece lands at the peak of the Macworld 2008 rumor cycle, and the corpus frames exactly why the stakes feel high. When the iPhone launched in June 2007, Scobleizer concluded that it lived up to every bit of hype — setting a precedent that a Jobs keynote can clear an inflated bar rather than merely meet it.
A week before the show, Business Week was already reading Apple's next move through its Intel relationship, showing how supply-side reporting had joined patent filings and retail store stock levels as raw material for pre-keynote speculation. Ars's point is that this information scavenging is no longer peripheral — the rumor apparatus now co-writes the keynote's reception before Jobs says a word.
First-order effects
- Jobs takes a Macworld stage where the benchmark has been set by weeks of leaked signals — Intel-related reporting, patent filings, thinning retail stock — so the keynote competes against the audience's own accumulated expectations, not just last year's products.
Second-order effects
- Rumor-tracking outlets and analysts gain a recurring traffic and authority engine around each Stevenote, giving them an incentive to escalate speculation with every cycle; Apple's retail channel, meanwhile, becomes a signal source in its own right as stock levels get parsed for what ships next.
Third-order effects
- If the pattern holds, expectation management hardens into a structural part of Apple's launch strategy — secrecy plus controlled information flow turns every keynote into a market where the pre-announcement coverage, not the product demo, decides whether the company is judged to have delivered.
The trend: Apple's product launches are evolving into recurring expectation markets in which rumor economics, not the announcement itself, set the standard for success.