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It's There, It's Not, It's Back (10/19/04)
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Stop the big rolly-stampy things! You know, the, uh, printy doohickeys. Presses! Yeah, those. Stop them, because big news is afoot. Do you remember when Amazon started taking preorders for Mac OS X 10.4 (aka Tiger) last week? Apple hasn't publicly set a release date any more specific than "the first half of 2005," and that was given by Steve way back in June, so when Amazon listed a ship date of March 31st, Mac fans everywhere wondered if the company had accidentally let slip some juicy inside info, as if Steve Jobs and Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos went bowling and Steve had one too many Michelobs or something.
Personally, we were skeptical that there was anything that interesting going on, given that resellers apparently have to provide some tentative ship date for any product for which they want to accept preorders, and Amazon's Tiger date just happened to fall exactly in the middle of the official "first half of 2005" range. But then suddenly Amazon stopped accepting preorders, and the March 31st ship date disappeared; Amazon's Tiger page reported instead that "this item is not stocked or has been discontinued," which we found to be a little odd. The product was obviously "not stocked"; neither are any of the gazillion other items for which Amazon racks up preorders. So why pull the tentative release date?
Well, here's the latest: as MacMinute points out, Amazon's Tiger page is once again accepting preorders-- and the ship date has been updated to "June 30, 2005." So what's the deal? If Amazon was just pulling a tentative ship date out of thin air in the first place, why bother changing it from the middle of Apple's range to the very end-- unless Steve did mention a little something about Tiger development lagging a bit after doing JELL-O shots with "Beer Bong" Bezos?
Okay, so it's all the thinnest of speculation. Still, we found it strange that Amazon would pull its preorder page and then reinstate it with a new ship date three months farther in the future. But even if the dates themselves mean nothing (as they probably do), it is nice to see that Tiger is once again available for preorder, because that makes the product eligible for Amazon's lists and rankings. When last we checked, Tiger's sales rank had dropped to 153, which doesn't sound all that impressive until you remember that this is for preorders of a product with a stated ship date of over eight months from now, so a rank of 153 sounds more than respectable. Furthermore, Tiger is Amazon's "#16 Early Adopter Product in Software"-- which is three notches higher than the Windows XP Professional upgrade. You just gotta love it when a product that ostensibly won't ship for two-thirds of a year ranks higher than its competitor that's available right now. (Yes, we know that XP has a sales rank of 62 and is actually selling better than Tiger. Don't step on our buzz. Jeez.)
By the way, we'd be sorely neglecting our duties as shameless money-grubbing content prostitutes if we didn't mention that, should you be moved to preorder Tiger this far in advance, you can buy it through this Amazon link and we'll get a few bucks when it finally ships. No pressure, though. It's not like anyone's going to call you an ungrateful freeloader or anything. At least, not to your face.
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SceneLink (4989)
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 | | The above scene was taken from the 10/19/04 episode: October 19, 2004: New iBooks and a low-cost Power Mac did, in fact, show up, but Apple states that new PowerBooks won't surface until 2005. Meanwhile, Apple also ships a new Xserve RAID with a cost-per-gigabyte price of roughly what you'd spend on a bag of Tater Tots, and Amazon is once again accepting preorders for Mac OS X 10.4-- but the reported ship date is now three months later...
Other scenes from that episode: 4987: Dashed Hopes Can Be Fun (10/19/04) And once again the rumor mill comes through with the goods; mere hours after we'd mentioned the buzz that Apple was about to disgorge a trio of revamped iBooks and a new low-cost Power Mac config for the ravenous consumption of the credit-abusing masses, faithful viewer John Maton was first to inform us that all four machines touched down exactly as predicted on Tuesday morning... 4988: Hands Up-- This Is A RAID (10/19/04) Say, buddy, can you spare a couple of bucks? We could use an extra gigabyte of storage right about now. See, the rumor mill may have left us with no surprises as far as the new iBooks and Power Mac are concerned, but Apple did manage to squeeze one newly refreshed product in under anyone's radar: according to a company press release, Apple's Xserve RAID storage system now packs up to 5.6 terabytes of storage into its same semi-svelte three rack units of space-- and all for a price that, according to Apple, represents "the industry's most aggressive price for storage of just over $2 per GB."...
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