In the past Apple has tried to time product development cycles so that new products can be announced at one of the twice annual Macworld Expo shows: San Francisco in January or New York in July. This is the ideal time to make announcements because media coverage is at its peak and Apple gets the most free publicity for its new products.
But if you stop to think about it, what happens if a product is running behind schedule and won’t be ready in time for Expo. What happens is a product is ready early, without a major trade show to announce it at? A company as large as Apple does not want to miss a single day of product sales, even if the tradeoff is some lost PR.
The latter may be the case with the new iMac.
Apple is slowly moving away from the lets-announce-everything-at-Macworld line of thinking. Readers of this site will remember yesterday’s report that Apple may announce the new LCD iMacs as soon as the end of this month. According to sources, the new iMac announcement may occur as soon as Monday, 25 June 2001 when Steve Jobs gives the keynote address at NECC 2001 in Chicago.
Look for smaller trade shows and press events, like the one on 01 May 2001 for the iBook Dual USB, to become more popular with Apple as they start announcing products in real time. The trend of Macworldizing all product announcements appears to be on the way out.
