Apple: Using the News for Advertising

So, the story on many news sites today is the alleged excitement building over the new Apple product that will be announced today. The BBC article does its best to summarise all of the rumours and suggestions that have been zooming around the internet, while the Guardian goes one better, encouraging you (the reader of the Guardian, not the reader of this blog necessarily. Unless you are a Guardian reader as well, in which case it's ideal for you, isn't it) to "crowdsource" the details of this new product, allowing you to choose what you think the name, weight, price, etc. of this new product will be.

Personally I hope it'll be called the iHype (which is a good joke, but I stole it from somewhere, and I don't remember where, so I can't credit the person who thought of it. So consider it mine. :P) and that it'll consist of a single white box with a screen that just randomly displays the words "Thanks for paying for my new house. Steve Jobs."

As you may be able to tell, I'm not the biggest fan of Apple products. Don't get me wrong, they're well designed, and do the job required of them, but I don't see them as the big renaissance that people treat them as. The only item of Apple I would actually like is the iPhone, simply because it is well designed and helpful, but then you reach the other problem.

The cost.

Apple products are just so DAMN expensive!

So I have no plans to migrate to an Apple for a computer, or an Mp3 player, or a phone any time soon, and the launch of this "iTablet/iSlate/iPad/iWhatever they're going to call it" isn't going to have any effect on me whatsoever.

But what annoys me is that if any other major technology company was having a press conference to announce something, it might be considered worth one small article hidden away on a technology page, but when Apple does it, it's front page news... They don't need to advertise now, the news and hype is doing it for them. And that just seems wrong to me...

But anyway. I am now going to declare my hatred for this new product before it's even been launched.

*Deep Breath*

It's an over-hyped, pointless, over-expensive, overly-shiny piece of crappy technology with at least one major flaw in it.

I wonder if I'll be proved right? ...