Shooting Engadget

A lot of people shot the messenger yesterday about Engadget’s news release claiming iPhone had been delayed. What happened was that Apple employees received what they thought was an official memo saying iPhone and Leopard had been delayed. Engadget then reported on that announcement.

What really happened was some nefarious individual spoofed an Apple internal bulletin, and managed to make it look good enough to trick Apple employees.

Of course, people blame Engadget for getting the story wrong. I’m going to defend Engadget here and say that this could happen to anyone. We would have reported on the same thing. Apple didn’t secure their internal bulletins (not that they really need to… but it would have avoided this), and Apple’s stock plunged temporarily because of it.

Engadget came out today and basically confirmed this. But, not good for them. One of my problems with the media is that they’re wimpy. Instead of falling on the sword, they should say “hey, if you don’t want real-time reporting, go elsewhere, we’re busy.” They should be willing to have enough of a thick skin to come out and rebuff detractors. They’re not, and we shouldn’t have to do it for them.

The same thing happens with lots of devices (PPC-6800 remind anyone)? If the PPC-6800 were to magically ship tomorrow, we’d report it. If the iPhone ships/gets-delayed/blows-up tomorrow, we’d report it. And we’ll continue to report the best information that we have available to report. We think you wouldn’t want any less.