Filed under: Analysis / Opinion, Apple
Apple Store team busy installing extra noise, additional funk
As has been widely emailed by our crack readers, the Apple Store is down as of midnight. We'd chalk this up to actual maintenance, but since it is officially Tuesday on the US East Coast, we'll give it the new-product benefit of the doubt. Some items, including Airport Express units and the Mac Mini, have been reported in limited availability mode for a while, so it's possible that we'll see some revisions come daylight. We also have been told that the iPod touch January Update is mysteriously unavailable for purchase at the moment (thanks Will!) so perhaps that's in play as well. Of course, it could just be, you know, maintenance.The question must be considered: are the Apple Store outages really technically necessary to update the store content, or are they a form of grass-roots marketing that primes the buying audience for something new? After all, Amazon, Dell and Newegg add products constantly and never seem to stall into these extended cones of silence. Is the Tuesday lacuna just a passive-aggressive way to get our attention, like a child throwing a sulk?
Recently, former Apple staffer Chuq von Rospach suggested via a Twitter response to Shawn King that the architecture of the Apple Store really, truly does require extended downtime to make changes to the product lineup. If that's the case, then this is an astonishingly powerful argument for the existence of the RDF -- only a marketing force capable of warping the fabric of space could turn an engineering flaw into self-generating hype with every minor tweak of the product line.
Update 7 am ET: Looks like it was only maintenance after all.
Thanks to everyone who sent this in!
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Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
Daniel Ray said 1:06AM on 3-11-2008
An updated Airport Express would be awesome. I have been thinking about purchasing one.
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jh said 1:47AM on 3-11-2008
Hmm yeh an update would be good, but seriously the airport xpress is real good as is. Airtunes works awesome and wireless printing is really good. also it works in well with a wireless/wired network from third partys so it is not in need of any updating. This being said it would be nice if it worked with xternal HDDs.
So in short, they are a good product and have very little that is needed to be updated
atuck said 1:59AM on 3-11-2008
Wait, is this new for the airport extreme?
"Turn a USB hard drive into a shared drive, accessible wirelessly by everyone on your network."
Is it just that Time Machine doesnt work like this, or have we been waiting for external Hard Drive support with the extreme?
Tom said 2:42AM on 3-11-2008
Atuck: no, that's been there since Jan 9, 2007. AirPort Disk doesn't work with Time Machine because Time Capsule is profitable.
ramin said 1:13AM on 3-11-2008
I ordered a Airport Express and it says ships by 21 march so I am guessing an update with N draft or something
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Tom said 1:22AM on 3-11-2008
it is obviously the missing midrange mac
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Ryan Valle said 1:47AM on 3-11-2008
i highly doubt that. a new mac model would probably be announced in a keynote of some sort. rather, its probably going to be just an update of some kind.
id love to see a price drop on the Air....
afrmx said 1:33AM on 3-11-2008
I'm sure the downtimes are because of the webobjects system used for the store. I tried it once, hated it, moved on.
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Joe said 1:35AM on 3-11-2008
Taking the store down for so long means less sales, so one would guessimate it's a bit more than maintenance.
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Tom said 2:48AM on 3-11-2008
Since Netflix is also down right now, one can only assume Watch Now is coming to the Apple TV
Libb said 1:35AM on 3-11-2008
I'm putting my non-existent money on iMac and Mac mini updates, they've both been getting a little long in the tooth and could use some nice upgrades to Penryn chips.
I'll put my long-shot bet on the item I have been wanting for months now - give me a quad-core iMac already!!! Now that they're 45nm, the thermal package should be low enough to slip it in there somehow...
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Chris Thomson said 1:37AM on 3-11-2008
It seems as though only the US and Canada Apple Stores are down. Come on Steve... iPhone in Canada!
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Billabong said 2:11AM on 3-11-2008
Yes iPhone in Canada! 2nd that!!!
daba said 1:45AM on 3-11-2008
New Zealand store up. :(
this means no international releases... boo!
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John said 1:54AM on 3-11-2008
@daba: There have been at least two (pink iPod & Time Capsule) international releases recently where only the US&Canada store was down. The international sites have been updated during the next few days without a take-down of the sites.
daba said 2:17AM on 3-11-2008
not true! the ipod touch update (32gb) & macbook updates all made the store go down in nz!
sam fisher said 1:48AM on 3-11-2008
surpirse it's a 32gig 3g iphone. I will buy it right now
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Sarnas said 1:55AM on 3-11-2008
a multi touch macbook would be nice and an iphone in canada too but i think thats to much to ask for considering wwdc in in april (gotta save some good stuff for that ) so i will settle for an upgraded imac. maby a memory upgrade somewhere in the ipod lineup or the 500 gb hd for mb and mb pro.
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atuck said 1:55AM on 3-11-2008
I can't stop myself from caring, which makes me ashamed
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Sarnas said 2:11AM on 3-11-2008
maby it's the mysterious "iThingy" that was on the itunes store? http://gizmodo.com/365583/itunes-store-private-page-shows-unidentified-ithingy
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