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!
Reader Comments (Page 1 of 3)
3-11-2008 @ 1:06AM
Daniel Ray said...
An updated Airport Express would be awesome. I have been thinking about purchasing one.
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3-11-2008 @ 1:47AM
jh said...
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
3-11-2008 @ 1:59AM
atuck said...
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?
3-11-2008 @ 2:42AM
Tom said...
Atuck: no, that's been there since Jan 9, 2007. AirPort Disk doesn't work with Time Machine because Time Capsule is profitable.
3-11-2008 @ 1:13AM
ramin said...
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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3-11-2008 @ 1:22AM
Tom said...
it is obviously the missing midrange mac
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3-11-2008 @ 1:47AM
Ryan Valle said...
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....
3-11-2008 @ 1:33AM
afrmx said...
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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3-11-2008 @ 1:35AM
Libb said...
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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3-11-2008 @ 1:35AM
Joe said...
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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3-11-2008 @ 2:48AM
Tom said...
Since Netflix is also down right now, one can only assume Watch Now is coming to the Apple TV
3-11-2008 @ 1:37AM
Chris Thomson said...
It seems as though only the US and Canada Apple Stores are down. Come on Steve... iPhone in Canada!
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3-11-2008 @ 2:11AM
Billabong said...
Yes iPhone in Canada! 2nd that!!!
3-11-2008 @ 1:45AM
daba said...
New Zealand store up. :(
this means no international releases... boo!
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3-11-2008 @ 1:54AM
John said...
@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.
3-11-2008 @ 2:17AM
daba said...
not true! the ipod touch update (32gb) & macbook updates all made the store go down in nz!
3-11-2008 @ 1:48AM
sam fisher said...
surpirse it's a 32gig 3g iphone. I will buy it right now
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3-11-2008 @ 1:55AM
Sarnas said...
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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3-11-2008 @ 1:55AM
atuck said...
I can't stop myself from caring, which makes me ashamed
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3-11-2008 @ 2:11AM
Sarnas said...
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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