Enough With the Fucking Tablet

It’s extremely dis­turb­ing when I read some­thing insight­ful on TechCrunch. Imagine tak­ing anger-management advice from Mirror Universe James Kirk, or eti­quette train­ing from Tara Reid; some­thing about it just seems off. So you can imag­ine the dis­com­bob­u­la­tion I felt today when I read Anticipating the Apple Tablet: When jour­nal­ism becomes fan­fic­tion by Paul Carr. Paul makes a point that will be famil­iar to read­ers here and to lis­ten­ers of the Angry Mac Bastards pod­cast. The short ver­sion is, “until Apple actu­ally announces some­thing, shut the living-fuck up about the Apple tablet.”

Paul truly nails it with these two paragraphs:

But until the offi­cial launch announce­ment comes, I would rather not hear another word about Apple and their tablet. Not because it isn’t news – but because so many of the jour­nal­ists antic­i­pat­ing the launch have dropped any sense of respon­si­bil­ity to their read­ers and replaced it with cloy­ing fanboyism.

They claim of course that they’re dig­ging for facts – the name of the new prod­uct, its price point, its specs – because that’s what reporters do. Bullshit. What reporters do is find out things that peo­ple don’t want us to know. In seven days’ time Apple is going to announce the name of their prod­uct, its price, its specs and much more besides. Revealing those things seven days early isn’t news.

He’s exactly right. At this point the inces­sant cov­er­age of the Apple tablet is sci­ence fic­tion at best, and worth­less mas­tur­ba­tion at worst. I mean, is it too much to ask that Apple actu­ally announce the fuck­ing thing before we go declar­ing it a fail­ure?