MacRumors founder Arnold Kim makes a very interesting point regarding the rumored new MacBook Pros and iMacs that Piper Jaffrey analyst Gene Munster unleashed on an unwitting public yesterday. Like many others, I was fairly impressed that Munster took the trouble to determine the average life cycle of both iMac and MacBook Pro generations.
Well, as it turns out, Munster might not have calculated the numbers himself:
These numbers correlate exactly to the [MacRumors] Buyer’s Guide averages. Some have asked couldn’t he have come up with these numbers on his own? It’s possible, but exceedingly unlikely as he would have had to choose the same releases (2002 PowerBook, 2003 iMac) to start counting in order to achieve the exact same averages.
Kim also implies that Munster’s assumption that Apple will release new Macs at WWDC might be directly drawn from an earlier ThinkSecret report, which makes the reliability of tech analysts’ reports about Macs questionable. Which they absolutely are.
Apple is the rare computer company that won’t play nice and let analysts see their stuff earlier than the general public. There’s no question that most reports or based on assumptions and reading rumor sites. I do question a commenter’s conclusion that any of this is new. From what I can tell, the Mac rumor sites have been ahead of the analysts since the day Steve came back.
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