On Reporting Rumors

With Apple’s WWDC keynote less than a week away, most of the Internet has lit its hair on fire and is running in circles, moving from one rumor site to another, trying to glean information on what Tim Cook and company might announce.

While a look at Mountain Lion and iOS 6 seem inevitable, rumors now say the entire Mac line might get updated. They’ll have Retina displays, or at least USB 3. Google Maps is getting kicked the curb (perhaps), on Apple’s fancy-ass, big-and-tall iPhone 5. (Or iPhone 6. OMG WHAT DO WE CALL IT?)

At the very least, sources say, all of Apple’s new hardware and software will include a new coating of unicorn fairy magic dust.

There’s no denying that rumors drive a shit ton of page views. Lots of people are genuinely interested in them, and they fill the time leading up to an event, but I think we as “Apple bloggers” are over-doing it.

With the large number of Apple-centric websites, it seems more and more like the whole scene is a big echo chamber. While some writers do have sources within Apple, the majority of them do not. Some in that majority write like they do, anyways.

This means that a story gets bounced around 100 times, with 100 mediocre writers adding 100 mediocre points to it. By the time I hit refresh in Reeder, what should have been a simple story is all over the place.

It’s all very tiring.

So, this morning, I deleted the “Apple News” folder from my Google Reader account.

We’ll see what sites make it back in there after WWDC.