Apple's online store goes offline
Major hardware announcements slated for Monday's WWDC keynote
If you had any doubt that Apple would be announcing new hardware on Monday, doubt no more.
Here's what Apple's online store is displaying in the hours before the 10am Pacific Time keynote presentation at its 2012 Worldwide Developer Conference (WWDC):
Backstage web admins are busy behind the scenes on Monday morning
It's not unusual for Apple to take its online store down briefly during a keynote presentation. In fact, Jobsian keynotes were traditionally ended with a musical act while online-store switcheroos were in progress – for example, the final San Francisco Macworld Expo keynote was memorably ended with Tony Bennett singling his signature "I Left My Heart in San Francisco".
But Monday's multi-hour takedown is an unusual move, perhaps signaling – as has been widely rumored – a comprehensive redo of the entire Macintosh line, along with the introduction of iOS 6 and further details of the next version of OS X, aka Mountain Lion. An iPad mini? Possibly. The next iPhone? Unlikely.
For reasons known only to themselves – though we have our suspicions – Apple's PR worthies have banned Reg reps from company events. Nonetheless, we'll be monitoring today's developments closely, and will provide Apple news and El Reg views as the day progresses.
Stay tuned. ®
COMMENTS
Masterful PR
Every other company manages to update Web sites with new products without bringing the whole site down for several hours. I'm sure Apple does it purposely to raise a kerfuffle. You have to admire their chutzpah.
Downtime...
...is for the buzz. Seems to be working too. No 'retina' display on air though :(
Oi, stop it!!!!!
All the speculating is already giving the fruity litigating gits enough airtime - at least El Reg has deigned not to have a live feed on their website like the rest of the fawning media - even the bloody Torygraph!
Angry of Buckinghamshire
Grrrrr
Re: Eh?
"What company needs to take a site down to make changes?"
My bank quite regularly has multi-hour outages, typically in the middle of the night, where they do maintenance on the systems.
Does apple.com still rely on WebObjects? Anyone ever worked with it? I'm curious if that deprecated technology has something to do with Apple's inability to transparently roll out updates.
