Well, what Think Secret giveth, Think Secret taketh away. The retraction post happened to be on the morning of the 9th, when hopes were looking grim for an announcement, as if to cover their own a**es.

The other rumor sites took the hard news a little more gracefully, but they were still wrong. What does this mean for the Mac Rumor Network? Well, it doesn’t do much for their approaching-zero credibility, but I have a sneaking suspicion that many, if not most people will go on believing what they say anyway.

However on the Apple side of things, things may be different. It must be a real pain in the a** for Steve Jobs when the Rumor Network gets everyone’s hopes up and Steve’s got nothing to release. It almost makes Apple look like the bad guy. “Here you got all of our hopes up only to crush them with no announcement?!” Um… no. Apple stayed silent (as always), and let the Rumor Network run circles around itself.

So what now? Well, people may be checking the apple.com constantly every Tuesday for the next 6 weeks. Or, the Mac Faithful could take a dose of reality and a side of maturity and realize that it’s only true when it comes out, not any time before.

If, May 10th rolls along, and Apple hasn’t released anything, or they release a $100 leather case to hold your headphones, it will be a big let down. If they release a MacBook or more, there will be major celebrations the world over.

Because of the giant rumor network surrounding their company, Apple gets free drama and publicity before they even announce a product, even if it is just a $100 leather case to hold you headphones. It works so well for Apple, they should really be paying these rumor sites instead of suing them…

Pretty interesting; here’s his website if you want a more in-depth explanation. Enjoy!

Not many people really worried about the whole “early adoption” issue. Everyone assumed that Mac OS X was now mature enough for that not to be an issue. And for the most part, they were right. There were a few minor bug issues, but looking back on the release, there weren’t many initial issues.

This highlights a uniqueness of the Mac Culture. Apple has created, almost singlehandedly, an entire culture or cult of people rallying around, of all things, a company. Not just through the release of Tiger, but through all most of their products over the past, well, 20 years.

Will this happen again? Absolutely. We’ll almost definitely see people lining up at Apple Stores the world over waiting to get their hand on Leopard (Mac OS X 10.5).

(click the image for full size)

I personally don’t think there will ever be an iPod this exquisite, but if there ever was, this comes pretty close to what it would look like.

I blew him off completely when he first contacted me, because, well, he’s a guy who’s trying to get a new 20″ iMac for free off of a bunch of strangers. … Please don’t help this guy, whom I really can’t blame for his optimistic effort.

So what does Cult of Mac recommend that those of you with burning holes in your pockets do with your money? How about donate it to some third graders? The idea was to collect donations to buy a third grade classroom an iMac. However, they’ve since got all the donations they need:

We reached full funding on the iMac before 1 p.m. Pacific — way less than 30 hours after the drive started. … And if you still want to give, or if you’re PC user, explore Donors Choose.

The video link can be found here; I would embed the standard YouTube player, but I'm having problems getting that up, so just watch it from their website.

What makes this an interesting example of Mac Culture is not just that he’s attempting this, but that he already has over $900. It makes you wonder if Stefan would’ve ever got that money if he just said “buy me a new computer”, instead of “buy me a new Mac”. This shows, that in the Mac Culture, people are not only willing to pay money to support their favorite company beyond buying their products, but are willing to pay money to help someone they don’t know support their favorite company.

This is especially significant because before Apple’s last event many rumor sites proudly predicted that Steve would introduce a “true” video iPod. However, only Intel Mac minis, a soon-forgotten stereo system, and $99 leather iPod cases. The Mac Rumor Mill has been getting less and less accurate in recent months, seemingly basing its rumors off hopes, not actual information. However, they may be getting back on track, or maybe they just had a lucky guess this time.

This blog is about the Mac Culture: the good, the bad, and the just plain weird. Here are some things we will try to do:

1. We will not be posting about every product announcement that Apple makes. Instead we will be posting about the reaction on The Internet and elsewhere to that announcement. (And probably not even the same day, a few days after.)
2. No simply reposting rumors. Everyone probably knows about them already anyway.
3. No posts on how Steve Jobs (praise be unto him) and Apple are gods.
4. Every post should have a central point/topic and stick to it. (This is true for every blog, but we thought we’d state it anyway.)
5. There will be no scheduled posts. We may do mini-series posts, but we won’t have a “weekly” whatever.

There is obviously a lot of Mac Culture out there, or we wouldn’t attempt this. In the next few days, we’ll be putting together a list of Mac blogs for the sidebar. From there, who knows!

By the way, “On The Outside Looking In” can be shortened into the acronym “OTOLI” and can be pronounced “oh TOL ee”.