mpantone

anthogag said:

I am glad Apple is suing Prosser. Shut him up. 

What will sites like Macrumors do if loser leakers like Prosser are finally muzzled. They may go dark. 

ALL Apple news sites including AppleInsider -- not just MacRumors -- rely in part on publishing rumors. There's not enough Apple news volume to sustain a site if they just publish actual facts or discussed released hardware and software. If AppleInsider stopped publishing rumors my guess is that site traffic would fall off by three quarters.

Hell, this site posted a security warning about customer data privacy breaches at Qantas which had ZERO to do with Apple, iPhone, Mac, or anything tied to Apple. This site has repeatedly posted articles about security breaches that are written as though the problems are specific to Apple users even when they are NOT.

Note that the more absurd and farcical rumors seem to get more pageviews and reader engagement. There's a balance between publishing what everyone else is publishing and losing any modicum of journalistic integrity. That's why I have repeatedly suggested that AppleInsider and other news sites use a quantitative rumor scoring system like the StarMine system used for financial ANALysts. People who make money from predictions should be graded on their track record.

For many years this site used to slavishly report anything that ANALyst Gene Munster (often referring to him as "legendary analyst Gene Munster") used to spew until it became an SNL parody of itself.

News sites walk on a very narrow tightrope of driving pageviews and risking credibility.

Note that Prosser got the rumor right. He is accused of getting his information illegally. That's different than just making wild-arsed guesses and regurgitating it on the Internet. But for some of these rumor mongers, they don't have good inside sources so they just fabricate their "content".

AppleInsider is not immune from the same rumor-related factors that influence MacRumors, 9to5Mac, The Mac Observer, CNET, whatever.

Mike Wuerthele said:

mpantone said:

These rumors have gotten far more ludicrous over the past ten years with a big drop in believability after the pandemic. And not just Apple rumors, pretty much any sort of rumor. We've seen countless silly rumors about upcoming products, the whole Apple Car thing, the just-won't-die Apple Television Set thing.

There are rumors about Jonny Ives's device, iPhone cases, folding phones, the "HomeHub panel", HomeHubs with robotic arms. A lot of this has veered into satire, like an SNL parody of rumors.

And the people who agree with many of the most ridiculous rumors go out of their way to concoct absurd scenarios to back up the rumor.

A lot of this can be blamed on today's social media analytics methodology and monetization policies. It's worth spewing farcical nonsense because you make money, even if what you are spouting is twaddle. These rumors were far more reliable 15-20 years ago before smartphones became ubiquitous. Smartphones democratized the Internet but online content quality didn't get any better. Smartphones gave everyone a voice and with today's monetization schemes, shouting out preposterous nonsense is more profitable than carefully written, thoughtfully considered analyses.

It's a shame that legitimate media sites have to regurgitate this nonsense, even go into in-depth analyses about some of these "reports."

And remember that these finance industry professionals have been long referred to as ANALysts for a reason. It's not just the knuckle dragging vloggers and tweeters who are at fault here.

Rumor mongers don't have any qualms or embarrassment about circulating garbage. Even if what they are saying is worthless, they are still making money and if someone points out their mistakes, the online world quickly moves on to the next Rumor Of The Day. These online rumors (and social media in general) are really like digital junk food in 2025.

Good post. We covered all of these points in two pieces, very recently!

https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/07/04/tim-cook-isnt-going-to-get-fired-and-steve-jobs-isnt-rolling-over-in-his-grave

https://appleinsider.com/articles/25/07/14/hype-drop-sketchy-leaker-risks-reputation-to-cash-in-with-iphone-17-cases

More useful than a couple of articles would be a true quantitative scoring system -- like the investment world's StarMine -- for analysts and rumor spreaders. I've mentioned this repeatedly over the nearly 20 years I've been a registered AppleInsider community member.

Hell, there are advanced analytics for fantasy sports and a lot of this is used to build out stats for videogame characters (sports titles).

For 15+ years, Apple news sites happily regurgitated made-up nonsense from Digitimes while many savvier readers started assuming that anything predicted by Digitimes would actually end up being wrong. It became a complete joke about 10 years ago. Gene Munster was a complete joke yet this site and many others referred to him as "legendary". Same with notorious Apple-bear Katy Huberty of MorganStanley who naysayed pretty much anything about Apple for 15+ years. God only knows how many MorganStanley investors missed out on Apple's biggest years of shareholder returns.

This leads us to highlight one actual realworld usage: the inverse Cramer strategy which is to do the opposite of what CNBC's stock picker Jim Cramer suggests:

https://topdollarinvestor.com/does-the-inverse-jim-cramer-strategy-actually-work/

This site finally introduced an extremely primitive rumor score which seems to be at the whim of whoever writes the article in question; no methodology or explanation is given. I often end up questioning the rumor score just as much as the rumor itself.

Ultimately, there really needs to be a StarMine-like rating. And yes this rating can and should change. The score should be weighted toward more recent activity and rumor accuracy. It should also be time sensitive. Making a product prediction a day before launch and posting a rumor a year before are two separate things. An accurate long-term prediction would be weighted more heavily than something last minute.

There are rumor spreaders who end up losing their inside source, moles, tipsters, etc. and whose current rumors are really just guesstimates rather than anything based on insider/supply chain information. In the same way, you wouldn't give Clayton Kershaw or Justin Verlander the same MLB fantasy score today as they had back in 2015.

These rumors have gotten far more ludicrous over the past ten years with a big drop in believability after the pandemic. And not just Apple rumors, pretty much any sort of rumor. We've seen countless silly rumors about upcoming products, the whole Apple Car thing, the just-won't-die Apple Television Set thing.

There are rumors about Jonny Ives's device, iPhone cases, folding phones, the "HomeHub panel", HomeHubs with robotic arms. A lot of this has veered into satire, like an SNL parody of rumors.

And the people who agree with many of the most ridiculous rumors go out of their way to concoct absurd scenarios to back up the rumor.

A lot of this can be blamed on today's social media analytics methodology and monetization policies. It's worth spewing farcical nonsense because you make money, even if what you are spouting is twaddle. These rumors were far more reliable 15-20 years ago before smartphones became ubiquitous. Smartphones democratized the Internet but online content quality didn't get any better. Smartphones gave everyone a voice and with today's monetization schemes, shouting out preposterous nonsense is more profitable than carefully written, thoughtfully considered analyses.

It's a shame that legitimate media sites have to regurgitate this nonsense, even go into in-depth analyses about some of these "reports."

And remember that these finance industry professionals have been long referred to as ANALysts for a reason. It's not just the knuckle dragging vloggers and tweeters who are at fault here.

Rumor mongers don't have any qualms or embarrassment about circulating garbage. Even if what they are saying is worthless, they are still making money and if someone points out their mistakes, the online world quickly moves on to the next Rumor Of The Day. These online rumors (and social media in general) are really like digital junk food in 2025.

Here's the issue: out of all of these "smart home" companies, how many of them will be around in 5-10 years? This particular company happened to navigate through their first bankruptcy but how many more times will they go through this?

Now I know all companies were startups at one point. However I'm not willing to shell out any of my hard earned dollars on "smart home" gadgets until there's reasonable evidence that the technology is ready for primetime. The X10 days are past but this technology is still kludgy at best.

At this point, I welcome smart home device manufacturers to offer freebies to beta testers instead of charging up the wazoo for prototype gadgets. Because that's what most of this stuff is right now. It's not the hardware that's the problem, it's really the software. Someday, probably after I'm long gone from this planet, someone will finally figure this out. Plugging a "smart lightbulb" into a socket shouldn't require any fiddly configuration routine. MY MOM NEEDS TO BE ABLE TO DO THIS WITHOUT CALLING ME.

Get that? WITHOUT CALLING ME...

Meta's grand Metaverse vision is the failure. Their actual shipping VR hardware is acceptable and competitive.

I have an Oculus Rift S and it fulfills most of its 6+ year old limited usage cases at close to 1/8th the price of the AVR (not adjusted for inflation).

AVP has a clearly better display and refresh rate but those aren't not the sole metrics. My geriatric Rift S is WAY lighter and that's super important for VR HMDs, even if it's an ugly piece of Lenovo-manufactured plastic-wrapped crap.

The AVP is both too expensive and too heavy to be of much interest to Joe Consumer. This has been the ongoing problem for VR HMDs for the past 30+ years and Apple is continuing this dreadful narrative.

Stop sugarcoating Apple and their overpriced AVP. It is not worth its price which is why Apple quickly scaled back production.

And this discussion isn't limited to fancy VR hardware. Google Cardboard is pretty much dead because no one want to wear their smartphones on their heads, even if the mounting hardware is nearly free.

Stop thinking of VR as the Next Big Thing because it's not. Hell, wireless earbuds took over the world because Joe Consumer hates the bulk of headphones. VR HMDs have their place in some commercial, enterprise, and scientific workloads. The user experience sucks for 95% of Joe Consumer's waking hours.

And I'll point out right here that this tangent was brought to us by an AppleInsider staffer. This is supposed to be a thread about AI researchers and their salaries which is what I covered in my first response (reply #2).

At least stick with the bloody topic if you are going to hold forum participants to that same criterium.