You know what the most important element of comedy is? On Tuesday, I wrote a piece about how Core 2 Duo MacBooks that were reputedly available from pre-order from a British site, Play.com, were the result of nothing more than a typo. It was, I thought, a solid theory: the MacBooks are less than six months old, to bump the processors now, just after a bump in Apple’s pro-level notebooks, seemed absurd.
Now I wonder if Steve Jobs just likes messing with me. Twenty four hours later, we have brand new Core 2 Duo MacBooks. Yep. Didn’t see that one coming. Took an iPie to the old iFace, I’ll admit.
But I wasn’t wrong about Play.com. I was a little suspicious that, as I’d noted in the original piece, the alleged Core 2 Duo MacBook specs were identical to the Core Duo MacBook specs. Contrast that with the actual specs for the new Core 2 Duo MacBooks, and you’ll find that they’re slightly different. The new Core 2 Duos come with slightly larger hard drives for the mid-range and high-range models, and both of those also ship with 1GB of RAM, as opposed to the 512MB in the original models. Play.com has now updated its site with actual listings for the Core 2 Duo MacBooks, due on 11/20, a week after the 11/13 ship date of the MacBook Pros.
So, was this a leak, a coincidence, or some clever speculation on Play’s part? I don’t know, but I lean towards the middle answer. I wouldn’t start sitting on Play’s website, hoping for a tantalizing glimpse of Apple’s next hardware announcement. Then again, that’s why I’m not MacUser’s Prognosticator General.
Oh, yeah: Timing.
Mmmmm... iPie. But will the black cherry cost more than the banana creme?
;)
Of course, but it also has 15% more filling standard.
=P
A simple isolated human error explains this incident in its entirety. Play.com obviously arranged to sell the new Core 2 Duos. Since whoever writes the specs is probably a different person than whoever writes the headlines, the leak happened in the headline but not the specs. This assumes only one error by one person, which I find more likely than a pure coincidence.