Engadget: iPhone, Leopard försenade - Apple: Inte då

This one doesn't bode well for Mac fans and the iPhone-hopeful: we have it on authority that as of today, the iPhone launch is being pushed back from June to... October (!), and Leopard is again seeing a delay, this time being pushed all the way back to January. Of 2008. The latest WWDC Leopard beta will still be handed out, but it looks like Apple-quality takes time, and we're sure Jobs would remind everyone that it's not always about "writing a check", but just how much time are these two products really going to take?

Update: While our source that provided us the information is solid, we just heard back from Apple PR -- they let us know that the iPhone and Leopard are both still on track, and should meet their expected launch timeframes. We'll keep you up to the second with any further developments.

You may have received what appeared to be a Bullet*News from Apple. This communication is fake and did not come from Apple. Apple is on track to ship iPhone in late June and Mac OS X Leopard in October.

It took only seven minutes for Apple to fall to its intraday low of $103.42 from $108.83. Apple was trading below $105 for only two minutes, but in those two minutes more than 2.2 million shares were traded.

In the volatile 23 minutes of turmoil between the minute the disinformation hit the stock market at 8:55 PST and Apple’s announcement that the initial email “is fake and did not come from Apple,” nearly 15 million shares changed hands. That’s 60% of Apple’s normal volume in well under a half hour. That’s also an awful lot money lost for some investors - and gained for others - all of it because of a lie.

Pity the poor investor who sold Apple shares at $103.42 per share, today, after reading a blog report on delays to the iPhone. The rumor, posted to AOL's Engadget gadget site early this morning, briefly knocked $4bn off Apple's market value.

There is some intrigue, though: the bogus email was sent through Apple’s internal email-to-every-employee system. Just a prank, or part of scheme to profit from the false news?

A fake email was indeed sent to an internal email Apple distribution list as described. The source of the fake email is unknown, but an internal investigation has been launched at Apple to seek out this individual. There is speculation that the author of the email was an ex-Apple employee.

Well, I wrote the listserver used to distribute groups internal to Apple, so I can comment on this (a bit). The easy answer is "hell, no, Apple's not an idiot". But that doesn't mean the server can't be spoofed; any email system can be spoofed if you understand email and study the system. Someone here clearly did. It's even somewhat possible that the message originated offsite (depending on how the list was configured), but one thing I can guarantee -- wherever it originated, there was someone on the inside of the company who put time and energy into understanding how to spoof the system to make this work.

I got a surprising (to me, at least) amount of email regarding my calling Engadget’s Ryan Block a jackass for his post on the bogus “iPhone and Leopard are both delayed” email. The question on many readers’ minds is how Block could have known, or even suspected, that the email was fake.

Easy: Because there was no actual press release from Apple.

[...]

Apple cannot release news like this internally before issuing a public statement. It’s not just good manners, it’s the law. (And if it had been true, they almost certainly would have had to admit these delays during their shareholders meeting May 10.)