Summer Apple Doldrums

Apple didn't wait until August when we go into a lingering state of inactivity or stagnation as many businesses do.

A lot of the inactivity came in June after the WWDC where Steve Jobs made a series of non-announcements -- a 3G iPhone that people had wanted in January at MacWorld SF, another follow-up announcement of the forthcoming results of the iPhone SDK and new apps on the way, and the long anticipated iPhone 2.0 upgrade.

One phrase mysteriously missing from Jobs cannon of keynote punctual was "Shipping today!"

Nothing he announced was shipping immediately after they keynote. No Apps Store. No iPhones in the stores until July 11th and no MobileMe. No iPhone 2.0 software update. Nothing appears to have been ready for WWDC, so Jobs made announcements of products that would be released on a future date. Apple stock, that had been surging toward $200 a share with predictions by analysts it would bound as high as $215, slipped back to $172 as of end of day Friday.

The following day, Fake Steve Jobs posted an hilarious spoof on the WWDC keynote called Holy Crap, I forgot to announce the new MacBooks in which he reports that the new MacBooks were ready to go and it completely slipped his mind to introduce them from the stage. "And I just spaced it. My bad," he blogs as first person Steve.

At the same time Apple has been remiss in addressing some of the major drawbacks to the iPhone software interface and hardware that was expected to be fixed. For instance, there has been no mention of remedy for problems such as no copy-and-paste function; the inability for the iPhone to read Flash or Java; upgrades to the camera and improving the keyboard functionality on the iPhone touch-screen. These are no brainer fixes that apparently just announcing a 3G iPhone (without shipping it) Apple feels will distort the reality field enough for the tougher questions to go unanswered.

MobileMe was probably the biggest surprise announcement, although, on this blog we had it covered the week before. Still, we have yet to see MobileMe roll out to the old .Mac account holders.

And so we sit in early summer doldrums brought on by Apple's meager menu of product roll outs and basic software fixes.