Philip Elmer-DeWitt, writing for Apple 3.0:
Apple has moved up by two days its final quarterly earnings call of fiscal 2016 due to what Apple Investor Relations calls a “scheduling conflict.”
What’s the conflict? Why Tuesday Oct. 25 and not Thursday Oct. 27? Apple didn’t say, and reporters’ inquiries (including mine) were met with silence.
And, among the rumors encountered for the change:
The best guess for the date shift, in my book, was also the most popular:
A launch event for new Macs
Just food for thought, here are the October events since 2010:
- Oct 20, 2010, Wednesday – Back to the Mac
- Oct 4, 2011, Tuesday – iPhone 4s
- Oct 23, 2012, Tuesday – iMac, iPad 4th Generation, iPad mini, Mac mini and MacBook Pro 13 inch
- Oct 22, 2013, Tuesday – iPad Air, iPad mini with Retina display
- Oct 16, 2014, Thursday – iPad Air 2, iPad Mini 3, 27-inch iMac
Notably, there was no October event last year.
I feel like this rumor is being floated without any accompanying logic. In order for this to be true, the Mac introduction would have to be locked to the 27th. The only possible reason I could think is that if they were hosting it at an external location and that is the only date available that week. Other than that, what would be the reason for needing to move the date?
Wouldn’t they prefer to announce things earlier in the week vs later in order to get better media coverage? That said, the date might just come down to when a venue is available.
Looking at that list of previous Oct events though, just announcing a MacBook Pro doesn’t seem to be enough for an event. Not much in the rumor mill. What else?
New Mac Pro?
New monitors?
4K Apple TV?
iPads? Doesn’t sound like it’s happening ’til spring.
With A10X benchmarks already floating around I think the iPads will be sooner than Spring.
I vaguely recall that there is some kind of SEC law against making any corporate product-related announcements less than 2 weeks before a quarterly report. So the product announcement would have to come after the report.
Isn’t there a moratorium on big product announcements ahead of a quarterly call by the SEC?
It seems pretty implausible this was related to SEC quiet period. It’s not like Apple set a date for quarterly earnings and then Tim went, “Oh dang dudes. We were going to announce new product and it totally slipped my mind.”