So Apple very quietly refreshed its desktop line this morning, the iMacs are faster, the Mac Pro now has 12 cores and displays were refreshed a little too. You can read all about that on Engadget and all the other Tech Blogs. Oh and they also released something called the Magic Trackpad: a slick aluminum track pad slab that already 80% bigger than the current 4×3 inch MacBook Pro trackpad. So it’s roughly the same size, in height, as the Bluetooth keyboard. It’s very cool looking and of course I already want one.
There was one thing that surprised me with this product launch, Apple didn’t really launch it, at least now in the traditional fanfare style of the september iPod refresh or the previous WWDC Mac announcements which have now become iPhone/iDevice announcements. So the most surprising thing that Apple did this morning wasn’t very surprising at all, they simply launched the product and probably tipped off a few blogs and then let the Social Media go crazy and build it up all the while staying rather quiet. And yet the new TrackPad went viral and trended WorldWide on Twitter to second place in a matter of minutes. So what you want about the products and it’s users, but this is one company that knows how to get great looking well polished products to market and then let the market generate interest in them without having to go a Hype Tour. It seems that Apple is quite happy to let their customers do the hyping, especially when many of their customers also write blogs, have podcast, or run Internet broadcast networks. All of this noise then usually attracts the TV Networks who seem very pleased to report on anything out of Cupertino these days. I’m not sure if this is a new record for Zero to Trending on Twitter, but it did strike me as pretty cool that an unexpected product like this one would suddenly take over the web. I just hope the Bluetooth antenna is in the right place.
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