Mountain Lion: How Apple Let Us Do The Work For Them

On this week’s episode of The Talk Show, listeners were treated to a recap (as well as a few behind-the-scenes details) of John Gruber’s experience with the Mountain Lion unveil.

At one point in the conversation, John, Dan, and John Siracusa (was it ever mentioned why he was there? If it was, I missed it.) were discussing why Apple had chosen to unveil Mountain Lion in the way that they did.

The consensus seemed to be, as Gruber pointed out in his Mountain Lion piece, that Apple knows that their unveil events are “precious” and that using them too often would decrease their overall value.

While I don’t think that idea is wrong, I thought that they all missed a somewhat obvious alternate explanation—minus the actual two hour on-stage performance at the Moscone Center, was this “reveal” all that different from any other in recent years? Besides morons like me following along with sketchy liveblogs, the number of tweets seemed to be the same (a ton), there was almost instant griping by the haters about how many of Apple’s AMAZING new features were already yawned-about features on other OS’s, the blogs and tech sites covered the stories, the second level blogs covered their stories, we all got to see plenty of video footage of the OS in action, and then Apple released the preview, developers downloaded it, etc., etc.

I loved the opening sentence of Gruber’s MLP:

“We’re starting to do some things differently,” Phil Schiller said to me.

When I first read that, and even after reading the article, as well as the other Moutain Lion coverage, I interpreted “differently” as “not as secretive.”

But as every day brings another iPad 3 component piece leak to the Internet, it dawned on me that the Mountain Lion unveil might have been Apple’s first totally leak-free unveil since the iPhone era began. Nobody was able to look for clues on the Moscone Center events page. Nobody was able to photograph the banners and signage that had gone up night before. Apple didn’t even have to send out invitations in which they hinted at what would be talked about.

My theory is supported by Gruber himself:

The meeting was structured and conducted very much like an Apple product announcement event. But instead of an auditorium with a stage and theater seating, it was simply with a couch, a chair, an iMac, and an Apple TV hooked up to a Sony HDTV. And instead of a room full of writers, journalists, and analysts, it was just me, Schiller, and two others from Apple.

So Apple condensed what they always do, removed some of the elements that they are unable to control (Apple figuring out ways to make things more minimal? Shocking.), and then sat back and let the Internet do the rest of the work for them.

Remember Ping? Whenever people want to take a chunk out of Apple, they point to it, rightly so, as Apple’s failed attempt at creating a social network. The Mountain Lion unveil and it’s reliance on social networking in the Twitter Era proves that Apple might know a bit more about social networking than we think.

I would assume that we’ll see more Mountain Lion-esque “unveils” going forward.