Zeev's Turnips Patch-No Politics (ZEEV)

[langostino]

choad - you are correct

bearmove's answer of "could be" is silly. anyone who knows even a little about Apple knows that if you are a vendor and comment in any way, shape or form about the nature of your relationship with Apple, you are GONE.

Heck, this is a company that's in the process of spending millions suing a college kid who runs a rumors web site because they think they can smoke out whatever vendor leaked information concerning the impending Mac Mini introduction.

Example. A few years back, Apple was going to be including one of ATI Technologies' new video cards in one of its laptops. Not a particularly big deal. ATI's p.r. people drafted up a routine press release. Some junior p.r. person didn't realize it was supposed to be embargoed, and he gave it to a press person the night before Apple was scheduled to officially acknowledge the thing. We're talking about a matter of maybe 12 hours early. It was a simple mistake, and basically inconsequential. But not in the world of Steve Jobs. He threw a complete raging fit, canceled Apple's announcement, trashed all the notebooks already produced, sent his engineers back to the drawing board to redesign for Nvidia cards, and canceled the ATI contract. And, he purged ATI contracts on other Mac machines too. Basically banished the company to hell for 18 months before another one of their cards got back into a Mac.

This is not a "maybe" situation. Component vendors dare not break the Apple wall of silence. They know exactly what the cost would be.