I actually don't support this behind closed door meeting with reporters. Steve always ran things incredibly tight lipped, no need for transparency that's part of the Apple experience. This is a leadership error in my eyes and seems like a decision made by community.
...the link is to a full transcript of the meeting. Sure, you weren't personally invited, but hardly a secretive off the record briefing.
> Steve always ran things incredibly tight lipped, no need for transparency that's part of the Apple experience
After the controversy about the iPhone 4's antennas he did a very similar briefing to this with a number of reporters, and Apple pre-announced the Intel transition many months before it actually happened. Jobs would happily tell you what was coming down the line when it suited him to do so.
> After the controversy about the iPhone 4's antennas he did a very similar briefing to this with a number of reporters
And yet to this day there are people who will insist that there was no controversy and it was just a bunch of troublemakers who were anti Apple and that Apple was just being generous to appease them.
Apple is no longer a cult, so it is natural that its leaders act more like normal business people than like prophets who come down from the mountain heights, once or twice a year, to enlighten the world with product revelations. Apple is the market leader, and its pro customers are losing faith. Giving some assurance about the future is the least its management could have done. In my opinion, it should have happened even much earlier.
Probably this was not something Apple wanted to do, but felt they had to do. While the pro segment is small, it is very vocal. Without this expectation management maneuver, we would have been waiting for something to happen on the Mac Pro side at each of the following launch events - and then the feeling disappointed when they did not deliver.
Exactly and with thoughts from the vocal pro side compounding over the next 1-2 years... better to address it now and make it clear that they're listening.
