2013 Rumor Retrospective: 'All the leaks were...'I've been writing Rumor Roundups for nearly two years now. In all that time, only two writers from sites featured in the Roundup have ever contacted me directly:
In mid-2012, Rene Ritchie of iMore contacted me once to (correctly) point out a regrettable inaccuracy I'd written about one of his site's claims.
Several times over the past few months, Mark Gurman of 9to5 Mac has contacted me via Twitter, and each time he contacts me his behavior becomes more and more... "erratic" is probably the polite way to put it.
On December 19, 9to5 Mac posted a 2013 retrospective patting themselves on the back for their supposed accuracy in the field of Apple rumors. "All the leaks were right," their article claimed. This was an intriguing claim to make, as 9to5 Mac takes the same "throw everything against the wall and see what sticks" approach to rumors as almost every other Apple site out there, and as a result they inevitably post heaps of wildly inaccurate information about Apple's supposed future plans.
When I dared to point out that 9to5 Mac deliberately ignored the dozens of inaccurate stories that it posted during 2013, Mark Gurman challenged me to prove it. I was at the beach in Mount Maunganui, New Zealand when Gurman first contacted me on Twitter. I ignored him at first, but barely two hours later he insisted that I provide him with a list of inaccurate links. I was still at the beach. Sometimes, the real world takes precedence. I assured him I'd get to it in due time.
Naturally, because this is the internet, this was soon followed by a handful of 9to5 Mac readers taunting and harassing me on Twitter. One of them even made a veiled threat about it not being a good idea to "pick a fight" with "9to5 Warriors" because "we don't get much sleep, you know."
Regrettably, I was too busy laughing my ass off to be properly intimidated. But it did provide me with the motivation to do a deep dive into 9to5 Mac's vaunted accuracy - as did Gurman once again prodding me (in a tweet he's since deleted), days after his initial challenge, to provide a list of inaccurate claims his site had made (or passed on).
There is an old Vulcan proverb: "Be careful what you ask for. You may get it."
I examined all of 9to5 Mac's articles between January 1 and December 28 2013. This was 326 pages of content, at 6 articles per page, for a total of 1956 articles.
The tl;dr summary of 9to5 Mac's 2013 track record:
73 rumor articles turned out to be true, and 30 of those were derived from their original sources
91 rumor articles turned out to be either partially or entirely inaccurate, or else completely unverifiable
That gives them an overall accuracy record of just under 45 percent. You'd do better by flipping a coin.
In 2013, 9to5 Mac posted a total of 164 articles that were either purely rumors or else speculative posts based on rumors. This was lower than I expected, accounting for only about 8.4 percent of all articles on their site.
9to5 Mac posted an impressively high 73 rumor articles that turned out to be entirely true, and this included all of the articles derived from their own original sources-a truly impressive and commendable 30 articles in total. 9to5 Mac absolutely does have someone inside Apple (probably several someones) feeding them accurate information.
If that were the whole story, then it'd be time for me to shut up and retire. Unfortunately, 9to5 Mac isn't content to stick with its own trusted sources, and it takes the same "shotgun" approach as everyone else by posting idiotic analyst speculation and Digitimes-derived BS with only occasional nods in the general direction of skepticism.
Let me be perfectly clear: I take no issue whatsoever with 9to5 Mac's reporting of rumors derived from its own original sources. They obviously work hard to get this information, and it almost always turns out to be either wholly or substantially accurate. The problem is, it's hard to sort out these diamonds from the piles of typical "telephone game" nonsense Apple rumors they're buried in.
If 9to5 Mac stuck to reporting only its own, originally-sourced rumors-and if they could rein in the more *ahem* enthusiastic members of their staff-they could easily be the undisputed go-to bastion of all Apple rumors. Sadly, that ain't so.
I wasn't feeling particularly charitable in my analysis of 9to5 Mac's track record (for some strange reason). Therefore, for any story that wasn't derived from their own sources (a "re-reported" article, in other words) or any purely speculative posts, if any detail was ultimately incorrect or simply unverifiable, I counted the entire article as inaccurate.
In 2013, 9to5 Mac posted 91 stories that were either partially or wholly inaccurate. Almost all of them were sourced from analysts, Digitimes, or some other typically unreliable source.
Analysis of 9to5 Mac's record over 2013 provided some interesting insights into the state of Apple rumors as a whole. Predictably, the farther away we are from the date of an Apple event, the less likely a rumor is to be proven true. Photos of hardware, deep dives into software, and leaks derived from original sources almost always bear fruit; re-blogging of analyst speculation and the latest tripe from Digitimes and other "supply chain sources" almost never does. And despite claims that Ming-Chi Kuo is a "typically accurate" Apple analyst, his track record in 2013 is almost the same as 9to5 Mac's; in other words, approximately half of Kuo's predictions ultimately turn out to be either partially or substantially incorrect.
― Elvis Telecom, Tuesday, 15 April 2014 00:16 (ten years ago) link