Here's a crazy idea: At one point during Apple's lawsuit against Psystar, Apple alleged that Psystar may not have just been one company trying to make money by making unauthorized machines running Mac OS X, but could potentially be a front for a cabal of Apple competitors who were hoping to win against Apple in a lawsuit so that they could run OS X on their own machines. Essentially, Psystar would be a way for Apple's competitors to attack it. What if Apple rumours work the same way? What I mean is this: Every time Apple is getting close to releasing something, and sometimes even when they're just working on something and never end up releasing it, like the legendary xMac, there's always some kind of leak. Sometimes it's a legitimate leak, and sometimes it's just a small detail that happens to get out, but it always snowballs. Like a crazy game of Internet-Telephone. The leak could be something as simple as "there's going to be a better camera", and somehow that, by the time it hits the mainstream press (or as mainstream as that bit of news will ever get) it's been transformed into "the camera's going to be 3D, 12 megapixels with 1080p video, and a sensor that lets you focus the image after the fact (à la Lytro)". The rumours themselves aren't the problem. The problem lies in the way that this kind of news propagates. When it gets repeated enough by rumour sites, the echo and reverberation builds up enough that the noise starts to leak out of the usual Apple rumour circle and into the mainstream press, and regular consumers (as opposed to the more technologically inclined who usually pay attention to tech rumours) start to hear about the rumours and have their expectations for this supposed product raised. With the iPhone 5 rumours, it got to the point where friends and acquaintances were asking me if I knew if the next iPhone was going to have a built-in projector that mapped a keyboard onto a surface for you to type, if they were going to need a new case, since their iPhone 4 case would be unlikely to fit on it if they redesigned it. And then Apple "only" releases the iPhone 4S and people who aren't even remotely connected to the tech world have heard that "some people were disappointed by the new iPhone". The problem with these kinds of rumours is that, if they're deliberately exaggerated and repeated, they could be considered a form of libel, which could get interesting for Apple's legal team. But with Apple competitors potentially forming a company that infringes on Apple's IP in the hopes of finding a way to use it freely I wouldn't be surprised if it was true, at least to some extent.
