It’s amazing how powerful and how widely read some of the uberblogs have become. Yesterday, Engadget posted a story based on an email from an ‘apple source’ claiming that Apple was about to announce another delay of Leopard External Link, the next version of Mac OS X, as well as a delay for the iPhone External Link, perhaps the most hyped gadget of all time.
Once Engadget published this story Apple’s stock fell 2.2% in just 6 minutes, knocking $4Bn off Apple’s Market Cap. It turned that despite the email being sent by Apple’s email system, the email turned out to be a hoax.
It’ll be interesting to see what happens when Apple find out who was the source of the email, if they haven’t already. I’m pretty confident that if it was an employee they will get fired on the spot. We had a similar incident a few years ago at my firm when an employee leaked new pricing plans, which sent normally well-behaved directors crazy as they stalked the office trying to find someone to throw out of a top floor window.
