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Comment by pclark | Hacker News Reader

I wrote an entire comment about how great it is for Apple to work in secret and release and "blitzkrieg" the competition. But it turns out Apple announced their iPhone ~Jan 2007 and it shipped ~June 2007.

So why did HP announce their entire 2011/2012 line up and direction of products without a price and or release date?

I think that this means HP has stake holders breathing down their neck, and they had to publicly show their hand asap. Thoughts?

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only reason Apple announced six months in advance was the the FCC approval process, being public the iPhone would've been out in any case whether Apple announced or not.

It's also possible they simply didn't trust ATT employees to keep the secret, so they announced the phone publicly before showing it widely within the carrier. With later versions of the iPhone the network doesn't have to make as many changes (like visual voicemail) so they don't have to tell them about it so far in advance.

I don't think that's true. It might have been what they said, but it's February now and we haven't seen any glimpses of iPhone 5 (or whatever) from the FCC, and I'd be willing to bet it launches less than six months from now.

"Jobs unveiled the iPhone to the public on January 9, 2007 at Macworld 2007. Apple was required to file for operating permits with the FCC, but since such filings are made available to the public, the announcement came months before the iPhone had received approval."

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IPhone

I remember hearing this story at the time, as well.

For all we know, the rules could be different for iPhone 5, since it is an update of an existing product, rather than a new one.

Given we've already had a few different iPhones, if the rules are different shouldn't we know already?

Announcing early slows sales of previous models. Apple announced the iPhone 1 and the iPad 1 early, but not any subsequent models just for this reason, because the only previous models were competitors. In HP's case, their previous models aren't selling anyways, so they hope to slow the competition. It's called the Osbourne effect.

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