iPhone 5 Fake Rumor Roundup

Following in the footsteps of the fake Asymmetric Screws rumour which was planted by Swede Lukasz Lindell (and friends) I felt a sudden wave of sadness crush on me when I realized that I simply lack the amount of creativity that goes into constructing a good Apple rumor. If only I was creative enough to think of several such good and believable rumours, I could probably make a living just from the blog traffic alone. #linkbait

I wish I was more creative… I cannot think of any good Apple/iPhone rumours to “leak” today.

— Cocoanetics  (@Cocoanetics) August 14, 2012

So I vented this frustration on Twitter and to my surprise many people took this as an invitation to chime in and also play the game. Here’s a roundup of the best fake rumors I’ve heard. If you respond with a good one I’ll add your contribution as well.

One suggestion aimed at automating the Rumor Mill:

There really should be an App that randomly generates and spread Apple rumors. Would save us all a lot of time. — @donal_cahalane

Which was immediately followed by a witty remark:

There is such an app. It’s called Twitter 🙂 — @gianniponzi

But in all seriousness …

The Actual Rumours

Here we go, I’ve sorted the rumors slightly so that some are paired that go together well.

Apple is doomed! — @sneezr

Ah, the classic. Have we seen Peak-Apple? I can only go down from here…

I hear the new iPhone is going to have a tiny moustache. — @applingua

According to KnowYourMeme moustaches “are self grown powerhouses of awesome”. The iPhone is grown up and is awesome, thus it deserves a moustache.

iPhone 5 will have Push to Talk – Since Apple is buying Sprint it all makes sense now. I miss that PtT sound. — @jayjardim

Awesome, then we could finally play pretend-Police, tootiloot!

Apple will use rivets instead of screws in the next iРhone. — @glebd

That surely would make it even less recycleable than the Retina MacBook Pro!

I’ve heard that the screws in the new iPhone are entirely fictional. I guess that means they’ll hold it together with magnets. — @qrunchmonkey

Hm, that contradicts the rivets and wouldn’t that cause my iPhone to fall apart?

The Next iPhone To Have Two Dock Connectors, Can Be Docked Either Side Up. — @adurdin

Actually I have a better idea: How about being able to dock in Portrait AND Landscape?

Apple is about to launch a game console. You might be able to use an iPhone as a gamepad for guests. — @madewulf

Totally makes sense! Since my guests have iPhones they’ll always have their own controllers on them. And I have to get space iPod Touches for all unlucky people who don’t.

Conclusion

As our Swedish friends have demonstrated it is fairly simple to generate good sounding rumors and with the help of blogs and tweets those can be made to spread like wildfire if they contain a certain degree of general believability. It certainly helps to have a good 3D rendering that you mail to yourself and black out your address in the From: “to protect your sources”.

The less you originally provide as information the faster it will spread because people tend to snowball the kernel by attaching their own hopes and fears to it. TapMag UK has collected people’s outrageous ideas that Apple most certainly will ignore. True to Apple’s philosophy that the user never knows what he wants until he sees it.