Buyer's Guide Discrepancies

[omihek]

I went to the Buyer's Guide the other day and noticed some discrepancies between what MacRumors has posted and what actually happened. For example, the guide says the Apple Watch has been updated twice already. It actually hasn't been updated at all, which you should already know since you stated in an article written today that the next watch is the so-called "Apple Watch 2".

I also noticed the iPod Touch guide is very inaccurate. New colors do not mean a new iPod (and new bands don't mean a new Apple Watch). You claim Apple "updated" the iPod Touch when all they really did was release a 4th gen in white color. Then you claim they "updated" again when they released the 16GB 5th gen. This is misleading as it makes it look like they are still on a yearly refresh cycle when in reality the 4th gen came out in 2010, 6 years ago. During that 6 years they have only updated the iPod Touch twice although in the buyer's guide it says they've updated 6 times! The guide says Don't Buy Updates Soon even though Apple just released the iPod Touch 6th gen last year. At the rate they're going it will be at least another year or more before we get a 7th generation. That doesn't sound very "soon" to me.

Apple hasn't updated iPod Shuffle since 2010. Apple hasn't updated iPod Nano since 2012.

I haven't looked at other products on the guide as closely, but I did notice the Apple TV release schedule on the Buyer's Guide looks suspicious and I believe there are discrepancies there as well.

 

[keysofanxiety]

This is really down to your interpretation of what you think 'updated' means. If Apple release watches and iPods in new colours, this is classed as an update. Think of it more as a release cycle.

Each date has a hyperlink you can click, so you can see exactly was updated; be it hardware or new colours.

The Buyer's Guide also helps to reflect how Apple consider the product releases. If they weren't thinking about developing them whatsoever and put them to the back burner, then you've got the 13" cMBP, which hasn't even been released with a Rose Gold option yet

 

[WildCowboy]

keysofanxiety is correct...in some circumstances, we consider such tweaks as price drops and color changes as updates for the purposes of the Buyer's Guide, as they generally signal a "resetting" of the release clock for Apple. If they release a bunch of new iPod shuffle colors, that means we shouldn't expect any additional changes in the near future, so it becomes a "Buy Now" recommendation if you're interested in that product.

In some of these cases, we use custom recommendations...Apple Watch is one example of that. For the time being, we're counting the fall and spring band/color/price refreshes as updates, as they did signal a fresh release for Apple that precluded additional imminent updates. But we have been using a custom "Caution" recommendation to try to make people aware they should look into things a bit to see the hardware hasn't been updated. We may revisit this decision once new hardware does appear and we have our first full product update interval on the Apple Watch.