It's Not Hard To Punk The Apple-Loving Press

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Intentionally feeding fake news to the media to watch them fall all over themselves to be the first to report on the fake rumor? Now that was just mean....kinda funny...but mean. :p

In a matter of hours, news of the "asymmetric screw" had spread across the Web, generating hundreds of credulous headlines, angry tweets, Google+ commentary and YouTube videos. On Monday, in a post entitled How we screwed (almost) the whole Apple community, Day 4's Lukasz Lindell announced that the screw was a hoax -- a "test" to see how easy it would be to spread disinformation through the media.
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if only someone would pull a hoax that would affect the stock price, make it dip hugely, and go in for a buy on the dip
 
The engineers from Quanta that Apple hires to design all their stuff are probably kicking themselves for not coming up with this idea on their own. Either that or they don't care since Apple is busy bribing the US government with free iStuff so they can import Quanta-made stuff with exploding screws instead.
 
knowing Apple I wouldn't be surprised if they get an idea from this screw and announce something , magical, wonderful, ponies, or the works :D
 
it has dipped to mid 500s in the past month, that was your dip. ipad 5 stories look positive, and rumored stock split will also keep the price up. i got in a year ago, dont own a mac, but i like making money.
 
I got an asymetric screw from a girl with one leg shorter than the other the other night.Eileen I think.........:D
 
Nowadays most reporting isn't fact checked beyond a cursory check, and thats if you are lucky. A good chunk of it is just regurgitated press releases, from companies or politicians, or special interest groups, etc.

Dunno why they felt they had to test this, because its obvious.
 
Most of the time articles are just a slightly different take on another article. One person reports it and everyone picks up the story and runs with the same information, just written in a slightly different way or taking a different slant. One of the more amusing ones (besides the screw) was the statistics coming out of the court case about Apple's survey of Android purchases and whether or not they'd have picked Apple if their carrier had it. The first people to report it buggered up their reporting of the statistics and so did everyone else that carried the story. Nobody bothered to independently read and interpret the chart, they just kept reporting what the first guy wrote. A "48%" was reported when the real number was 12%. Little bit of a difference but the chart was meant to deceive people that don't read caveats and they all fell for it.
 
dccmadams said:
it has dipped to mid 500s in the past month, that was your dip. ipad 5 stories look positive, and rumored stock split will also keep the price up. i got in a year ago, dont own a mac, but i like making money.
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What's funny is I had wanted to sell off some of our stocks and buy 3k shares when it was less then $5 a share and my wife wanted us to keep the stock we currently had. I didn't really put up a fight but every now and then I do the math on what that investment would be worth today and remind her about it. :D
 
dccmadams said:
it has dipped to mid 500s in the past month, that was your dip. ipad 5 stories look positive, and rumored stock split will also keep the price up. i got in a year ago, dont own a mac, but i like making money.
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Tell me, in which case do you make more money:

A) Purchase 500 shares of a $1 stock. Stock price goes up $0.25 on better then expected earnings

B) Purchase 1 share of a $500 stock. Stock goes up $25 on better then expected earnings.

It really doesn't make financial sense to own all those high priced stocks, because they're never going to move more then 10% or so.
 
If I was trying to punk the Apple press, I'd have released a story about the iPoop. Just because it would have been funny.
 
I remember way back in the day when the main stream press ran with the onion story that dell was closing shop because he had done everything he had wanted.

nowadays we have a billion websites all reporting the same story.. quite literally cut and pasted from a "source". gone are the days on real investigative reporting it seems, for the most part.
 
To be fair though it's not like Apple doesn't have a long standing history of making sure that you can only do things the way they envision with their product
 
Yeah its pretty sad what constitutes news lately... I am completely fine with "rumor" reporting as long as it is mentioned that info has not been confirmed.

Boy am I a dork but a fantasy novel series which stresses a different Wizard rule each book, the first was pretty much on point imo

"Wizard's First Rule: people are stupid." Richard and Kahlan frowned even more. "People are stupid; given proper motivation, almost anyone will believe almost anything. Because people are stupid, they will believe a lie because they want to believe it's true, or because they are afraid it might be true. People's heads are full of knowledge, facts, and beliefs, and most of it is false, yet they think it all true. People are stupid; they can only rarely tell the difference between a lie and the truth, and yet they are confident they can, and so are all the easier to fool."
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Wizards First Rule by Terry Goodkind
 
Yep, the Wizard's First Rule is pretty much smack on. People believe what they want to believe and if you have charisma and know how to manipulate you can convince them of damned near anything you want. A good used car salesman doesn't appear to be a scumbag until a week later when your car is smoking on the side of the road. When you buy the car you think he's making perfect sense ... because he is good at manipulating you and playing on your emotions. Good advertising agencies are full of people who's job it is to figure out exactly how to get you off your ass and buy their product. Yes, occasionally they flub it but on the whole a good ad person is paid a small fortune because they know exactly what images and words will play on your emotional state.

So, the original article? Yes, it is really easy to manipulate the tech media right now.

Step 1 ... Make up a story about Apple and they'll print pretty much anything. Other companies they may or may not react as quickly to as they don't draw as many immediate click-throughs. Even Apple haters will click through just to leave a comment. That's why many tech writers will write articles about other tech companies from an Apple perspective, just to get people clicking. Samsung announces a new type of display technology and all you have to say in your headline is "Possible new Apple display from Samsung" and you'll get the clicks you're looking for. Just saying "New display technology from Samsung" doesn't draw as many clicks.

Step 2 ... Know your subject. With Apple that is fairly easy. We know where the leaks usually come from at this stage so you can easily push that angle. We also know quite a bit about Apple's methods. The media talks about them at length so it is easy to figure out what kinds of things will make the story believable. The screw was believable to the media because Apple has done something similar before.

Step 3 ... Make it look legit. By presenting the email as a photo of a paper copy the guys made it believable. It looks clandestine so people get sucked in much more easily than a nice clean scan. A bit of doodling on the piece of paper helps even more because people are less likely to believe someone would go through that much trouble to prep a "fake".

There are other ways, but I find those 3 steps are pretty much the basics to convincing people. And, as noted, Apple is a bloody easy way to lead the tech media by the nose right now. The ones that love them will print it and the ones that hate them will print it as well, just with a negative slant. Apple is an emotionally charged company. They produce more love/hate because of how they do things (secrecy, advertising, etc).
 
I got it at the year low at the time of around $320. So, $630 is looking pretty good today.
 
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