Bryan Chaffin, two weeks ago:
John Martellaro was good man. He was not only a better man than
me, he was one of the best people I knew. It is with a heavy heart
that I tell you Mr. Martellaro passed away today.He rose to the rank of Captain in the U.S. Air Force, and he was a
NASA scientist. He worked for years at Apple, and most importantly
to me, he was a columnist and the voice of reason and humanity at
The Mac Observer. He wrote SciFi and a variety of tech columns for
several other Mac sites, too.
He wrote for many Mac publications. Just his author page at
TMO has 83 pages of article summaries.
One of Martellaro’s columns I most remember was one I linked to in January 2010, “How Apple Does Controlled Leaks”:
Often Apple has a need to let information out, unofficially. The
company has been doing that for years, and it helps preserve
Apple’s consistent, official reputation for never talking about
unreleased products. I know, because when I was a Senior Marketing
Manager at Apple, I was instructed to do some controlled leaks.The way it works is that a senior exec will come in and say, “We
need to release this specific information. John, do you have a
trusted friend at a major outlet? If so, call him/her and have a
conversation. Idly mention this information and suggest that if it
were published, that would be nice. No e-mails!”
Inexplicably, the original piece is no longer hosted at The Mac Observer, but thankfully the Internet Archive has it. What’s interesting about this particular leak, to The Wall Street Journal, is that it came just three weeks before the introduction of the first iPad, and this was the story that pegged the price of the “new multimedia tablet device” at “about $1,000”.
The actual starting price of the iPad was $500, which made the purpose of the leak — if indeed it was a deliberate strategy from Apple leadership — pretty obvious. A $500 price looks pretty good if everyone were expecting a $500 price. But a $500 price is cause for celebration if everyone is expecting it to cost $1,000. It’s a way of under-promising and over-delivering without ever having promised a damn thing.
Another one worth revisiting is this post from December 2011, where I linked to a Martellaro column in which he declared that the success of the Amazon Kindle Fire necessitated that Apple build a 7-inch iPad. “Noted for future claim chowder,” I wrote. Well, Apple debuted the iPad Mini in October 2012.
I never did revisit Martellaro’s accurate prediction. Rest in peace, and enjoy the posthumous Being Right Point.
