Apple Store down - new cultware coming? Apple has taken the Apple Store down for maintenance, which is generally an indication that new products are on the way. The site has been down since at least 7am Pacific time Tuesday and remains down at 9:10am: During its fourth quarter earnings call yesterday, Apple said would be hit with higher freight costs than usual …
why they do it.
partly as an homage yo the "under construction" signs that used to adorn the net and, most importantly, it garners hype/attention.
Would there be any anticipation for a simple price change or extra product roll out if they simply performed a batch update to some records?
no, far better to drop the whole site and get a similar boost to sales as a bank holiday sale when it does come back,
I can think of some reasons: Perhaps they need to synchronize the deployment of the new product data across many data centers, in many different countries; or maybe the new product set comes as a file and is imported into a centralize database, which may take a few hours to update; or maybe they need to flush all product cache and this takes some time.
When you have massively distributed systems, data propagation and caching can take time. Taking the system down during may affect customer access, but can ultimately prove beneficial by decreasing customer-facing integrity issues, such as obsolete prices or product descriptions.
Perhaps Apple is conscious of this and wants to avoid such issues. The alternative is to do like, say, Amazon and Google, and perform live updates, which increases the chance of integrity issues and customer problems. These happen more often than many would like to admit--as we have seen here in El Reg many times before.
-dZ.
... or brilliant marketing.
I imagine they want to launch their entire new product range at a given date and time, and don't want to be taking orders for the old kit at the old prices in the meantime.
Plus: taking the Apple store down for a few hours will create an instant press buzz.
Worked rather well, it seems. Brought Twitter to its knees as well.
Shiny shiny! New svelte iMac, beefed up minis, and a rather neat mouse- now that I am tempted by. Time in seconds before someone gets the new mouse fully supported in a Linux desktop environment? Not long, I'll be bound.
It's hilarious how low-key and slick their marketing is- the noise level as all the flamewars break out do their work for them.
Meantime, if anyone has a spare "Magic Mouse" for me to hack on...
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