According to highly placed sources at Apple, the company is current working on absolutely nothing. The wells of creativity have been completely tapped at Cupertino.
“We got nada,” one source said. “Zip. Zilch. The big goose egg. The null set. Our product development cycle is so empty, you can hear the roar of the ocean from it. If it were a Zen koan, the answer would be mu.
“Uh… because… mu means nothingness.”
Unless someone comes up with something fast, sources said, Apple followers should expect pretty much diddly after the September iMacs are released.
“It’s not that we don’t have any ideas,” the source explained, “It’s that we don’t have any good or new ones. This isn’t as easy as it looks.
“I thought I came up with something a few weeks ago, and then I realized we already had laptops. This other guy sent out an email to the entire senior executive group talking about how we should add a storage device to every Mac that would burn data to plastic disks with a laser.
“He’s… um… not with us anymore.”
A recent product development brainstorming session reportedly consisted of two hours of uncomfortable silence broken only by the occasional cough followed by “What?” and then “I didn’t say anything.” and finally “Oh, I thought you said something.”
According to the source, good ideas are in such short supply that at one point “We were gonna just add a clock to the Airport base station.”
Sighing heavily the source added “But… then we thought… naaaaahhh…”
Often considered a source of perhaps too many good ideas, this creative drought is striking and disturbing.
“If Apple cannot turn this around,” said The New York Times’ David Pogue, “I’m just going to have to send them my idea.”
Pogue would not provide details, but did say it involved highly stacked sandwiches and Airport Extreme.
“Mmm?!” Pogue said, raising his eyebrows and smiling wryly. “Mmm?! Uh-huh!”
Apple declined to comment for this story, but did ask if we had any suggestions.