Memo to Apple: Enough with the "special events"

On Tuesday Apple CEO Steve Jobs, as is his wont, gathered hundreds of members of the press, acolytes, and various VIPs into an auditorium and went on stage to show off the company's latest round of iPods. Sequestered for an hour, people lapped up the demos, as usual, which generated hundreds (or thousands) of dutiful stories about what they'd seen.

Yesterday, conversation around San Francisco (which is hosting two tech shows simultaneously) was decidedly not about how awesome it was that you could finally get a yellow iPod but about how disappointing the event was. "No surprises." "Big snooze." "Boring." All very common refrains around CTIA and TechCrunch events (along with the usual observations about Jobs' health).

It's not just attendees who were annoyed by the lack of excitement. (Sadly, it turns out all those people clapping and cheering were actually Apple employees.) Wall Street hammered Apple stock down over four percent on Tuesday and has kept it going down all week. It's dropped six percent (as I write this) since the event.

All of which leads me to ask, Why have a big, splashy event (and promise huge news) if all you've got are some relatively minor product refreshes? It's now tradition for Jobs to take the stage at regular intervals... but why?

Traditional wisdom says that Apple gains far more from all the hype and free publicity when it announces events like this than it does from any letdown that could occur afterward, but that's not entirely true. Apple's still making money, sure, but its stock is now being hammered down to levels it hasn't seen since April . (If I was an Apple stockholder, I'd also be a little annoyed about how much it costs to throw events like this. Is Jack Johnson expensive?) Do events like this have any lasting effect when there's nothing worthwhile to show off at them?

Come to think of it, is there any other company that so regularly rolls out its products in such a highfalutin fashion? Even Microsoft reserves big events for its most anticipated products. Seriously, is a curvy iPod screen and a point-one iPhone software update worth all this hubbub?

Let me suggest another way. If you're not going to floor everyone, try a subtler approach that doesn't waste everyone's time. Maybe a press release, timed with product samples sent to a few hundred of your closest contacts. An ad campaign timed with your release (just like you do now). Or keep up all the carefully seeded rumors about what's coming up on what day, then just announce it. People expect when you get on a big stage in a big auditorium that you've got "one more thing" up your sleeve... and when you don't, you feel the backlash. Apple is starting to feel a little like the boy who cried wolf.

Give the quieter approach a try, just once... I bet the stock responds much less wildly (and much less negatively).

Alas, I'm sure this post will fall on deaf ears. The latest rumor is that Apple is already planning another event to refresh the MacBook line, around October 16. Buckle up, investors and readers... the rumors start now!