DigiTimes, which is something of a tenured voice in the tech industry, has had a lot of trouble with their credibility when it comes to making predictions about Apple’s next move. How much trouble? 3/5ths of the time, they’re flat-out wrong. Time’s Harry McCracken, who has a well-earned reputation for telling everyone when the Emperor has no clothes, put DigiTimes under the microscope in a recent article and illustrated why we shouldn’t be so quick to believe everything they say about Apple’s future.
A Digitimes defender might argue that the publication always says that the Apple rumors it reports are merely what it’s heard from various sources. Which is true. But at least some of its sources appear to be so lousy that suppressing their scuttlebutt would make more sense than publicizing it — and partway through its stories, it sometimes stops hedging and starts stating the rumor as fact.
McCracken’s (and many others’) main gripe with DigiTimes is not so much with the site itself, but with the cavalcade of other web “news” outlets that are all too ready to simply take what they say at face value and reprint it without so much as a sliver of skepticism — many even re-stating rumor as fact. In a web climate where so-called journalists put their credibility second to search engine rankings and “tune” the stories to get better hits, it’s good that someone’s still willing to stand up and call shenanigans.
