The Osborne effect is a term referring to the unintended consequences of a company announcing a future product, unaware of the risks involved or when the timing is misjudged, which ends up having a negative impact on the sales of the current product. This is often the case when a product is announced too long before its actual availability. This has the immediate effect of customers canceling or deferring orders for the current product, knowing that it will soon be obsolete, and any unexpected delays often means the new product comes to be perceived as vaporware, damaging the company’s credibility and profitability. - Wikipedia

The fundamental lesson of the Osborn Effect is that disclosing future plans leads to potentially fatal consequences, particularly in the fast moving early personal computer industry. This is well understood as far as it applies to a single product line, and many technology companies have become tight lipped about future plans after learning this lesson directly, as Apple did watching it’s then peer implode and die, or by hearing the cautionary tale we fondly remember them by.

Family Problems

Of course, the Osborne effect doesn’t just apply to product lines with a single model with updates released in succession, it also applies to product families like the Mac. When you update one part of the product family other parts can suffer a “Second Hand Osborne Effect” as their implied obsolescence becomes tacitly clear. This is particularly true when making fundamental changes, like external I/O ports.

Which brings us to the recent problems with the Thunderbolt 3/USB Type C connectors on the new MacBook Pros: they immediately obsoleted the entire Mac desktop line in one fell stroke. With no announced or regular update schedule, it slaps a big red **DO NOT BUY** sticker on the box of every iMac, mini and Pro in the stores.

Leaving Pro and Developer users, who’s offices are typically packed with iMacs and Mac Pros on desks, with a mini or two in the network closet running servers and continuous integration tasks, who want to upgrade in the sort of limbo that makes putting together a Hackintosh start to look like a viable option.

The Worst Case Scenario

The Osbourne effect is a killer. You could argue that Apple’s current level of secrecy around new products is the result of a sort of corporate early life trauma: watching someone else die horribly by their own press release must have left some scars on the executives. Theres no arguing that the resulting communications policy works very well for the revenue leading product lines: iPhone and iPad. We have become accustomed to regular annual updates of the iPhone line with slightly less frequent (and trailing) iPad releases. Both coming along with a steady cadence which while unannounced, is clear and predictable.

Without a predictable update schedule, doubt and fear rule the consumer’s buying decisions, and when a shiny new MacBook Pro makes it clear that the rest of the product family isn’t the Most Favored and several of them have been neglected for some years, well. You can expect purchases to drop off and while a smaller company would be in big trouble, for Apple the situation is less immediately tenuous but clearly, in some ways it can be worse for a big company: sales decline leads to less attention from the executives, which leads to sales decline and the eventual outcry from users who feel neglected.

Admitting the Problem is Just the First Step

While some were happy with Apple’s recent executive sit-down with the press and their vague pre-announcement of a “less innovative than Phil’s ass” version of the Mac Pro next year, it worries me that they’re just admitting they have a problem now. This suggests they haven’t even started in on a replacement for the Pro which means waiting an entire development cycle (more than a year, typically) and nothing new was revealed about the iMac or Mini update cycles which are also staring to get long in the tooth.

The key to having a happy family, at home or in your product lineup, is to not show too much favoritism to one child or the other. There are, of course, moments of need or a particular talent which require special attention from time to time. The birth of a new family member can be a trying time, especially when rushing the rest of the brood through the annual update process and throw in a big move to the new house.

So, like many an ignored eldest child the Mac line seems to have been left to itself, and as it ages it’s more and more embarrassing to be living at home, in the basement.