I have a couple of questions: When does speculation become a rumor? When is a rumor really speculation?

Here’s why I ask: yesterday afternoon I wrote up a piece for The Apple Blog regarding the photos of the banners hung in Moscone Center for next week’s WWDC. I noted John Gruber’s belief that dropping the “Mac” from Mac OS X is an attempt to unify the OS X brand (OS X iPhone and OS X Leopard), and I noted that “this is probably the simplest and most logical explanation.”

And then I jumped into speculative fun times: is Apple planning to license the Mac OS again? Considering the fact that rumors are pointing toward Apple turning .mac into something more platform-agnostic, and the fact that Apple has yet to do anything publicly in regards to Psystar, maker of the “Open Computer” Mac clone, as well as some other conjecture, I put this all together and raised some questions. Do I really think we’ll really see Apple jump into cloning again? I don’t think so. But you can never count anything out when it comes to Steve Jobs (see also: Apple switching to Intel—who saw that one coming?). So I offered my admittedly absurd speculation (said so in the article), and it somehow ended up on MacRumors.

Yes, that’s right. My article. On MacRumors, one of the biggest Mac sites out there. Excuse me while I pass out.

That’s the backstory. So I’ll ask again, when does speculation become rumor, and when is a rumor really speculation?

Let’s take a second and analyze what a rumor is, as it pertains to Apple. The Oxford American Dictionary¹ defines “rumor” as “a currently circulating story or report of uncertain or doubtful truth.” So insofar as Apple rumors go, a rumor could best be described as a story of what Apple is planning to do from a purported industry insider. This insider may present the rumor openly, like Kevin Rose when he ”leaked” details about the iPhone, but it usually comes from anonymous tipsters. Sometimes these tipsters are onto something, sometimes they’re totally off the mark. And sometimes, they take “spy shots” of purported new products in elevators. So to sum up, a rumor is a claim made by someone who says they know something you don’t.

That leads us to speculation. The dictionary definition of “speculation” is “[to] form a theory or conjecture about a subject without firm evidence.” So in the context of the Mac universe, this means taking the rumors and synthesizing them into a theory of what Apple is up to. Sometimes it seems totally possible, sometimes it seems totally off the wall. In regards to my speculation on Mac cloning returning, I think it falls somewhere in between. It’s not totally out of the realm of possibility given Apple’s track record of doing things nobody expects, but at the same time there are some holes in the theory (and as I said in my original article, it was some “absurd speculation” on my part).

So a rumor is not speculation, and speculation is not a rumor. The thing is, though, sometimes, some people conflate the two, and refer to any bit of speculation as a rumor. It’s especially embarrassing when media outlets make this mistake, and doubly so when they report a combination of speculation and rumors as fact.² Speculation should never, ever, be taken as anything more than that speculation, not as rumor. Because once a few people start calling a bit of speculation a “rumor,” it can build momentum as a “rumor,” and can lead to it actually being reported as a rumor. Speculation-passed-as-legitimate-rumor can lead to inflated expectations, which can be a bad thing. So the next time you see an article where the writer dives into speculating, consider the possibilities and have fun with it, but always remember that speculation is just that: speculation.

²Of course in that case, Apple did eventually unveil a movie-downloading service, but rumors of that were around for long before the article I linked to surfaced.↩