ahsanford said:
Remember, Tony is a stable genius at all things -- here he is two months before the 5D4 (that everyone and their mother knew was coming) was announced:
Friend of mine had an inside scoop on the then-next Nintendo games console. They knew all the hardware details, they knew the name of it, they knew the games that would be out with it at launch, they knew the launch date, they even knew the time of day it would be officially announced and the first advertising slogan.
They
thought they knew the price, too. Turned out the price they had been leaked was slightly wrong by about $50 (or equivalent for each region). On that basis alone, half their readers jumped down their throat and accused them of being a bad journalist, of not knowing what they were talking about, of having made everything up, and they quickly got a reputation for having been "always wrong".
Never mind that they got every single other tiny detail correct. Never mind that they'd been well-respected for years. They got one number wrong and suddenly they're the big dumb idiot running joke of the industry.
Hell, to a lesser extent, I've been there, too. I've gotten plenty of leaks and educated predictions correct; I've gotten hands-on with many camera products months before announcement and always reported on them publicly. I was able to make public that the Canon 24-105 was being discontinued and replaced 18 months before the public acknowledgement from Canon. I gave FujiRumors their (completely accurate) breakdown of the X-T10 and several aspects of the X-Pro2. Then I gave a full breakdown of the X-T2, too, after having handled a pre-production copy... but, not having a lot of time with it, I mixed up the locations of the mini HDMI and USB ports. I said one was above the other, when it was the other way around. Oh, silly me. But hey, that one mix-up was enough that now nobody believes a word I say about Fuji, so, that's fun!
People get predictions wrong all the time, and even the people who do get insider information and leak what-should-be perfectly accurate details can still seemingly get aspects wrong as hardware, software, and everything else can all change slightly before launch. It doesn't mean that person deserves your eyerolling.
In the case of Tony's 5D4 prediction, I understand where he was coming from.
Nobody expected the 5D4 to be as mundane as it ended up being. This very site was predicting everything from 24 to 42mp with an APS-C auto-crop mode, bluetooth, 4K recording at twice the frame rate the 5D4 can actually do, etc. Nobody was anticipating it just being a 5D3 with a touchscreen. Did Tony predict incorrectly? Yes, significantly. But did everybody else? Yes. Does he or anybody else deserve your snark? No.