I killed more Apple products than Apple itself ever killed (okay, maybe a slight exaggeration). Not from Cupertino, of course, but from my digital desk reporting for Apple at MacRumors, poring over every leak, every rumor, every supposed CAD image and analyst predictions of what might be coming.

Somewhere in the supply chain, someone had seen a panel, a chassis, a code name, and now there was a thread to pull. At MacRumors, my job was to pull it. That was the work, and when you do that work long enough, you stop noticing how often the threads never lead to anything real.

Inside a newsroom like that, you live inside a ritual of three acts. First comes “Apple is working on X.” Then, “Apple is still planning X, but launch later than expected.” And finally, when the expected window passes, a quiet, almost inevitable shift into “Apple has canceled X” or “X reportedly delayed” follows. I took part in that shift. I wrote those headlines, or at least helped frame the stories that sat under them. Not because I wanted to dramatize Apple, but because the format, and the expectations of the audience, rewarded closure.

The gap between what we knew and what readers believed was always there. We knew when a rumor was thin or chained together from indirect signs. A vague supply report about larger panels might turn into a “jumbo iPad Pro” story. A mention of yield issues might seed a wave of “Apple could scrap plans for” follows. Internally, every newsroom should discuss confidence levels, about which sources had a better record, about how to phrase a hedge without killing the headline. But externally, that nuance collapsed. Regardless of our internal deliberations, readers saw one thing: Apple is going to ship this

Once enough outlets repeat the same rumor, it stops feeling like speculation. It feels like a product with concepts appearing. Headlines saying said product is on the way proclaim it with a level of certainty that you’d think Tim Cook stood on stage and said so himself. By that point, for a reader, Apple has already made a promise, even if that promise came entirely from a feedback loop of rumor reporting and commentary. When the device does not arrive on the unwritten schedule we all assume, that absence demands a story of its own. That is where “canceled” and “delayed” comes in.

The thing is, in the real world of the newsroom, the pressure is not abstract. Success is measured in traffic, engagement, and speed to match – or beat – your competitor on a story. The rumor, which drove massive interest last year, hasn’t driven much interest lately. The products Apple has announced are the ones we expected to see, but there are no signs of product X when we thought it might be coming. As a result, someone writes a piece saying they’ve heard product X has been put on the back burner or they’ve heard from “supply chain sources” that production has slowed or halted. Now you have a choice: treat that as the natural death of a weak rumor, or as the closing chapter of a product saga.

It is very easy to write “Apple cancels plans for…” when you have been telling readers for a year that those plans existed. It feels fair. It feels like an update, even a service. In reality, you are giving narrative weight to a chain of guesses. You are retrofitting intentionality onto what may have been nothing more than a concept explored in a lab, a prototype that never left an engineering building, or in some cases, a misread translation from a “supply chain source.” From Apple’s side, nothing was “canceled,” because nothing was ever a committed product. From the reader’s side, Apple changed its mind.

But the story of AirPower is different in kind. AirPower was presented by Apple. They named it, presented it, promised it. And when they could not get the engineering pieces to work, they made a statement and said they were canceling it. This was a real reversal and it was universally disappointing. This was a case where the word should be used with all the strength that it carries when a real cancellation is involved, and the burden is on the organization for either delivering on a promise made or not. The problem is that the same verb now gets applied to things that never reached anything like that level of commitment.

During my time at MacRumors, the Apple Car existed in a kind of weird purgatory between the two realities above. Apple never once took the stage and promised the world a car, but the volume of times in which the scope and breadth of Project Titan was leaked created a reality for the average reader in which it felt as though the odds of the car being a future product were close to a sure thing. When hard reporting revealed the truth that Apple was killing the car project and shifting many of those engineers into other roles, the narrative of the “cancelled car” felt both familiar and logical as a result.

The incentives on both sides of this equation were never well aligned. Apple strives to provide optionality within the company. Product teams design, iterate, and test products that never actually get assigned a marketing name. Whole product directions come and go without anyone outside the company even being aware. That is just the normal operation for a company that spent many orders of magnitude more time on the products that never shipped than the ones that did. The rumors, by definition, were shining a light on the unseen products, but we tended to behave as if that light only shone in nice, comfortable places.

As a writer, I got used to writing stories as if every visible hill in the terrain was a future city. When the hill eventually turned out to be a mirage, I wrote about a sudden cancellation of the city, not about the fact that we had mistaken a shadow for a building. It is uncomfortable to tell readers that the story you sold them last year did not have enough foundation. It is much easier to tell them that Apple walked away from a plan and shelved the whole thing all together.

I recall writing headlines where the only information added was that of absence. A product hadn’t been announced at an event or that a timeframe for an announcement came and went. A previous source, who started the original rumor, stopped talking and vanished off the face of the internet. It made little sense, but the pageviews justified it.

And looking back, I don’t feel so much guilt but clarity about what I was a part of. We were not just writing about Apple, but we were defining the shape of Apple’s intent. We were indirectly training readers to treat rumor cycles as if they were part of the product lifecycle: announcement through leak, iteration through Weibo translated rumors, and resolution through “cancellation.” It made Apple’s internal experiments feel frenetic and haphazard, even when their culture was deliberately slow and stubborn.

The people caught in the middle of all this are not Tim Cook or other executives. The people caught in the middle are the engineers and designers who see their more speculative ideas being put in front of the public and presented as real and upcoming, when in reality they aren’t. You do this enough times for “canceled” to no longer mean anything. It no longer means “a rare admissions of failure.” It just means “end of the rumor cycle.”

Writing now, outside a newsroom, I try to draw a sharper line for myself. There is a real difference between Apple canceling a product it announced, ending a long internal program that never went public, and simply not shipping something that only existed in rumor headlines. That distinction was blurry in my own work when I sat at MacRumors. I reached for the neat verb that tied a bow on a messy reality.

This piece, to me, is a means of giving that behavior a name and excising myself from the behavior. Apple will continue to explore the ideas that never ship. There will continue to be leaks of those ideas that never were. There will continue to be attempts to turn those leaks into stories. The ritual will not go away. What can change, at least for me, is the degree of seriousness I take for myself in completing the circle. “Canceled” should describe Apple walking back a commitment, not rescuing a narrative I helped inflate in the first place.