A report from TUAW has been gaining some attention today for its revelation of an entry on Amazon's site for an iLife '11 Family Pack priced at $99. The entry was apparently originally noticed late last month by a poster on Macworld's forum who also spotted the single-user version priced at $79. Both entries are listed as shipping in 2-4 weeks and claim that they were first posted on July 27th.
Amazon has frequently posted information on Apple product releases, including listing for the products themselves as well as other products such as books written as user guides for products that had not yet been released. We do not believe, however, that Amazon generally receives specific advance notice of Apple's release plans, and instead relies on rumors and release date guesses from third-parties such as book publishers to create placeholder pages in advance of product releases.
In the closest parallel to this most recent example, Amazon posted entries for iLife '07 and iWork '07 just ahead of Apple's Macworld San Francisco keynote in January 2007. By the following day, the entries were updated to read as generic placeholders, and then removed entirely.
In retrospect, Amazon's postings were clearly guesses, as iLife had up until that time seen updates each January. Apple ultimately did not release iLife '07 and iWork '07 at MWSF 2007, holding off until August 2007 to release iLife '08 and iWork '08 and skipping the "'07" versions entirely.
Consequently, we place little faith in Amazon's new listings being specific indicators of imminent releases, and would tend to regard even posting that turn out to be correct as merely good speculation or chance. As Apple has moved to a roughly 18-month release cycle for iLife over the past few versions, expectations have been high that Apple will deliver an update in the near future. One specific claim had pointed to an August 17th release for iLife '11, while other suggestions had pointed to the possibility of an introduction at Apple's media event last week. Neither obviously came to pass, and users continue to await revised versions of Apple's multimedia and productivity suites.
Update: Amazon has removed the two iLife '11 listings from its site.
