If you don't follow the Woot Writers on Twitter, you're missing out on our comedic rants through the day and our live-tweeting coverage of events like Apple press conferences. We poke a lot of fun at Apple and their "special announcements" because, well, they're a pretty broad target. They're a giant company teetering right on the edge between "still cool, loved by millions" and "Microsoft 2.0." Steve Jobs is an eccentric weirdo in a turtleneck. Their marketing stresses how shiny their new gadgets are. Everyone there really, REALLY drinks the company Kool-Aid. It's relatively easy comedic fodder...

The funny thing is how it's usually received. The flood of "YEAH! YOU TAKE THOSE ELITIST JERKS DOWN A NOTCH!" is overwhelming, followed by a sizable contingent of "Oh man, that's pretty funny!" followed by a much smaller but impressively vocal group of Apple groupies desperate to be offended and defend a company that has done nothing for them other than sell them things. It's all in good fun, gang. I type every Apple insult (I'm deep in the trademarking process for the phrases "iSnark" and "iJab") on my MacBook with Apple USB Keyboard.

So when Apple announced they'd have a HUGE announcement today we licked our chops, stretched our typing fingers, and unbound our Moleskine notebooks (Reward if found: a fiery night of passion with a geeky writer) full of turtleneck jokes (Seriously. I wrote a song once. The words are "Do you like my mockneck? / My sexy sexy mockneck!" It loses something when you can't hear the delivery.), but then we noticed the time of the announcement: 7am Pacific?

We're not getting to work at 7am if they're announcing a simultaneous cure for cancer, AIDS, world hunger, and Owl City. No WAY we're doing it for Apple.

So we slept in, and we're glad we did because SURPRISE, the announcement was pretty underwhelming. The big announcement was that music by the Beatles, music that has been available literally almost everywhere music is sold nearly 50 years, is now for sale on iTunes. Groundbreaking, right?

Don't get me wrong: I love the Beatles. My wife is one of the more obsessive Beatles fanatics I've ever met, and so's her dad. I grew up listening to them on my dad's old LPs. We got the remasters last Christmas.

Which is why I can't really get excited about yet another way to buy the music I had on vinyl and bought on cassette and bought again on CD and ripped to my hard drive and bought NEW CDs because they were remastered even though no one buys CDs any more and bought the Beatles RockBand game on Xbox 360 to listen to the same songs while I play glorified air guitar.

I could walk into any record shop (before they went extinct) and find some Beatles albums. I can find extensive collections that would rival curated Beatles museums on bit torrents. I can raid my dad's old record collection and listen to Beatles songs all fuzzy and warm and popping. I can turn on any oldies station in America and, if they're not playing at that moment, wait about 10 minutes and hear a Beatles song.

Announcing you are now selling something that almost everyone else sold before you is not groundbreaking, Apple. Your announcement is sort of like Rite-Aid or Walgreens holding a press conference to announce that the world will never be the same because they have finally secured the rights to sell toothpaste. Keep your special announcements special; don't hold one every other week.

And for the love of all that's decent in this world, schedule them later than 7am.