#sike

Oh, how we danced. One week ago, in this space, we celebrated the last of the JBL OnBeat Micro Speaker Docks. You can see the highlights in today’s video, just to the right of these words. To see off this scourge, the polio + Saddam Hussein of our times, we poured one out for our dead homie. And then battered that homie into pieces and made you guess how many pieces we left it in.

We dismantled another OnBeat Micro in a more cold, calculated fashion, like a mad scientist, and made you guess how many pieces that resulted in. It wasn’t all sadism, though: we also shared some incredible (as in “not credible”, as in “not true”) Speaker Dock Facts. And coolest of all, we made some amazing vehicles for our Speaker Dock Derby Race:

Yes, it was quite a day. A day of celebration, of camaraderie, of love, of prayer, of triumph.

But you knew that wouldn’t really be the end of it. In your heart, you knew.

Some of you noticed how careful we were to specify the JBL OnBeat Micro - conspicuously excluding its bigger, better brother, the JBL OnBeat Mini. Some of you took note of our “Mission Accomplished” banner, like another banner celebrating a mission that, it turned out, was far from accomplished.

Others sensed something subtler, more fundamental: a doth-protest-too-much tinge to the revelry. Making a huge deal about the end of Speaker Dock Friday, and then following it up with another Speaker Dock Friday, is exactly the sort of perverse, confounding move we would make, isn’t it?

Yes! Yes it is!

Call it an anticlimax. Call it a cheap stunt. Call it a sop to the surprising feelings of nostalgia some of you (and us) felt over the “last” SDF. When you walk a mile with a rock in your shoe and finally take it out, part of your foot misses that rock.

Just don’t call it the end. Because we’ve got enough JBL OnBeat Mini Speaker Docks left to last us a month of Fridays. If you’re looking for a Lightning-equipped speaker dock that fits iPhones and iPad Minis, or even better, if you’re looking for a rechargeable speaker with an aux-in port and an 8-hour battery life, just ask us on Twitter if you can buy a JBL OnBeat Mini. Expect a very different answer than we gave when people asked about the Micro a week ago.

Now, if you’ll excuse us, we need to go plan how to make the next Final Speaker Dock Friday bigger and better than the last Final Speaker Dock Friday. At least we know the speaker docks themselves will be bigger.