Down in the Delta

So a couple weeks or so ago, I decided that since I didn’t have kids, I might as well take the case off my iPhone 5.  Nobody else handles it, I’m reasonably sure-handed, why not?  Sure enough, I’ve only dropped it once and not in a particularly harmful way, so now I have the benefit of it being light and slim and such.  And then, a couple days after, I did what my wife had done to her iPhone 4S with no regrets: pulled the screen protector off and left it off.

This was a huge leap of faith. After all, I scratched the screen of my iPhone 4 within a week of receiving it, and I’ve been paranoid about it ever since.  To take this fragile aluminum-glass iPhone 5 with no case, no screen protector, nothing at all – it feels akin to whipping off my trousers and Porky Pig-ing my way around Plato’s Retreat in 1978 or so. I mean, it may feel great and look very sexy, but before long, I’m going to wish I’d never done it.

But so far, it hasn’t been much of an issue.  And the thing is – it’s like getting a brand new phone. I don’t think I appreciated just how amazing the screen is, after months of having it covered by a scratched layer of polymer. I certainly didn’t appreciate just HOW thin and light it is on a day-to-day basis, or how the chamfer between glass and aluminum looks if anything even more high-tech than its Dieter Rams-influenced predecessors.  And given that right now it will support every known feature of iOS 7, it’s going to feel like a whole different phone again soon – probably by mid-September, given the Great Mentioner’s announce date of September 10 and the likelihood of sales on the 20th.  It’ll almost certainly feel like the biggest shift in the iPhone since it first shipped.

And that’s important. Apple is getting clubbed pretty good in the blogopshere by people who look at the evolving state of Android, or the new design of the Moto X, or the prospect of Google Glass, or just the fact that most Android phones have upward of 5-inch displays, and want to know why Apple isn’t doing anything wildly different.  And this betrays a couple of fundamental misconceptions about how Apple works and how things are in the world.

For starters, Apple tends not to test things out in public. The first iPhone and the first iPad had months to build buzz, but since then, new versions tend to be on the shelves within a couple of weeks of announcement.  The rumor mill goes berserk, always, but Apple themselves never let the cat out of the bag early. The notion of a Google Glass-like approach where an unfinished product is released to a handful of randoms is unthinkable in Apple World.  Sure, Siri has been “beta” since it launched, but how much of an outlier is that? By contrast, how long did it take for Gmail – for GMail – to drop the beta tag?  Siri’s ongoing beta status jumps out because it’s unusual that Apple would go to market with an officially unfinished product.

The other consideration is that of the delta. The first iPhone lacked a few things, but within three years, the iPhone 4 was essentially what we have now.  By contrast, the first Android phone worth criticizing – the Nexus One – only shipped in 2010…a few months before the iPhone 4.  Apple hasn’t had nearly as far to come over the last three years as the Android ecosystem, which itself made a virtue of necessity by producing ever-larger phones to accommodate the ever-larger batteries required to carry them through a full day.  The result, with half a dozen manufacturers, was a plethora of choice and the appearance that the Android world was somehow advancing further and faster than the Apple one.

In the end, a lot of what people wanted from iOS 7 was change for the sake of change.  Something new, something fresh, something different and exciting. That’s only been made worse by the features Motorola has rolled into the Moto X’s hardware, features that are almost certainly going to require new hardware to emulate and which Apple may not be able to match in 2013.  The iPhone 5S, so-called, will almost certainly be evolutionary rather than revolutionary, and will as such feed the inclinations of a tech press that at some level has never really been able to shake the “beleaguered Apple” meme.  “No wireless. Less space than a Nomad. Lame.”  “There’s no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. None.” “iPad – failure, joke or fiasco?”

At some point – probably in 2014 – Apple has to do something to increase the delta.  Slow and steady may win the race and fatten the wallet, but it’s just not sexy enough for Them Asses.

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