You know, I'm having trouble deciding. It seemed so essential and obvious to me that the best device to run iOS 5 would be the iPhone 5. I mean, next year when we get iOS 6 (we will get iOS 6, right?), is it going to run on iPhone 5? Six on a 5--that may have a nice ring to it, or not. But alas, today at Apple's keynote we saw kinda what we all expected from the rumors, though our hopeful and optimistic attitudes nearly got the best of us. Since earlier today, I've had some time to purge my brain of the dreams of that super awesome-looking iPhone 5 mockup floating around the interwebs and take a good look at what the new iPhone 4S means for consumers and Apple.
Are consumers really missing out this year when the iPhone 4S has everything you could have expected from an iPhone 5? And just how important is a hardware redesign, then, when every feature is already there? Look at the feature set of the 4S: iOS 5 and all it's new features, faster, new super camera, 1080p video recording, a world phone with multiple carriers, the new Siri personal assistant (which looks fantastic, btw), and iCloud--the service all iOS 5 devices will sync to for backup, syncing and storage. This is all pretty impressive. The only thing missing? A pretty new package.
The biggest question is, does that really matter to people? Do consumers have to have new hardware to be truly excited about this product? It begs asking when the hypothetical iPhone 5 wouldn't do a single thing more effectively than the already gorgeous iPhone 4S design. I know I was disappointed. But for what real reason? I told myself I would not upgrade if they didn't change anything externally. But why does that matter so much? The point is that it does and doesn't matter at the same time. For starters, it didn't matter when they did this once before with the iPhone 3GS. It broke previous iPhone sales records. And what features did it gain sans a new look? The same thing that the 4S has received today: faster processor, improved camera and the new OS with voice command capabilities. What Apple needs to prove now is that this is enough for the iPhone 4S to make up for all the bad press the iPhone 4 design got with the antenna problems.
At least it sounds like they might have fixed that ol' bug that haunts every iPhone 4 today--the signal drop. Please let this new antenna be the end of that crap. Please?
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