

Why the iPhone 5 is a good thing - jarsbe
http://jackcallister.me/2012/09/why-the-iphone-5-is-a-good-thing/

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xenophanes
> Unfortunately there’s a downside to doing this – small incremental changes
> that uneducated consumers won’t appreciate.

It's the "educated" tech press and bloggers who have a problem with
incremental improvement. The public is buying it.

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tesseractive
In fairness, I think it's hard to tell to what degree the public is buying it
because they're impressed with the iPhone 5 in particular, and to what degree
they're buying it because they like the iOS ecosystem in general, and Apple
has trained their customers to hold off purchase of the old model for a few
months before the new model comes out, creating months of pent-up demand for
anything they could release as long as it's not actually defective.

I don't mean that as some kind of indictment -- if you create customers so
happy with their products that they'll buy the new one whenever they're due
for a replacement, surely that speaks well of the job you've done! But the
tradition Apple public relations machine was driven by the expectation that
there would be something new and exciting, so everyone felt the need to pay
close attention.

The greater risk, I think, is of the media deciding that new Apple releases
are no longer special news events worthy of major coverage in general interest
publications and dedicated stories on mainstream television news. And instead
a new iPhone becomes an event on the order of a new Honda Civic -- lots of
people buy them, lots of people buy a new one to replace the last one they
had. But honestly, how many people get genuinely excited because there's a new
Civic?

~~~
xenophanes
I don't disagree. I agree it's hard to know what "the public" thinks. I do
think the public is uneducated about the details of the iPhone 5, but I don't
think that makes them not buy it.

I actually think most of the public is so uneducated they don't really know
the difference between and incremental or large improvements in most cases, so
the incremental thing becomes irrelevant because they are uneducated. They
only know when a handful of major using facing features come out (e.g. siri,
iphoto app release, retina display, new shape, maybe the earpods).

And they know that Apple says "new and better" and they put some trust in that
since they don't know how to evaluate it themselves (a lot of the public would
have difficulty telling the difference between an iPhone 5 and a samsung phone
or a 4s).

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joejohnson
I think that the "uneducated" with regards to Apple products is a slowly
dwindling minority. The day of the iPhone 5 launch, I overheard multiple
conversations on the street from people that I quickly judged as not the
stereotypical Apple fan. But I think this goes to show that Apple products
(and apparently their announcements) are captivating to a lot of people now.

Regardless, it's clear that Apple's announcement was only disappointing to
bloggers; actual consumers seem to be very interested in the latest revision
of the iPhone.

