I think this post is the main problem Apple could face; their PR essentially falls into the Android ditch of promoting specs instead of ideas and features. It's the kind of thinking that results in gadget sites using side-by-side comparison tables, which helps no one buy their next phone. Buying an Android phone must be hell, since that's how most people have come to explain why one model is preferable to another.
Marco's description of the improvements is basically incrementalism: it's "harder, better, faster, stronger" - X% more Y.
The 4S was a bit of a disappointment, because Cook - and Apple's engineers - did a pretty measly job of touting Siri as something profoundly new. But otherwise incremental changes to hardware are just an opportunity to focus on the software instead in terms of iOS (which won't run on all devices, which directly makes the new phones that more attractive).
There's a reason we shouldn't see keynotes talking about how dashboard navigation is now 13% faster, and Spotlight search is 8% better at indexing and uses 7% fewer system resources.
In the Android world of PR, Retina was just a DPI number, whereas Steve Jobs sold it as a level of detail that met the limit of visual perception by the user. That made it a genuinely interesting feature instead of just another case of numbers wank.
I think in some sense the expectations game has been lowered ever since iPhone 4, and that it's suddenly O.K. to just judge an iPhone by its spec changes - and as a result, Apple apologists like Marco are just moving the goal posts as a subtle concession to the disappointed critics.
This also means that people missed how much better the iPhone 5 camera is in low-light environments, for one, which could just as well have been touted as a great feature instead of an incremental increase to the camera, or in whichever vacuous incrementalist ways people like Marco choose to put it these days.
Marco's description of the improvements is basically incrementalism: it's "harder, better, faster, stronger" - X% more Y.
The 4S was a bit of a disappointment, because Cook - and Apple's engineers - did a pretty measly job of touting Siri as something profoundly new. But otherwise incremental changes to hardware are just an opportunity to focus on the software instead in terms of iOS (which won't run on all devices, which directly makes the new phones that more attractive).
There's a reason we shouldn't see keynotes talking about how dashboard navigation is now 13% faster, and Spotlight search is 8% better at indexing and uses 7% fewer system resources.
In the Android world of PR, Retina was just a DPI number, whereas Steve Jobs sold it as a level of detail that met the limit of visual perception by the user. That made it a genuinely interesting feature instead of just another case of numbers wank.
I think in some sense the expectations game has been lowered ever since iPhone 4, and that it's suddenly O.K. to just judge an iPhone by its spec changes - and as a result, Apple apologists like Marco are just moving the goal posts as a subtle concession to the disappointed critics.
This also means that people missed how much better the iPhone 5 camera is in low-light environments, for one, which could just as well have been touted as a great feature instead of an incremental increase to the camera, or in whichever vacuous incrementalist ways people like Marco choose to put it these days.