Get ready to play expectations limbo because you need to find out how low you can go.
Writing for the Forbes contributor network and Sasquatch stud farm, Ewan Spence explains “Why You Will Be Disappointed With The New iPhone.” (Tip o’ the antlers to Philip Speicher.)
We needed a reason?
Apple is expected to reveal the new iPhone family on September 9th…
Did you doze off already? It’s quite possible that even the mere mention of the new iPhone could knock you out and leave you wandering through this life somnambulant, waiting for Apple to deliver something other than the iPhone 7 yawnphone.
Which, the Macalope feels obliged to point out, we haven’t actually even seen yet. But we no longer live in a world where we need to see things in order to judge them. It’s all feelings now.
The best advice I can give you about thess new smartphones is…
Actually wait until they’re released in order to see them and judge them based on their merits? Whoops, nope, not that.
…get ready to be disappointed.
Oh. That seems like… not the best advice one could formulate. Easiest, yes. Most negative, certainly. Itchy? A little. This advice is a little itchy.
This doesn’t mean that I think the iPhone 7 family of smartphones will be failures…
Just disappointments. Can you see the difference? No? Well, let’s go to the diagram. As you can see, the path of the iPhone 7 motorcade passes the book depository…
BLAM, A SHOT OF DISAPPOINTMENT FROM THE GRASSY KNOLL.
What it won’t do is satisfy the voices that are rightly pointing out that Apple is delivering little more than a minimum viable upgrade…
Yes, Apple reinvented the smartphone category back in 2007, but what has it done for the smartphone category lately? Has it reinvented it yet again? Clearly, it has not. Disappointment City in Disappointment County, Oregon. (The Macalope might have used Washington which has a Cape Disappointment but residents close to it insisted they wanted nothing to do with this article so he had to make something up.)
The big takeaway, though, is that Apple’s long string of smartphone successes leading to this yet-to-be-seen failure is now lade bare before us. Sad, really. They offered so much promise. Yet they were ultimately only able to reinvent the category once and then offer amazing evolutionary updates to it since then. Unlike Samsung which, er, well, they, uhhh, I think they had a phone with pointless screen space on the side? And they had that really gross ad that one time. That’s the level of innovation we like to see in the smartphone biz.
Oh, also, they copied Apple’s Watch design wholesale and tried to patent it. They did that.
But Apple?
Adding a capacitive home button is cute, but it can’t sell the iPhone as new and innovative.
Nor, according to Spence, can dual speakers, new colors or dual cameras. Presumably, any combination or jet packs, lasers or monkey ninjas will also be deemed “old hat” and leave us wondering when it was that Apple jumped the jet pack laser monkey ninja.