Remember when iPhone launches were fun and exciting? Yeah, good times. Now they’ve become predictable and boring, and that’s mostly down to the lack of any mystery.
Yeah, mystery.
Bring back the mystery, Apple.
September 10 is the date when Apple will unveil the new iPhone, but the problem is that we know most, if not everything, about this new release already. The size, shape, camera array, displays have all been leaked, some leaking many months ago, so we’re now just waiting for the official confirmation.
About the only thing we’re uncertain about is the naming of the new iPhone. Yawn.
And the lack of any mystery is a real shame. Gone are the days of tuning in to an unveiling and being genuinely surprised – and sometimes shocked – by what Apple was debuting. In fact, the whole thing would be a rollercoaster of emotions, with surprise after surprise, and then just when you thought there couldn’t be any more surprised, there’s be that trademark “one more thing.”
Nowadays, Apple releases are predictable and mundane. Not only do we know everything there is to know about the new iPhone already – and it is, after all, just another smartphone – we also know the structure of the release events. There’s going to be a lot of waffle and self-congratulations at the beginning, and there will be a lot of filler thrown in in the form of stuff that was already talked about at WWDC.
And Apple will wait until the last moment to shock us with the pricing.
It’s come to the point where I wonder how many years iPhone release events have in them. Given that the iPhone is how Apple makes the majority of its money, I think it is going to want to milk these events for as long as possible, but they’re feeling like a TV show that’s jumped the shark, and the stars are just phoning in their performances.
This isn’t Apple’s fault. After all, with a product as big as the iPhone, with such a massive and complex supply chain, it’s impossible for everything to happen in secret. Combine the massively leaky supply and manufacturing chain with the fact that Apple releases iOS betas ahead of the new hardware – and these betas contain a lot of delicious clues as to what the new hardware will contain – it’s inevitable that there will be spoilers galore.
These days, if you want to be surprised by the time the iPhone launch event comes around, you need to disconnect from the internet about nine months ahead of the unveiling, move to live under a rock (preferably on the Moon or Mars), plant your fingers deep in your ears and hum loudly.
We can’t have nice things like surprises anymore. Not only is there a massive news industry that’s built up around everything Apple, but there’s not much that can be added to a smartphone that’s exciting. I mean, what could Apple unveil that would “WOW” us? Medical tricorder functionality? A death ray app? A battery that lasts an entire day?
Yeah, unlikely.
Wake me up when Apple says how many thousand dollars the new iPhone will cost me.
