That's never been an issue before. Other iPhone product cycles have been well under two years and still introduced new features. Hell, the original iPhone was dropped en masse by pretty much everyone in favor of the 3G when it was released after just a year. That sounds more like an excuse than a "real reason" honestly.
The real reason, of course, is that Apple didn't have anything revolutionary to ship (other than an out-of-house software product that they turned into a "hardware" feature by fiat). I'm not convinced that's bad, really. I think a bigger issue is that smartphones are turning into a mature product and there's simply less revolution to be had.
But my gut is with the many other people who have voiced similar intuitions: this feels a lot like the mid-90's, when Apple stagnated in the face of clear motion in the industry, chasing old markets while new ones opened. Is the iPhone 4S the new Centris?
"That's never been an issue before. Other iPhone product cycles have been well under two years and still introduced new features."
Not so, the pattern of introducing an entirely new model only every second year and a performance boost of the existing model in between is one that Apple has followed since the iPhone 3G:
iPhone 3G -> iPhone 3GS -> iPhone 4 -> iPhone 4S
For that reason I was not expecting an iPhone 5 and was bemused by all the hype surrounding it.
Yet objectively this is a significant upgrade with a huge performance gain, the addition of a very exciting feature in Siri (I suspect it's limited to the iPhone 4S as a result of the decision to add dedicated processing hardware) and a vastly-improved camera. The iPhone 4 design is great and extremely successful, I don't understand why people are so upset that it wasn't changed.
I don't understand why people are so upset that it wasn't changed.
IMHO the iPhone 4 is already fast enough. It didn't need a new system board, it just needed a bigger screen, and they needed to get rid of that Radio Shack-style square enclosure.
This release was an exercise in fixing things that weren't broken while giving the competition a break.
That's fair enough, but it seems like more of a personal wish list than an analysis of what the iPhone really needs. Does it need a bigger screen and a new enclosure? The sales figures don't seem to suggest that it does.
Assuming for a minute that I'm right and the screen size and enclosure are not market liabilities for the iPhone, then my personal opinion is that the upgrades are sufficient to maintain sales, with the performance boost, new camera (along with the improved processing hardware) and Siri all being enough to keep it competitive at the high-end.
Also, I suspect it was about dropping the price to $99 while still preserving the enthusiast market who will continue to buy the $299 devices on sheer inertia. The former part of that decision is good. The latter is IMHO a very dangerous platform to base your business on (i.e. "dumb users will continue to pay more for our products"). Apple tried that in the 90's. It worked... poorly.
The real reason, of course, is that Apple didn't have anything revolutionary to ship (other than an out-of-house software product that they turned into a "hardware" feature by fiat). I'm not convinced that's bad, really. I think a bigger issue is that smartphones are turning into a mature product and there's simply less revolution to be had.
But my gut is with the many other people who have voiced similar intuitions: this feels a lot like the mid-90's, when Apple stagnated in the face of clear motion in the industry, chasing old markets while new ones opened. Is the iPhone 4S the new Centris?