Hello! And welcome to our Friday column, Worst of the Week. There’s a lot of nutty stuff that goes on in this industry, so this column is a chance for us at RCRWireless.com to rant and rave about whatever rubs us the wrong way. We hope you enjoy it!
And without further ado:
So, there we have it. Apple’s annual nose-thumbing to all of those that can’t get enough Apple is in the bag and yet again no one comes away happy. (Or at least no one that has access to and the time to post their opinion on the Internet.) Apple: Mission Accomplished
And, I love it.
For those of you on vacation to Mars this week (though I hear they are setting up a Starbucks there with 1 hour of free Wi-Fi with each double espresso), Apple unveiled the iPhone device(s) that will be the face of the franchise for the next 12 months. But, in throwing a bit of a curve into the annual geek-fest, Apple unveiled two devices. That’s right … two new iPhone’s launched in the same year. (And here I thought only Washington and Colorado had legalized marijuana. You go California!)
The best part of the launch was that the two devices were basically the same device that has been available for a year, but in new colors (pink!!!!) and some new internals that 99.9% of the people that spend their own money for the device won’t care about or notice, while 100% of the people that do care either got the phone for free or make up the other .1%.
Irregardless (I love that word), the best part is that Apple yet again announced a device that for all intent-and-purposes not only was barely an upgrade from the previous model, but included a new model that was actually the old model in new colors (yellow!).
I understand from reading those that know about these things that the latest iPhone 5S may not have as many “doos” or “daads” as some other recently launched devices from rivals and that the iPhone 5C is merely an iPhone 5 with a candy-colored wrapper (blue!!), but is that really enough of a bummer to let one’s undergarments become bunched?
I guess we can lay the blame for this at the feet of Apple, which sort of set high expectations with the launch of the initial iPhone and perhaps solidified that with the iPhone 4 launch in 2010. But, since then Apple has seemingly fallen behind the times in terms of giving Apple-fanatics what they want. And what they want is to be blown off their feet, or at least off their sofas.
Of course, that did not stop people from already lining up to get their hands on the new phone. (I still can’t believe this happens. It was one thing when everyone had to get the latest iPhone the day it launched or their lives would end or something, but with so many different ways and outlets in which to purchase an iPhone, people still find it novel to sit out front an Apple store for a week?)
Maybe Apple is trying to tell us something. Maybe we have advanced so much technologically over the past half-dozen years or so that with current form factors and customer demands, there is really nothing ground breaking that can be introduced. Sure, each new smartphone that is offered up by manufacturers may have some sort of incremental improvement that marketing people spend millions of dollars to promote and customers light up message boards to critique, but in the end those advances are so minor they seem to quickly fall by the way side. (Did someone say “Siri?”)
I am guessing/hoping that Apple is just waiting to perfect the one application we all want – teleportation – and will continue to underwhelm us with incremental iPhone improvements until perfected. Until then, we will just have to remain ungrateful consumers always wanting what we didn’t know we couldn’t live without.
OK, enough of that.
Thanks for checking out this week’s Worst of the Week column. And now for some extras:
-Alright, I know I probably used up all of my Canada credits last week, but you gotta hear me out on this one. It appears some brave Canadian used his cellphone to fight off a polar bear attack. That’s right, someone stared down a man-eating polar bear with a small, plastic slab of electronics.
(Of course, if that slab of plastic was “The Brick” then that bear didn’t stand a chance.)
I know I have joked in the past about Canadian’s being the last line of defense against marauding polar bears taking over the United States, but this proves that is no joke. So, the next time you are in Canada, make sure to buy any random Canadian a beer (they all drink beer) and tell them thanks for keeping those pesky bears at bay.
–I have to say it was great to finally see some progress on the whole 700 MHz interoperability issue that has been hanging over the lower A-Block licenses for the past couple of years. The timing of the announcement was also great, seeing as it came just ahead of next week’s Competitive Carriers Association event where many of the carriers holding those licenses will congregate.
(You think some of them may have a few more dollars to throw at the local blackjack tables there in Las Vegas now that the “value” of those licenses could be set to soar with the clearing up of that pesky interoperability issue?)
Of course, the list of “conditions” placed on the agreement announced by AT&T is long enough to provide plenty of “outs” should the telecom giant decide that perhaps it’s not getting the respect it deserves. Or, should federal regulators raise any concerns over the number of pending acquisitions AT&T has lined up waiting for approval.
Just a thought.
I welcome your comments. Please send me an e-mail at dmeyer@rcrwireless.com.
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