It was a hope of mine that Apple would ignore 2011’s update to the iPhone and iPod line and rest on their laurels until 2012. For most consumers, a new iPhone could be far off and they wouldn’t care. A new iPhone usually means it’s time to upgrade and this has been going on for years with iPods as the running joke is, “I JUST bought the latest iPod nano and there’s another one?” Personally, it’s not that consumers don’t care or that carriers are selling millions of the 1 year old iPhone 4 or that I don’t see many weak points that need to be resolved this year and thus warrant an updated iPhone. Those things didn’t help me arrive at this opinion.
Honestly, I’m tired of hearing about the next _____ from Apple. Maybe it’s my friends on Facebook and Twitter or the blogs I subscribe to on Google Reader. It is probably the fact that I’m the Apple Nut in my non-techie circles and thus have to deal with constant questioning from friends about a rumor they heard that the new iPhone is going to be razor thin and come out any day now. The constant questioning has me tired of iPhone and I love the HTC Sense UI for Android phones and love form factors and tiles that are being applied to Windows 7. Heck, WebOS was looking great until HP killed it. The thing is, I’m tired of iPhone so forgive me if my tone is a bit off. iOS5 has some things I have been wanting but it’s not enough to get me to switch from X to Apple if I were on another platform.
We all know that Apple has us. I’ve spent thousands on media and apps and car adapters. There’s no switching now but, if it wasn’t for the thousands of apps that aren’t available for other platforms, I would have gone back to Blackberry. That’s not really the focus of this post but it’s apparent that I’m alone here. I’m just bored of the sliders and boring springboard and all of the tapping I have to do of the home button to change apps or close apps. I’m sick of iTunes and how it integrates with my devices. iPad…well, iPad and I are still cool. We’re brotastic.
Deep down, I was hoping Apple would release iPad 3 and iPhone 5 next year at an event in January along with the ability to buy either of them with 3G and no voice and that the iPod touch would receive 3G or the entire iPod line would change as we know it and we’d see iPod (the touch with 3G) and iPod nano (the current clippable iPod with iOS and a data connection to sync runs with Nike and have iTunes Match on the go). No colors, nothing fancy just iPad, iPhone, iPod and iPod nano. Four devices to complete the mobile offerings from Apple along with MacBook (the current air) & MacBook Pro (MacBook Air shell with pro processing power). Apple would then reserve the MacPro for server and enterprise customers and the Mac Mini and iMac would be the only consumer machines. We’d FINALLY go back to the days when Steve returned to Apple and made 2 laptops and 2 desktops available and we’d have the 4 mobile products as well in an 8 product matrix that completed the picture of simplification across the board.
I think that’s what you call a tangent but I think it makes sense.
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There are too many rumors about what the next iPhone is to really weigh in on what we’ll see next Tuesday. Everyone has guessed it will be thinner, have a larger home button or touch home button. Maybe the screen will be larger or it will go edge to edge and have a curved back. The camera will improve and the ergonomics will be better. It’ll have an A5 chip with one gigabyte of ram. All of these things are exciting and likely to happen but some won’t happen and that’s what I’m thinking about.
What is missing on the next iPhone? What has Apple decided to leave out? You have to use deduction when rumor-mongering. Too few of us do that. Here are a few things I think the next iPhone won’t have.
- Higher resolution screen
- Larger Screen
- 1080P Video Recording
- Touch Sensitive Home Button
- 3D
- 1 Gigabyte of ram
- 64GB Flash Storage
- Additional Measurement Tools (adding to accelerometer, gyroscope, A-GPS, ambient light sensors)
- HDMI Out
- A Radically different design