The camera upgrades are anything bug marginal as well (high reduction in noise, significantly higher quality especially in lower light conditions, much lower deformations in corners, and the capture speed improvements, from off and from a previous picture, is extremely significant both relatively to the iPhone 4 and in absolute terms of usage and usability)
Maybe it's because the performance numbers are abstracted away so much more for mobile devices. Most mobile phone buyers probably view their phone as a black box. It does what it's supposed to do (hopefully) and that's about it. They don't know or care about the internals, so the outside gets so much more attention. If the outside isn't updated then it seems like it's a marginal update.
(I wasn't planning on getting the 2, but I won a coding contest. So, not looking a prize in the mouth and all that)
The camera updates alone were brilliant.
I said when it was announced that it was an underwhelming release (http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=3072514) and it is. With that said it's an improvement on what is widely considered the best phone on the market. The iPhone 4s is certainly no worse than the iPhone4. It continues to be what will generally be considered the best phone on the market.
Couple this with the fact that a lot of people were likely holding off on iPhone purchases until this announcement. And unless this new iPhone was a complete stinker, they were going to get one. It's not a stinker and so you have all this pent up demand from the past 4 months -- and the fact that the smartphone market is growing each day.
So I don't think it's inconsistent that this is a somewhat disappointing rev, yet will likely be their best-selling phone to date.
I’m not quite sure myself. The iPhone 4 was clearly a major update compared to the iPhone 3GS: On the outside the design and materials improved. The resolution of the screen quadrupled and they switched screen technologies to IPS. They improved the camera, added a gyroscope, doubled the RAM and improved the processor. All that at no loss or improvement of battery life.
The iPhone 4S does three (or maybe four, depending on whether the RAM was doubled) of the same things. That’s certainly less major.
But what could they have done?
They could have changed the design. That said, one thing I like about Apple is that they are willing to stick to a design if they like it. Maybe they should have tried to make the phone thinner or lighter (with an otherwise unchanged design), though that would likely have cost battery life.
Increasing the resolution of the screen was in no way practical. That’s for all intents and purposes a done project. The pixels are invisible to the human eye and that’s that. Apple would only quadruple the resolution anyway and that’s clearly not practical. Switching technologies would also have been an option, but whether you prefer OLED or (IPS) LCD is more a question of taste than opinion.
They could have increased the screen size but I again think that’s more a question of preference. A larger screen is not automatically better and Apple clearly thinks that consistency is worth more than a marginally larger screen.
Could they have added sensors? I honestly don’t know. Maybe NFC? Maybe they prefer Bluetooth?
They could have switched to 4G but I don’t think that would have been practical. It would just cost too much battery life for too little benefit. Getting everything out of 3G (which they did) is, I think, for now good enough.
Yes, this update was less major than the last, but maybe that’s to be expected. I’m not sure whether I would want to call it minor and I don’t think that jumps like from 3GS to 4 are possible every year. Maybe the next update will be of similar scale than the 3GS to 4 jump: They will probably at least switch to 4G.
EDIT: Also, I've yet to see any mobile device that is as polished in terms of lag, responsiveness, usability, etc.
Apple's almost going the tick-tock model with their iPhones, or at least they seem to be, where the tock is mostly internals, improved OS, etc.
Samsung or other competitors haven't done a great job with this (and of course it's not an easy thing to pull off).
Mainstream reporting doesn't have the technical chops to have the imagination, and it's also (maybe unfortunately) not their job to do so. It's probably some sort of failing of communication between engineers and media and mainstream audiences.
What you're missing is that much of Apple's value creation and pushing the envelope happens through the ecosystem (that's not an esoteric statement, their ecosystem creates real jobs and real money). We're living in a mobile world, the tools and the distribution are in front of you. I prefer that over an ecosystem where the masses are only given the option to be consumers rather than also participators.
You want to know what it is?
Firstly the difference between the iPhone and any phone when it came out was phenomenal. It was 3-5 years ahead of any other phone. I am not exaggerating at all. It was incredible, a true game changer.
That Google managed to change Android's direction and produce a touch phone OS so quickly was an impressive feat and also showed how switched on whoever was running that project was. On the other hand calling it an homage to the iOS is being very generous. I was always surprised that Apple didn't go after them straight away with copyright it was that much of a ripoff.
The iPhone was ahead in every degree. The UI was awesome where every other phone was awful. It had a touch screen, no other mainstream phone had one. There were a lot of other details that were amazing at the time but have now faded into the recesses of my brain. And it looked incredible. All other phones looked like they'd been designed by Homer compared to the iPhone.
The difference between todays iPhone and all the others are pretty much the same but with less pronounced effects. There's a good reason Apple are suing Samsung over the design of their phone. No phones looked like that before the iPhone, it is a rip-off, we've just got used to all phone being iPhone clones, getting as close to ripping off Apple as they can without getting sued.
As for iOS vs Android? The UI is better. Not a little bit. A lot. It's smooth, it's thought out, it's a joy to use. Android pretty much copied the entire interface and still it's nowhere near as good. It's just not got the Apple attention to detail. The MS phone 7 one is the only other genuinely innovative product out there.
I'm not even a fan boy. I like Google most of the time. I respect the skill with which they brought out Android. It's still a knock off and you get what you pay for, knock offs are lower quality. They're not innovators, they're copiers and copies don't outshine originals. Apple have vision while Android just slavishly copies them. Siri is a perfect example of this. They didn't make it but as soon as they saw it they knew it was what they wanted, where they wanted to take it.
It's the only apple tech I own, but I'm sticking with iPhones for now. They rock.
This is sort of blowing my mind. After the release of the iPhone, Android shifted from a trackball-based design to a touch-based design (which is a big shift), and copied the Apple homescreen for its app drawer layout, but to call it a "slavish copy" is disingenuous. Android diverges - and innovates - in a lot of very significant ways. Google has been offering voice search/commands/voice-to-text for Android long before Siri. It did notifications and task switching far better than iOS did (and iOS has now "slavishly" copied those concepts). The back button and activity stack make the device usage behaviors ridiculously different from iOS usage. It's been doing wireless sync and cloud-based stuff for a long while; Apple's just now starting to integrate that stuff.
iOS has better-looking stock art assets/widgets, and the application approval process guarantees an adherence to Apple's UI design policies, which does help produce a more consistent experience for the things that Apple cares about, but to me personally, iOS feels like a toy next to Android. As non-fanboyishly as I can say it, I genuinely believe Android is better software than iOS. Apple has the vertical integration down better, no doubt, and their marketing is about a thousand times better than anything that any of the Android handset makers are doing, but I don't think you can use both OSes and seriously dismiss Android as a cheap carbon copy.
There are admittedly plenty of operations that touch phones have that can't be done any other way, but silly things like sliding left/right as iOS does is a perfect example. WP7 slides up/down. The reason it slides left/right is because Google copied the widget layout.
If you didn't know, this is what Android looked like before they copied iOS:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1FJHYqE0RDg
Doesn't look like Android at all does it? Then 1 year later, ta-da!
Yup. Before the iPhone, phone features fell into four categories:
1. I can figure out how to use this on my own.
2. I need to read the manual to figure this out, but I'll probably remember enough to be able to do it without the manual after that.
3. I can make this work if I have the manual with me, but probably will never be able to use it well without the manual.
4. I can't figure this out, and the manual makes no damn sense.
On many phones, even telephone features like conference calling where in #2 or #3.
With the iPhone, most things were in #1, including calling features like conference calling. Forget about the smart phone features--the iPhone was my first cell phone where I could actually use all the telephone features.
Going back to pre-iPhone phones would be as painful as giving up my calculator for a slide rule, or giving up vim for ed.
Post iPhone, you flick the hardware switch that you can reach while the phone is still in your pocket.
Apple changed a lot of things with the iPhone, but let's not get into revisionist history.
All the phones had some sort of way to get into quiet mode. Apple did it right, no-one else had.
There's a vast gulf between volume controls and a tactile feedback of 'is my iPhone on silent, [move thumb over toggle], yes it is, brilliant'.
And that was the genius of Apple. But not just there on all parts of the phone.
Just preordered my 4S to replace it. I admit I was a bit disappointed--I prefer the rounded back so I'd hoped for a case redesign. Even at this much of an upgrade [I don't have video, haven't been able to upgrade iOS in six months], I don't expect the "magic phone" feeling I had with the 3G. Far fewer people had smartphones at that time (May 09). Always startled me when my phone would create a stir. Now I get more of "wait, how old is your phone anyway?"
On the TouchPad that's like 5 seconds to change both.
(I understand I'm comparing a tablet to a phone but I never tried any other mobile OS so I have no idea how quick you can do that. I can guess it's like the TouchPad though.)
Seriously, I'm just at a loss. I honestly don't get Apple. I've used their products and just don't see what others do. What am I missing?