The iPhone 4S

[SJWhiteley]

What I find iconic is that if Apple don't revolutionize the world on each iteration then Everything is Terrible, whereas when Microsoft announce their next cycle it's success is based on whether we can do what we can already do.

the 4S isn't a monumental upgrade as far as feature set - and bear in mind that Apple have had failures, just that the market was so small that no-one noticed. But again, here we have Apple unable to meet/beat their own bar with a single app - a failure, I suppose. The hardware, however, looks like a significant upgrade, but maybe that's too early to tell.

[baja_yu]

What I find iconic is that if Apple don't revolutionize the world on each iteration then Everything is Terrible, whereas when Microsoft announce their next cycle it's success is based on whether we can do what we can already do.

the 4S isn't a monumental upgrade as far as feature set - and bear in mind that Apple have had failures, just that the market was so small that no-one noticed. But again, here we have Apple unable to meet/beat their own bar with a single app - a failure, I suppose. The hardware, however, looks like a significant upgrade, but maybe that's too early to tell.

Actually that's not the problem. What you describe is perfectly fine. The problem is that even when the case is such, they (Apple and Mactards) still praise it like it's the second (or this time fifth) coming of Jesus. It was the same thing with iPhone 4, "video calls, this is going to completely change how we look at phones"... No it's not, video calls in general suck, and we had those 15 years ago, I had it on my Nokia N70 6 years ago and unlike iPhone mine worked over the carrier (2g/3g) not just WiFi and it worked with all other devices (other manufacturers) that supported it, not just a few iOS devices. So that's the problem, every time they act like they've invented fire and the wheel.

[kleinma]

What I find iconic is that if Apple don't revolutionize the world on each iteration then Everything is Terrible, whereas when Microsoft announce their next cycle it's success is based on whether we can do what we can already do.

the 4S isn't a monumental upgrade as far as feature set - and bear in mind that Apple have had failures, just that the market was so small that no-one noticed. But again, here we have Apple unable to meet/beat their own bar with a single app - a failure, I suppose. The hardware, however, looks like a significant upgrade, but maybe that's too early to tell.

Maybe it is just the way they need to hold a huge secret press conference after total silence about their next product to build insane hype to those interested. Then when people find out its just a faster phone with some piece of software you can talk to and a better camera, they feel a bit let down after all the hype that Apple built around "revolutionizing everything all over again".

Don't forget siri was an app that you could get on your iPhone previously (up until they announced it to be part of the 4s, which is when they yanked it and turned off its servers for the existing users).

So even if its been refined and tweaked, to say it can only run on the next gen iPhone is probably not accurate, since it was running on iPhone 4 and iPhone 3 up until 2 days ago.