Too Much Nick

It’s very unfair of me to only show you this one flaw in the excellent micro-essay by Pierce Gleeson on the problem with fetishizing newness in iPhone updates. But I want to point out, as someone who often shoots narrative video with just an iPhone and a GorillaPod, that the iPhone’s camera capabilities have improved dramatically since the GS (the 3G can’t even record video without special apps), such that I can be relatively unembarrassed by production quality when one of my videos gets a quarter-million views. (In fact, with iPhone 5, I may finally be able to use the stupid little front-facing camera and see what the fuck I’m doing as I shoot.)

In addition, the processor is simply able to adequately handle applications that ran too sluggish on earlier phones. The hard drive is large enough to contain many customers’ entire music collections (though I admit this is less important to Spotify/Rdio users). In speed and storage space, a big enough quantitative difference becomes a qualitative difference, as certain tasks become not only possible but painless.

It also handles multitasking, which is essential if a phone is to replace a computer for more than ten minutes.

And of course you ignored the beauty of Siri, which hahaha no I’m kidding, what bet did Jobs lose with Eric Schmidt to release Siri as if she was any goddamn help? Voice control is occasionally useful and will become moreso, but I’ll admit the average user doesn’t get much out of the current capabilities — partly because to activate voice control, first you have to touch the stupid phone.