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'Boring' iPhone 5 Is Not A Steve Jobs 'Legacy Device' But Cements Apple's Dominance Anyway

This article is more than 10 years old.

Update — Apple announced that it sold 2 million iPhone 5s on the first day, setting a new sales record.  

Wired called the iPhone 5 “utterly boring”. The BBC ran a review lamenting that "Apple's iPhone launches no longer excite."  Well, the iPhone 5 is certainly no game-changer. But, that’s OK for Apple—since the iPhone 5 is good enough for Apple to continue to dominate the current game.

Reports around Steve Jobs’ passing talked about how he was focused on the iPhone 5 during his last days and predicted that it would be his “legacy device.” That seemed plausible, given Jobs’ reputation and the incremental nature of the iPhone 4s that came out around the same time, and helped to heighten the anticipation for this week’s iPhone 5 launch.

The new iPhone does not meet those lofty “legacy” aspirations, however. The iPhone 5 is bigger, faster, thinner, etc.—definitely a creditable offering that reiterates Apple’s design, engineering and marketing chops. While it does nothing to detract from Jobs’ design genius reputation, it does nothing to enhance it, either.

To be a legacy-defining device, the iPhone 5 had to be another game-changer—in some form or function—on par with Jobs’ introductions of the Mac, iPod, iPhone and iPad.

Rather than just being incrementally bigger in form, Apple could have introduced a radically different form factor. Many hypothesized, for example, that Apple might match competitors’ attempts at radical upsizing. I personally look forward to the day when Apples offers a dramatically smaller device, perhaps some sort of iPhone mini coupled with Apple’s version of Google Glass.

Rather than just being incrementally faster in function, Apple might have offered entire new classes of applications. Apple might have legitimized mobile payments by including an NFC chip and, with its singular simplicity, helped to mainstream the long talked-about mobile wallet. It might have revolutionized user interaction and gaming with advanced haptics. Or, it might have revealed the iPhone 5 as some prime component to its long-anticipated move into TV.

These and other radical innovations might appear someday, but not this time, and thus the iPhone 5 is boring.

Even though the iPhone 5 didn’t add to Steve Jobs’ design legacy, it cemented Job’s most dramatic legacy of all—the building of the world’s most profitable and valuable company through the total dominance of the smartphone category. Powered by the iPhone 5, Apple will remain the undisputed market leader—not only in terms of sales but also, incredibly, by continuing to grab the lion’s share of the industry’s profits.

Apple’s continued dominance was pretty clear even before the launch, given Apple’s rivals’ weak positions. As I wrote last week, not only did its competitors fail to offer a credible alternative, they highlighted their own weaknesses in their respective preemptive launches.

The weakest showing was Nokia’s. It was critical that the former market leader establish itself as a viable contender. Instead, Nokia saw its share price drop 16% in response to its new phones—and that was even before it had to apologize for misleading advertising materials associated with its new phones. What does it say about your products when you fake product comparisons—as Nokia did—and still get panned?

But, none Apple’s other competitors—not Google's Motorola, Samsung, Amazon, RIM, etc.—were able to take any steam out of the iPhone 5 launch, either, much less contend for its leadership position.

That gives Apple another generation of phone dominance to enhance its ecosystem, widen its competitive moat, enlarge its war chest and aim towards another legacy device. Word is that Jobs was in his final days working on a four-year product roadmap. Is it time to start wondering what he dreamed up for the iPhone 6?

In the meantime, it is back to the drawing boards for everyone else. Better luck next year.

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Chunka Mui is the co-author of “Unleashing the Killer App” and “Billion-Dollar Lessons.”  Follow him here at Forbes, at Harvard Business Review, or on Twitter @chunkamui