The Street’s Jason Notte is bored, you guys. So bored.
“For Apple Consumers, the iPhone Thrill Is Gone” (tip o’ the antlers to ghibby!).
The Apple iPhone 6 gets its big announcement next month. Great.
Whatever. So stoopid. It’s so stoopid that there’s an entire industry devoted to finding out things about it and making mockups of it. That stoopid.
Oh, investors will be jumping up and down, no doubt, and first week sales and shipment numbers will be coursing through the media bloodlines.
Oh, it’ll sell well. But what do sales numbers really mean? In fact, what do numbers mean at all? Does not the Buddha teach us that this life is but an illusion?
But as a consumer, seven years into the iPhone’s lifespan, it’s difficult to get excited about what are now incremental changes to the company’s leading product.
OK, sure, but is this an Apple thing or is it a thing about smartphones in general? This question is never asked, never answered. Because, as the Macalope has noted time and time again: Apple, Apple, Apple, Apple.
They’ll still line up outside the Apple store the night before the first versions go on sale and they’ll still buy millions of them, just as they did in the months before the iPhone 6 announcement. They just won’t be incredibly excited about it, nor should they be.
Zombie Apple buyers. We know they won’t be excited about it because we are told they won’t be. Also, it’s easier to write these pieces when the phone is just an amorphous concept instead of a real thing with actual features that people might actually want.
Bigger screens, a sapphire display, a fitness app?
What’s the point? WHAT’S THE POINT OF ANYTHING?
[table flip]
In fairness to Apple …
And right on schedule, “fairness” makes an appearance mid-piece. Because writing a piece that’s fair from the beginning is apparently out of the question.
… it’s incredibly difficult to blow minds in the modern tech landscape.
Well, in smartphones. The way Apple’s “blown minds” before was by releasing entirely new products, not by updating existing product lines. The first MacBook Airs were met with yawns. Now it’s the best-selling line of laptops.
As ComScore points out, Google Android devices still hold a 52% share of the smartphone market to the iPhone’s 42% share.
The U.S. market.
That still makes Apple the premium, elite counterpart to Android’s downmarket, multi-device offerings, but it’s a high enough percentage of iPhone owners to make the device a common luxury.
So … let the horny one see if he’s got this right. The iPhone, which we’ve repeatedly been told is doomed because it only has a minuscule market share, is now a common commodity because its market share is so big in the U.S. That’s the argument being made here, right? The Macalope isn’t imagining this? This is reality?
Sometimes it’s hard to tell.