LESSON 1 Apple may have set its own bar for innovation too high.
Year after year, Steve Jobs used to blow our minds with products we didn’t know we wanted. Now, two years after his death, we still expect every new iPhone to clean our gutters, cook our popcorn and levitate. So when the hardware revisions are minor each year, we’re disappointed.
And sure enough, after Apple showed off its two new iPhone models last week, its stock dropped. Analysts shrugged that they contain nothing “transformative.” The blogger-haters had a field day.
The budget model, the new iPhone 5C, comes in five colors ($100 for the 16-gigabyte model with a two-year contract, $550 without). It’s essentially identical to last year’s iPhone 5, except that its back and sides are a single piece of plastic instead of metal and glass.
Actually, “plastic” isn’t quite fair. The 5C’s case is polycarbonate, lacquered like a glossy piano. Better yet, its back edges are curved for the first time since the iPhones of 2008. You can tell by touch which way it’s facing in your pocket.
It’s a terrific phone. The price is right. It will sell like hot cakes; the new iPhones go on sale Friday. But just sheathing last year’s phone in shiny plastic isn’t a stunning advance.
LESSON 2 The smartphone is mature.
The App Store filled a huge hole. Siri voice command answered a desperate need. And high-resolution Retina displays helped compensate for the tiny screen.
But today, every phone has that stuff; the big holes have been plugged. Maybe the age of annual mega-leaps is over.
The new 5S ($200 with contract, $650 without) looks exactly like last year’s thin and gorgeous iPhone 5. You can now get it with its brushed aluminum body in dark gray (with black glass accents), silver (white accents) or a surprisingly classy-looking gold (white accents).
Apple says the 5S’s chip is twice as fast as before. Nobody was exactly complaining about the iPhone’s speed before, but, sure, it’s plenty quick. Since it’s a 64-bit chip, Apple says the graphics in 3-D video games look especially smooth and detailed.
There’s also a second chip devoted to tracking motion data from the phone’s compass, gyroscope and tilt sensor. Apple says this coprocessor should save battery life when you use fitness tracking apps, because it can monitor your data all day long; the main chip, which requires six times as much power, can remain asleep.
Those are both fairly invisible changes, though.
The new camera will mean more to you. Its sensor is 15 percent bigger, and the individual light-detecting pixels are bigger. Take photos side-by-side with the iPhone 5S’s predecessor, and the difference is immediately obvious; lowlight pictures are far better on the new phone. Clearer, brighter, better color.
The 5S also has two LED flashes — one pure white, one amber — that fire simultaneously. When mixed in the right balance, their light can match the color tone of your subject (moonlight, streetlights, fluorescents, whatever). Apple says this idea is a first in both phones and cameras.
It really works. Flash photos look much, much better. No longer will your loved ones’ skin look either nuclear white or “Avatar” blue.
The 5S’s camera also offers a burst mode (10 frames a second), 3X zooming during video capture, Instagram-style photo filters and truly wowing slow-motion video. (Weirdly, filtered photos and slo-mo videos don’t survive the transfer to your computer, although you can send them by e-mail or text message.) Sample photos and videos accompany this column online.
The most heavily promoted feature is the 5S’s fingerprint sensor, which, ingeniously, is built into the Home button. You push the Home button to wake the phone, leave your finger there another half second, and boom: you’ve unlocked a phone that nobody else can unlock, without the hassle of inputting the password. (And yes, a password is a hassle; half of smartphone users never bother setting one up.)