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Why Do We Keep Being Surprised By Apple Just Being Apple?

apple-apple-appleLast month, on the day of the iPhone5 announcement I was in Toronto at the Canadian Wireless Show.

It was expected, yet surreal, when at 1 p.m. local time the entire trade show floor ground to a halt as everybody tuned into their phones and tablets to follow the Apple presentation for the next forty five minutes.

While the resulting backlash and sentiment of disappointment that the CE media and the blogosphere expressed afterwards wasn’t as severe as last year when, expecting the iPhone 5 we were given the iPhone 4S, there was still a palpable feeling of letdown amongst the colleagues at the show with whom I discussed the new phone.

The obvious summary,of course, was the sentiment that the new handset wasn’t much of an upgrade at all.

Having taken some time to consider the matter, my question is this: why do we ever expect otherwise?

With the exception of the initial launch of a brand new product category: the first iPhone, the first iPad, heck even the first iPod, few new Apple product are ever a revolutionary departure from what’s come before.

Seldom does Apple release a miraculous new product, and why would they? Why give you everything you’ve ever wanted in a device when they can release minor upgrades every year, and milk three or four more years of sales out of a series of products?

This is nothing new, nor is it original to Apple, either. Remember surround sound AVRs in the 1990s? First there was Dolby Surround, then Dolby Pro-Logic, then Dolby Digital “READY” receivers, then Dolby Digital, THEN Dolby Digital AND DTS, and so on.

While I was working at Sony, at the time it always seemed miraculous to me that all these new features always came exactly one year apart from each other.

I just got an iPhone 4S in January, so I won’t be upgrading. I’ll likely wait for the 5S or the 6 or even the phone-yet-to-be-named. If you want one, buy it, but just don’t be surprised when the next one isn’t a huge leap forward either.

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