Seriously, Apple. How could you screw yourself and Tim Cook? Today’s keynote was a blunder at best and a setup at worst. Tim Cook needed a compelling product to launch yourself into the post-Steve Jobs era. And all Apple had was an incremental update for the iPhone 4? Apple, you don’t really think that we are delusional enough to waste our money on a 2-year old phone? Let’s scratch this one and let’s talk iPhone again, seriously.
Thinking too much about today’s “let’s talk iPhone” event could give you a headache. It just doesn’t make sense. All right, Apple never said it would be announcing an iPhone 5 and it was just blog reporting and our tendency to instantly believe virtually any Apple rumor (believe it or not, rumors about the real release date for the iPhone 5 started flying just about 20 minutes after the Apple event had ended), but a 4S phone was, … ummm …, unexpected.
It was Cook’s first time in the spotlight, without the support of Jobs, and he needed all the support he could get: Support to create a foundation for his legacy and for his company that so heavily depends on faces. But there was not much that was about Cook. The new CEO got to talk 22 minutes about how successful Apple has been.
Then there were 25-minutes by Scott Forstall and Eddy Cue who gave us a recap of iOS 5 features. Marketing boss Phil Schiller talked for about 7 minutes about iPod updates and, 55 minutes into the event, started talking about the iPhone – the iPhone 4S. Remember, Schiller talked, not Cook. The iPhone 4S got 40 minutes – 15 minutes of that dedicated to the natural language detection and processing engine Siri. Cook got a total of 24 minutes on stage.
How could this have been a star production for Cook? Perhaps Cook did not want to present the iPhone 4S, because it looks like a leftover cake from the Steve Jobs era, and really should have been sold by him? The entire presentation just felt awkward once the event abruptly ended with no iPhone 5 being announced. There was silence for just a brief moment and you could feel the disappointment in the audience that there was no truly new phone that could have helped Cook to seamlessly transition into a successful Jobs-successor role.
Whether the new features in the iPhone 4S are compelling enough for buyers depends on your perception. There’s the 8MP camera, the dual-core processor, and Siri, which is impressive, but cannot hide the fact that voice recognition will always remain a complementing way for data input and never become the primary way for users to interact with their phone. In the end, do you want to mumble into your phone with people around you? Of course not. The 4S will be the new 4 and it’s obvious that most people will be choosing the 4S over the 4 and the 3GS. A good friend of mine noted that the 3GS is a ripoff, even if it is “free” – because you will pay more than $2000 in carrier fees over a 2-year contract period, but won’t have access to the latest features. He’s right.
$100 and even $200 over a 2-year period is a negligible investment. If you get stuck with such a contract, then get stuck with a iPhone 4S, not with a 3GS and not with a 4. Personally, I don’t think the 4S is worth the money you need to spend to drop out of an existing 2-year contract and accept a non-discount price of the 4S, especially since the 5 is now expected to be released in late 2012 or early 2013, according to IHS (here we go again, rumors).
Rob Enderle, one of the best entrenched analysts in Silicon Valley, described today’s Apple announcement as a miss. It’s a harsh sentence an implies that Apple missed an opportunity to pull ahead with another wave of sizeable innovation. Apple may be more vulnerable than it was last year and rivals have an opportunity to catch. I am not sure if it was miss, since we know that Apple dropped the ball on iPod innovation quite frequently (remember how long it took Apple to offer Wi-Fi?) and rivals never caught up. It appears that every time Apple slows down, its competition takes a break as well. We will have to wait and see what the 4S means for Apple.
For Cook, however, today’s presentation was forgettable and unworthy for the first public performance after Steve Jobs’ departure. If Apple depends on its CEO to sell products, then Apple may be heading into more difficult times – times that won’t allow the company to sell bags of frozen ice in the Arctic anymore.
Wolfgang Gruener in Business on October 04
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