The crowds duly showed up on Friday for the launch of the iPhone 5, but no one really understood why.
Two Apple stores in London each had more than a thousand people queuing, some of them for days. Places at the head of the queue were being sold, allegedly for prices up to £1,000. You would assume that they were queuing to be first, and they were actually excited about the iPhone 5.
But you might be wrong there.
Even people who went out that day to buy an iPhone 5, could have got one quicker, and easier, and without queuing in the cold, by going to the Three store or the Orange shop, or other mobile phone outlets. They all said they had stock, though they may well have sold out during Friday.
And what did they get? Well, according to plenty of fawning reviews, they got a very good phone. But was it that good? It supports 4G networks for faster data – but the UK doesn’t have any in operation yet, that’s not much help.
Other than that, it’s got a bigger screen and it is 20 percent thinner.
That’s not a huge leap forward – and we knew all this from the 12 September launch event (and even before that, as the leaks turned out to be pretty solid).
The iPhone 5 hullabaloo has the same feel as a crowd in London’s Leicester Square waiting for celebrities to tread the red carpet before a film preview. They don’t care about the film. They don’t necessarily rate the actors’ talents. They just want to see them because they are famous.
From reports, it seems the people at the front of the iPhone queue didn’t actually want iPhones. They were queuing to buy them for friends, or their parents. Or else aiming to get publicity, or selling their queues spaces for charity.
In other words, they were there because of the iPhone’s celebrity status, not its abilities.
Last year, the term “iPhone” was top of the list of Google search terms, beating out others, including “Kardashian”. But we haven’t yet reached the stage where the iPhone is a baffling Kardashian amongst celebrities, where no one can quite explain why it is famous at all. Some six years ago it did, after all, take smartphone features, wrap them in a beautiful design and take them to a wider public.
The device gained a critical mass of users and established the App Store concept.
But none of this is unique or great any more, and this doesn’t matter. The iPhone 5 can command coverage, even if it is not the world’s best smartphone to command coverage, just as David Beckham is not the world’s greatest footballer, Victoria Beckham is not the best singer on the planet, and X Factor is not the best way to spend your Saturday evening.
Celebrity has a self-sustaining logic of its own. The media (TechWeekEurope included) is part of a complex surrounding the brand, in which everyone hopes to gain by stoking the fire.
It’s not even possible to condemn people for buying and using the phones because brands are felt to have a “value” of their own. Like any other fashion item, it may cost more, but if people pay up, that proves it is worth it.
It’s surprising, though, to find that the tech devices we write about are the new celebrities.
How much do you know about the iPhone? Take our quiz!
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While I absolutely agree with the article there is one small point I'd like to make.
Apple are generally credited with, as you put it, establishing "the App Store concept" but that is far from correct.
For many years before iPhone was a twinkle in Steve's eye, Linux distributions maintained huge archives of software which was tested and verified to work with that distribution. These repositories were a single place where you could go to get any manner of software you could want without trawling the net.
Sound familiar?