I don’t know about you, but I’m getting a bit tired of seeing that “4″ in front all of the iPhone products and rumors coming our way.
Granted, 4 is a beautiful number: it represents a nice, clean, divisible number, the time signature designation for most western pop music, the number of seasons — I have nothing against 4 per se.
Except for the fact that Apple seems to be stuck on the number 4.
If the rumors come true, the 2011 iPhone will in fact be yet another chapter in the iPhone 4 saga: the iPhone 4s would be — not ironically — the fourth iPhone iteration to be part of the iPhone 4 franchise, after the original iPhone 4, the Verizon iPhone 4, and the white iPhone 4. And as iPhone 5′er and iPhone 5 News Blog commenter extraordinaire Andres deftly points out, regardless of what Apple brands the next iPhone as, it will be the fifth iPhone design — thus, the true iPhone 5.
But there’s more to the iPhone 5 than the name and series number: iPhone users have an expectation for what the iPhone 5 will be. While there is no agreement on what features or functions the iPhone 5 will need to have in order to deserve the “iPhone 5″ moniker, the general consensus is that the iPhone 5 will need to be a game-changer in the smartphone market — a true product leader that puts Apple well ahead of Android in the smartphone race.
It would seem that Apple understands what’s at stake with the iPhone 5 as much as we do — after all, it is us, the consumers, who have set the stakes for the iPhone 5, not Apple. Because of this, the plan may be to cash in on the success of the iPhone 4 franchise once again, especially since Apple is unable or unwilling to chock the next iPhone full ‘o new gadgets and gizmos that will dwarf even the resounding success of the iPhone 4.
But the success of the iPhone 4 may in fact be what compels Apple to stay stuck on “4″ for their 2011 iPhone.
There is no question that the iPhone 4 is by far the most successful iPhone product ever released by Apple. Whether its meandering release schedule was something that Apple anticipated from the beginning or something that they half-improvised along the way, Apple learned how to extend the lifecycle of its sole smartphone well beyond the arc of any of its predecessors. In this way, the iPhone 4 has managed to stay mainstream and relevant throughout 2010 and 2011, in spite of the fact that it gets more and more outmoded with every passing day and every new Android release.
What insulates the iPhone 4 franchise against a multiplicitous Android competitor is the iPhone’s eternal coolness factor; a marketing intangible that Apple alone has managed to forge with all of its products. The mainstream consumer would be shocked to learn that the iPhone is not the top-selling mobile phone in the world.
All of this being said, Apple stands to lose its cool with its faithful customers in the wake of an ignominious iPhone 4s release. Apple may think that it’s a no-brainer — a lay-up, even — to simply affix an “s” to its spiffy “4″ and sell another 40+ million units before getting an iPhone 5 in the Summer of 2012. But the thing is, iPhone users patently do not want the iPhone 4s!
Do they want all of the purported features of the iPhone 4s — namely, iOS 5, A5 chip, 8 megapixel camera, iCloud, etc? Yes. But they want all those things, plus next-generation technologies, like real 4G, NFC, and mind-blowing new features akin to the front-facing camera of the iPhone 4.
And they want it to be called “iPhone 5.”
If the rumors turn out to be true and the 2011 iPhone is the iPhone 4, why do you think that the iPhone is afraid to turn 5? Let us know!
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