Recycled iPhone 5 Rumors Miss the Point ⇥

Sascha Segan, on the reheated iPhone 5 rumours:

Hey, did you hear the iPhone 5 is coming? And according to the latest rumors from 9to5Mac, it has a 4-inch screen and a new body design!

Repeat after me: Nothing to see here.

Good point. These rumours are almost exactly what we’ve been hearing since the middle of last year, which could mean a few things. On the one hand, you could argue that because these rumours are relatively constant, it’s been the iPhone 5 design all along. Where there’s smoke, there’s usually fire, right?

On the other hand, though, these rumours are often lazy and lukewarm. Segan points out that the latest rumours also suggest that there isn’t a final design at this point, and that Apple is testing a number of contenders. Furthermore, he argues that all these hardware rumours really miss the point:

The success of the iPhone 4S also shows that Apple’s secret sauce isn’t hardware as much as software. […] What drew consumers to the 4S – and what will draw them to the iPhone 5 – is iOS, Apple’s apps, Apple’s cloud services and the spectacular third-party developer community that Apple has nurtured through the industry’s best app store.

That’s a great argument. Of course, software isn’t the entire story. Apple’s success in hardware has been about balancing available technology with their priorities and values. As long as they continue the balance and the precedent they have set, the iPhone 5 will have excellent hardware with an amazing software stack on top.