Why You Shouldn’t Be Pre-Disappointed With the Next iPhone ⇥ elezea.com

Rian van der Merwe has a really smart piece regarding the palpable disappointment with the new iPhone:

It’s a natural evolution of a product, and we should be happy with the incremental progress. But that’s just not good enough for us. We can’t move beyond the amazing 2007 keynote where we first saw the iPhone. That’s where Apple set the bar, and now it’s almost impossible to reach it again. So, even though every year the iPhone and iOS keep getting better and better, we become less and less impressed because we have an unrealistic expectation that everything Apple does has to fit into the Excitement generator category.

Everything’s amazing, and nobody’s happy. It’s ridiculous. I don’t know what people were expecting from it. NFC? Yeah, sure, but there needs to be a better standard. Hell, there needs to be a single standard for it. Wireless charging? Not until it works over several feet.

We should be saying “wow”. It’s an ultra-thin piece of hardware porn, with a great OS on it. But nobody’s happy because Apple didn’t reinvent the category, and that’s an enormous expectation for what they could do (and a dangerous one, because it’s something they shouldn’t do while the category is still new).