The Real Problem With the iPhone 5

It's like clockwork. at Apple Stores and . The next thing you know, people start . With the iPhone 4, it was the questionable antenna which snowballed into "Antennagate." What a scandal! With the iPhone 4S, it was both the and the fact that Apple did little to improve the iPhone 4. "Why was there no iPhone 5?" This went on for months.

All the wailing over minor features, however, clouds Apple's real problem: it's hard for users to upgrade to the newest iPhone.

Nobody is ever going to call me an Apple apologist, but even I cannot get on these shallow critique bandwagons. If I were to write a , I'd have to conclude that it was an obvious, necessary, and expected upgrade to the definitive smartphone. People want thinner phones with bigger screens, and that's what they got. It still feels like an iPhone, which iPhone connoisseurs will tell you feels better than an Android phone. In fact, this little difference is why Google developed Project Butter, a code base that smoothes out the phone's "feel."

This time, though, the complaints revolve around not just about the iPhone 5, but the entire upgrade, which in favor of a seriously mediocre in-house mapping system.

So what's the big deal? Google has thousands of people working on its Maps and Google Street View cars are driving everywhere, taking pictures of everything they can. Google is even mapping the inside of buildings. This would be great if Apple got the full product, but it just licensed a part of the system.

The Google Maps on the iPhone was just a map. It lacked the unique turn-by-turn navigation feature that often would factor in traffic jams and re-route users around the mess. The feature saved me once in Washington state when the navigation told me to exit Interstate 5 as I approached Tacoma. This seemed weird but I followed the new path, which took me through town and back onto the freeway some three to four miles past what turned out to be a massive pile up.

The iPhone's Google Maps didn't have this feature, so what's the point of staying on board with a competitor's product? It was more of a promotion for Google than anything else. Exactly why everyone is carping about it is beyond me.

Apple probably should have gone out and bought TomTom, Garmin, or Magellan to help with its in-house dev product. It has the money. For all we know, this sort of deal is in the works and is just taking forever.

Two things are ahead: First, you can be certain that Apple and roll out an update to iOS 6. Second, Google will eventually app-ify its maps, possibly with its turn-by-turn system for some fee (although Google's Eric Schmidt said the company has ). I'd bet Google could easily charge $10 for its mapping app. Apple would get a piece of this action and could fast track the product into the App Store. The company would look petty if it blocked the app, and Apple's beef with Google is not about the maps anyway.

But let's get down to the real problem with the iPhone 5. It's the ridiculous contracts. It is simply not that easy to get an iPhone 5 unless you can manage to with your iPhone 4S, which doesn't seem to be the case for many people. I don't know anyone who is getting an iPhone 5 because the upgrade path is sketchy. These same people have said they would get one tomorrow if they could.

If Apple wants to follow an automotive "model year" marketing scheme for these devices, there has to be an easy way to trade up, otherwise it won't work out. This is the real problem—not the maps.