In the weeks leading up the launch of iPhone 5, two myths merged and dominated.
One was about fingerprints and, quickly after, about hacking the new technology. Because a lot of people in this field want fingerprint technology (or any new main feature) to matter, the way touchscreens and apps mattered.
The other was about Apple's "mojo." Is it gone? Because a lot of people want it to be gone just like a lot of people wanted the Yankees to be awful for all these years.
The fact is that fingerprint technology is not a revolution in the touchscreen or app mode -- it's a function and a quiet feature. That's not to say it is not important. It's a function of security to begin with and could become a feature of identity-detecting. It will have real impact on our lives, and possibly privacy, but it will lay low while doing so. And that's not revolutionary. There are many things that detect you, and make your life a little more sci-fi all the time, and fingerprints are another.
On the other hand, none of this hand-wringing meant anything but good news for Apple's bottom line. The Yankees have proven this year that if they're going down it won't be precipitously and Apple is proving it's nowhere near the end of its run.
Last week I watched a group of millennials trying out the new iOS and 5S. What they talked about was minutiae of details -- the artless album feature on iTunes, the cluster of related apps on the home screen, the fingerprint technology, the speed (it's ever so slightly faster in the real world), the flatness of its UI, etc.
Why would those little things mean so much?
Well, actually, they don't. Marcus Wohlsen at Wired has it right:
These customers didn’t flock to the phones because they wanted a fingerprint sensor or a slightly better camera. The reality is that Apple’s new models are synced with cell phone contract cycles. After two years, contracts have expired, and our two-year-old phones have taken a beating. A phone with slightly better features at the same subsidized price meets consumers where they’re living.
And more importantly, as Wohlsen pointed to in his piece, the New Yorker's Matt Buchanan writes, "for the next few years, advances in smartphones and tablets will continue to be subtle and iterative, driven by the twin processes of simplification and connection. "
A revolution every time is not realistic. So we settle for, and create a lot of noise around, those subtle iterations. In a world where customer voice could be so powerful, it's Apple and a few competitors setting the agenda, not the other way around.
