“There was clearly some disappointment after Apple’s iPhone 4S announcement Tuesday,” Nick Bilton reports for The New York Times. “Twitter was awash with despondent Apple fans who had expected an iPhone 5. Investors seemed just as crestfallen. Apple’s stock fell sharply during the speech. (It bounced back a bit by the close of trading.)”
“Many people had hoped the company would showcase a new phone, specifically called the iPhone 5, that would come with newly designed hardware,” Bilton reports. “It was like the child who convinces himself there will be a pony waiting for him under the Christmas tree even though no one promised one or even suggested such a gift existed.”
“Instead, Apple announced a device that on the outside, looks exactly like the iPhone 4,” Bilton reports. “Although it would have been nice to see some new iPhone design, just for the sake of metamorphosis, it’s what’s inside that counts.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: By SteveJack
Why Apple didn’t leak “there will be no iPhone 5″ – strongly enough to seriously dent the rumors – to The Journal or some other credible outlets last week is beyond us. Leaks to convey important information to trusted journalists is nothing unusual and Apple’s done it many times before. Tamping down overwrought expectations should be standard operating procedure for Apple Inc. And it’s so easy! Under-promise (this includes not only saying little, but also managing out-of-control expectations) and over-deliver. So simple.
And, it obviously doesn’t matter if Apple said anything about an iPhone 5 or not, it’s the perception that’s the problem. In general, too many people expected an “iPhone 5.” That is clearly a problem for iPhone 4S. That the overly-inflated expectations were not caused by Apple is meaningless. It’s Apple’s job to manage hyped up expectations that will negatively impact the reception of their products – especially with a new CEO trying to do the impossible and stand up there in Steve Jobs shoes. Why is Apple so tone deaf? Have they become too insular?
The same sort of media mismanagement happened with “AntennaGate,” too. Apple was maddeningly slow to react, lost control of the narrative early on, and then had to resort to trotting out no less than Steve Jobs – along with videos of competitors’ phones attenuating all over the place – for a way-late dog and pony show just to regain some vague semblance of the control they never should have relinquished in the first place! Apple seemingly manages everything well, except for the media sometimes. Ignoring the media and letting hype spiral out of control is not a valid strategy for managing your message, Apple; it’s incompetence.
All that said, even without properly managing the hype, Apple could have solved much of iPhone 4S’s problem if only they hadn’t forgotten to make a silver one!
SteveJack is a pen name used by a long-time Macintosh user, web designer, multimedia producer and, when he feels like it, a contributor to both MacDailyNews Takes and the Opinion section.