Missing Some Vowels

marco:

This is where I stopped reading the article during my first pass, but enough people kept linking to it that I figured I’d give it another shot. It didn’t get better.

We over-paid for your phone—which you render obsolete every 13 months, like clockwork

Over-paid? Value judgments aside, whose fault is it if you paid a price you considered too high for something that you didn’t need?

Render obsolete? The original iPhone, now two years old, runs every application just as well as the iPhone 3G and has nearly all of the same capabilities except for the handful of features that the 3G explicitly added (e.g. 3G radio, true GPS). The iPhone 3G is so good that Apple’s still selling it. The 3GS is such a relatively minor update that almost no 3G owners are paying the premium to upgrade yet.

I haven’t yet met an original-iPhone user who felt that their phone was obsolete. “Obsolete” means something very different than “no longer the newest model.”

And what if they didn’t do this? What if they didn’t release a new iPhone this summer? Imagine the bad press and negative speculation they’d get.

Obsolete is when the manufacturer stops supporting the phone or any updates to it, owing to which it’s rendered useless

The first-gen iPhone on the other hand is virtually just as good as the new iPhone 3GS.