I started with a BlackBerry in 2005, and stuck with it through two product cycles. I finally gave in and got an original Droid; Verizon didn't offer the iPhone yet. I had played with an original a few months after it had been released, but at the time Verizon was pretty much my only choice for where I was living, at least for digital data services.

I did see the revolution in that phone though; combining an evolved mobile OS (sorry, but the basic functionality and layout struck me most as an evolution of BBOS) with the ability via a large screen of actually having a "usable" online experience. Stayed hung on the physical keyboard for a while though. Last upgrade cycle I realized I was invested enough in the Android ecosystem to stay with it; yes the iOS integrated experience is smoother but I was already familiar with mine so even that wasn't compelling enough. I'm just a little disillusioned with this at least as an "integer" release instead of a "point" - the OG iPhone was groundbreaking, the 4-series was a huge step up in design, with the high-dpi display and FFC...but the 5 really just doesn't strike me as anything spectacular in terms of attracting switchers or new customers. Of course if I were already invested in iOS I would upgrade but even then I'd wait for a contract subsidy.

I see tiny shades of the Sculley/Spindler days starting to rumble around now that Steve is gone again...Apple isn't IBM or MS, they have to be a lot more agile to stay ahead. I worry.

Every other device wants to be an iPhone. Many of them eclipse it by one measure or another, but none of them are the total package. iPhone was first to market and is the most mature of the products. It *is* the smart phone paradigm. The others just want to be.

Now to be sure, you can find a faster this or bigger screen that or a thinner the other, but all of them are "me too" devices. The iPhone IS the device.

I agree with you about worrying about Apple now that Jobs is gone. That said, Apple is actually no longer in the hardware business. They're in the content business and their hardware is just a conduit. I don't think anyone other than, maybe, Microsoft get that. Apple owns both content and conduit and has the strongest identity in the business. MS labors under the reputational burden of many shitty versions of its flagship product and a few very bad tries at hardware (how Zune *can* we forget??). MS smart phones are barely on the radar.

After 25+ years of living in the Apple ecosystem, I definitely understand that; I was making that case in the 90s when Classic was a buggy, crashing, horrendously baroque outdated pile of crap and the ONLY argument was for the combined product.

That being said, fifteen years down the road from my first posts in comp.os.mac.advocacy, I'm a little bit more tempered...circumstances at the time kept me from iOS, and now that I'm invested into the other one, the additional fit and finish of iOS, while quite lovely and something that would make the decision easy if I were entering the market, isn't compelling enough anymore to make me switch. I'm also more of a gearhead/techie than Apple's target market; I almost always have a shell open on my MBP, I know what plists are and how to use them - I've broken a few iPhones and rooted a ton of Androids and I actually prefer the rawer design of the latter. Especially AOSP, the reference basic implementation built directly on the source code from Google...if you want any bells and whistles you have to specifically install apps for that, but man, it FLIES.

You're dead-on with Apple being in the content/consumer electronics business, but I can see that being their Achilles' heel as well as their strength. The Economist (IIRC) a few years ago had an article detailing how Apple would need to survive after Jobs; the crux of their argument was that Apple needed to look at themselves as a design house/fashion label as opposed to a tech company, and manage themselves accordingly. Think Chanel, post-Coco. It makes perfect sense, but the problem I'm already starting to see is that Steve and only Steve had that ephemeral ability to take academic-intellectual innovation and transform it into the most beautifully revolutionary usable products on the market; Tim Cook just ain't got the chops.

Cook is no Jobs, but he studied at the man's knee.

Scully was no Jobs. I can wait a year or three on Cook. The stuff in the pipeline is still Jobs' stuff.

Now, if Cook shops for turtlenecks, jeans, and glasses where Jobs shopped, I'll rethink things.

I guess I don't see the 90s again...I think I feel about the iP5 like I felt when the G4s were stuck at 500MHz for a year, right in the middle of the speed-race between Intel and AMD. Not catastrophic but getting a little stagnant.

They're still going to print money with it, though.

And it provides a faster connection.