Hype, Hype, Hype – Must Be iPhone Season
All my cards on the table. I like the iPhone. There is a lot of like – it is sleek, has a myriad of apps, tonnes of functionality, is light, easy to navigate, and it’s cool.
But I also like the LG Arena, Samsung Omnia and Blackberry Pearl. However, for some reason they do not have the mystique around them that the iPhone does. There were no huge cues and resellers stores when any of these phones came on the market, nor were there pages of copy written about it, or mentions on the TV So why does this happen with iPhone? Easy. Two words – Steve Jobs.
Don’t get me wrong, I’m not saying people like the iPhone because of him, but he is the master manipulator that gets us all excited when the new units comes out. He is the one that set the ball rolling when he came back on board in 1996 deciding that although the Mac was not the most popular computer platform, there was still a place for it in the tech mainstream.
So he set about looking for new, funky ways of using technology. Remember the first iMac that came out without a floppy drive? I was pretty angry at the time, but within a couple of months I was burning files to CD and using the CD drive. Jobs is a man of vision, and while I sometimes feel he creates unnecessary hype and over exaggerates the capabilities of his products, he certainly does keep his competitors on their toes and makes them try and out-do Apple.
Over the past five-ten years so many innovations have come out due to this competition, that in the end, we the consumers are the winners. So while I can get cynical about the Apple marketing campaign, I do realise there are benefits to be had.