The iPhone 5 letdown: We’re all to blame

What a letdown. The iPhone 4S announced yesterday features the interesting Siri virtual assistant technology, which fulfills Apple chairman Steve Jobs’s longtime goal of having a device that takes and acts on spoken orders. And the prosumer-level rear camera puts one more nail in the coffin for stand-alone digital cameras for the masses. But the iPhone 4S was no iPhone 5, though it’s been treated that way sight unseen among journalists, bloggers, and fanboys for nearly a year.

After all that hype — some of it outrageous — Apple’s announcement of basically a hardware upgrade fell flat. It didn’t help that new CEO Tim Cook blathered for more than 20 minutes about rising Apple market share or that iOS chief Scott Fostall replayed his iOS 5 and iCloud presentation from June for another 25 minutes. Or that the Siri demos by Phil Schiller went on way too long (I tuned out after 5 minutes of essentially the same type of example). The nearly two-hour Apple “special event” was way overpadded for what turned out to be a moderate set of announcements.

Early signs of an overhyped event Last February, when the “iPhone 5” crescendo started in earnest, I warned people to expect a modest hardware upgrade, what I called the iPhone 4X, instead of an iPhone 5. I have no secret ins at Apple; I just relied on my long observations of Apple’s behavior. It very rarely upends a new design just a year later, and the iPhone 4 was the most recent new design. It turned out the iPad 2 later that spring was an exception to that rule, but it’s held true in iPods, Macs, and previous iPhones.

In fact, a look at the iPhone’s evolution shows how conservative Apple is when it comes to radically redesiging its products. The same goes for the MacBook Pros, which are largely unchanged after three years, and even the MacBook Air, which is about as old a design. Apple is more apt to innovate inside the case once it’s found a form it likes — and it likes its carved-aluminum-block Macs and sandwiched-aluminum-and-glass iPhones very much.

The fact that Apple held the iPhone 5 — er, 4S reveal at its Town Hall facility at Apple’s Cupertino, Calif., headquarters should have been a sign that this was not a revolutionary moment. It historically uses that venue for relatively minor announcements, reserving the larger Moscone conference center in San Francisco for the big stuff. That may change when its “spaceship” campus is completed several years hence, but in the meantime, I bet that Moscone will remain the “big deal” venue.

Ironically, that facility couldn’t handle the (smaller number than usual of) journalists invited to relay to the world Apple’s latest revelations. Thus, dozens of sites’ “live” blogs went dark as the combination of the hall’s limited Internet access and the blogging engines that the media sites tend to subscribe to choked (Cover It Live was the biggest loser in that game yesterday).

Apple choked, too, in its larded presentations that lacked the entertainment value usually provided, in what seemed an attempt to hide the modesty of the announcement in a pile of presentations and videos. Instead, it drowned, feeling endless for the bulk of the two hours, then suddenly rushed at the end. Maybe we’re seeing what happens when it’s not the Steve Jobs show.

But the event’s importance was brought to an impossible level long before the notices went out. The week before the event, the Wall Street Journal and its tech website, AllThingsD, published the basic details of the new iPhone, par for the course before every Apple “special event.” Knowing that the Journal gets regular early access from the usually tight-lipped Apple, the press should have realized last week that the event was not going to be the Third Coming of the iPhone.

Instead, you had some major news sites run nearly a dozen stories yesterday morning before the event — all in the space of a few hours. One French-speaking tweeter noted the insanity and traffic grab, giving it the hashtag #overexpose. That same tweeter tweaked InfoWorld for running two stories (both by me; one a preview and one a speculation of what might come in 2012), then later noted sardonically that we were relatively restrained compared to other sites. For me, our two posts were enough, if not more than enough given where the signs were pointing.

Fiction rules the Web But the mania that fueled all this overreaction came first from the blogosphere. The number of ridiculous stories from sites like Boy Genius Report (which once had a high ratio of credible rumors but seems to have gotten addicted to “scoop” buzz), the various AOL properties (TechCrunch and Engadget, particularly; sister site TUAW is more circumspect), and Gizmodo — and replayed and rehyped constantly by aggregator sites such as Techmeme — has amazed me all year:

• The Photoshopped fake cases “discovered” by a “source who has provided credible details in the past”
• The alleged details revealed by a kid working in a Verizon store; Apple doesn’t tell Verizon’s CEO what’s coming, so the guy trying to sell you more minutes doesn’t know a thing
• The iPhone Nano model being developed, as well as a bigger-screen model; one site even took the Goldilocks approach, with three sizes predicted
• The alleged hardware details, such as a 4G radio and curved-glass design, from a line worker in some Chinese factory that probably doesn’t even exist; remember all those “new case design” stories based on alleged Chinese-made iPhone 5 skins from last week?
• The crazy comments made by writers and financial analysts; on Monday, Boy Genius Report invented a story that Sprint would get an exclusive on the new iPhone, which would be a WiMax-capable model (never mind that Sprint is abandoning WiMax for LTE), and on the same day Ticonderoga Securities financial analyst Brian White told his clients that Apple would replace the iPhone 4 with an all-aluminum unibody case like that in the MacBook lineup — a “fact” duly reported by that bastion of truth, Fox Business News, though neither was remotely true (trust me, financial analysts are clueless about technology, so be wary of them as sources on tech issues)

The scroll of shame is much longer, and Gawker’s Ryan Tate has a much longer list of these fictions if you want to revisit the mud pit.

It gets worse: All the blogger wannabes — you know, the folks who rewrite and even copy others’ stories — rerun these accounts, quoting each other repeatedly, building a web of deception, fiction, lies, and wishful thinking. Apple barely speaks to the press, creating an (intentional, I’m sure) fertile ground for the rumors to sprout and grow, so the company is always in the current discussion without having to actually be responsible for it.

Ironically, of all the rumors, the only ones that proved true were the obvious: the use of the A5 chip, Sprint becoming an iPhone seller, and the “world phone” capability. Of the three technical innovations, only two leaked: the use of the Siri assistant technology a week ago and the 8-megapixel camera in early September. The more-efficient radio and its increased data rate was a surprise, so there was no need for rumormongering before Labor Day.

The mainstream media these days increasingly lives and dies based on Web traffic, and these iPhone (and iPad and Android) fictions get as much of an audience as the Super Bowl. So you see the legitimate press (I include many blogs in that category) doing weekly iPhone 5 rumor roundups, a cynical attempt to gain from the gossip, while pretending not to be playing the same game as the fiction-spinners. Believe me, if you don’t play that hype-and-rumors game, you feel like you’re missing the gravy train — but it’s clear that these stories (how aptly named) are a disservice to the reader and the truth. InfoWorld rarely runs such rumor stories, and to do so, we have to have a strong belief it’s credible enough to repeat, which is why they’re so rare on our site. Worse, some major news sites — Bloomberg News is by far the worst offender — routinely run iPhone and iPad stories based on rumors and dubious sources without even the “we’re just repeating rumors” figleaf, as if they were credible reports.

This time, the mania got nuclear, if such a metaphor can exist. And during the iPhone 4S reveal, I could hear my fellow journalists — and the not-journalist bloggers — mutter in our various electronic forums that the event was a letdown, boring even. Well, we let down our audiences, and ourselves, way before Apple did. Apple may have bought into the hypefest, but we ultimately created: bloggers, journalists, and readers (who create the demand, like drug addicts).

But can the rumor mill actually break its addiction? Already, just hours after the iPhone 5 nondebut, Cnet’s Brooke Crothers was happily reporting more “analyst” speculation about the iPhone 5, and Techmeme was happily spreading it. There appears to be no lessons learned, at least on those fronts.

The sad thing is that the iPhone 4S is actually a nice upgrade to a great product — but so many people have lost of sight of that given the impossible expectations that had been set for so long. Let’s see if we can do better for the real iPhone 5, the iPad 3 (maybe better thought of as the iPad 2S?), and whatever else might tickle our fancy in the coming year.

This article, “The iPhone 5 letdown: We’re all to blame,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com. Follow Galen’s mobile musings on Twitter at MobileGalen. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.