The iPhone 5 - features your thumb?
I will preface this article with the acknowledgment that after many years of making fun of Apple and my friends who were Apple users, I went ahead and jumped on the iPhone bandwagon for my 32nd birthday back in May. That said, What the hell, Apple!? Have you seen their latest commercial? Allow me to show you.
All the amazing things that the iPhone 5 can do, like answer you when you talk to it, or get you hopelessly lost, and they spend 30 seconds of valuable ad time talking about how your thumb goes from here to there? How does that set the phone apart from every other smart phone out there? It doesn't, that's how. Why in the hell did Apple ad wonks choose to feature that? Is it an acknowledgement that the majority of the updates to the iPhone 5 are also part of my iPhone 4s thanks to my downloading IOS6?
Maybe I'm just bitter because once again I finally get something all the cool kids do and it's fading in popularity faster than Jerry Sandusky. (Too soon?)
But the iPhone 5 DOES have cool features. Maybe it's actually a sign of our own jaded sense of expectations. Even the crappiest phone takes signals from the air even when you're in the middle of nowhere. These phones browse the damn Internet in the middle of Yosemite. They take better photos (albeit possibly with a purple haze that would make Jimi Hendrix Proud) than my $400 Canon digital camera did that was top of the line five years ago. But we've come to expect that, so maybe all Apple had left to talk about was how the movement of your thumb lines up with the layout of their phone.
After all, we can't expect Apple ads to be this honest:
Consumers don't appreciate this kind of truth in advertising.
