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Apple fanboys are finally admitting Steve Jobs was wrong about huge phones
This weekend, the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus went on sale to record pre-orders and insanely long queues. Sure, there’s pent up demand from the public, which has been clamoring for bigger devices for years.
But much of the rush for the new huge iPhones comes not just from the broader public, but from hardcore Apple fanatics. And the Apple faithful don’t just want the 4.7-inch iPhone 6. They’re after the 5.5-inch iPhone 6 Plus, too.
Why are the true believers so enthusiastically jumping on the bandwagon, after holding out so long against the tide of larger phones?
The ungenerous answer is that Apple fans will buy anything Apple makes. And there is, perhaps, some truth in that, as we’ve seen this before. In 2011, Samsung started releasing “phablets,” including the 5.3-inch Galaxy Note with an accompanying stylus. All of which brought cries of tastelessness from Apple fanboys, especially as the iPhone 4S was released and stubbornly stuck to the original screen size of 3.5 inches. At the time, the Apple blogger John Gruber said on his site, Daring Fireball:
Apple decided on the optimal size for an iPhone display back in 2006. If they thought 4-inches was better, overall, as the one true size for the iPhone display, then the original iPhone would have had a 4-inch display.
Call it the Church of Apple. Steve Jobs once called big phones Hummers (like the cars) and said that no-one was going to buy them. (He was sitting next to the current CEO, Tim Cook, when he said that.) Only a year after the iPhone 4S, the iPhone 5 was released with a 4-inch display and it sold like hotcakes. The Apple fans bought it and loved it. And the same thing is happening again. So what gives?
Marco Arment, the creator of Instapaper, suggests that Apple fans were only “partially just flat-out wrong,” but mainly failed to see the technological advances that would make big phones lighter and more useful. Which is all a nice way of saying the battery is much better. “Big-screened phones were mediocre in 2011, but we failed to see that they wouldn’t always be,” he wrote. “People holding Galaxy Notes up to their faces to make phone calls looked ridiculous in 2011. Today, making a phone call in public on a huge phone is commonplace, and how often do you make phone calls in public anymore?”
Gruber upgraded to an iPhone 6. “One week in and I’m still unsure about the size of the iPhone 6 relative to that of my iPhone 5S, but I’m very sure about the size of the 5.5-inch iPhone 6 Plus: it’s too big for my taste,” he said in his review of the phones. He recalled an incident in a Verizon store two years ago where a tiny woman wanted a Galaxy S III or even a Galaxy Note because she didn’t want a tablet and wanted to use her phone for everything. She was not alone in her decision-making. Demand for phablets is the fastest growing segment of mobile devices.
So much so that Dan Frakes, the former senior editor of Macworld,decided to get the biggest iPhone ever made. “I think that in the past, we truly believed that the idea of a huge phone was silly,” Frakes wrote. “But many of us, for a lack of better phrasing, have evolved—and so has the hardware.” Frakes previously carried his iPhone 5S and the iPad Mini to do all the things he wanted to do—like read and watch movies. “It wasn’t until I stopped thinking of my iPhone as a phone, and started thinking of it as a computing device, that I warmed to the idea of a honking-big smartphone,” he said. “My hope with the iPhone 6 Plus is that I’ll find myself carrying a second device much less frequently.”
The time for calling the iPhone 6 a “sleek, sophisticated rounded rectangle” compared to the Galaxy S5’s “bulky, hideous rounded rectangle,” as The Onion put it, has passed. We’re all going to use bigger smartphones. At least for now, the taste wars are over.
In his first interview after taking office, Modi failed to dazzle
Communication is one of Narendra Modi’s strengths. But in his first interview as India’s prime minister, it didn’t shine through.
After a difficult week that saw much diplomatic wrangling as Chinese president Xi Jinping came visiting, Modi’s interview made front page headlines even before it was actually telecast.
Coming days before his trip to the United States, Modi chose to speak to CNN’s Fareed Zakaria (also a contributing editor to The Atlantic and Quartz). And short promotional clips of the conversation, including aparticular comment on Indian muslims, were immediately picked up by the Indian press.
The complete interview, however, failed to impress. Partly (and especially for Indian audiences) because it was dubbed in English, shadowing Modi’s sharp Hindi skills. And partly because the prime minister’s answers on India’s foreign policy seemed evasive and incomplete.
Zakaria began by asking if Modi thought India could replicate China’s impressive economic growth. “India does not need to become anything else. India must become only India,” Modi replied, before explaining how the two Asian nations had fallen and risen in tandem.
Continuing with China, Zakaria later questioned if Modi was concerned about Beijing’s expansionist behaviour in the South China Sea.
“China is also a country with an ancient cultural heritage. Look at how it has focused on economic development. It’s hardly the sign of a country that wants to be isolated. It wants to stay connected,” Modi said.
“That is why we should have trust in China’s understanding and have faith that it would accept global laws and will play its role in cooperating and moving forward,” the prime minister added.
Of course, this interview was recorded before Xi’s visit to India and the coinciding standoff between Indian and Chinese troops in Jammu and Kashmir. Nonetheless, Modi’s simplistic assessment of Chinese policy seems contradictory to how an increasingly aggressive Beijing has recently behaved in its neighbourhood.
Pressed on whether he thought Washington was looking to upgrade its relationship with India, Modi didn’t talk specifics.
On the possibility of a genuine strategic alliance between the United States and India, Modi replied in the affirmative and then argued that the bedrock of the relationship hinged on the fact that “Indians and Americans have coexistence in their natural temperament.” Pressed on whether he thought Washington was looking to upgrade its relationship with India, Modi didn’t talk specifics.
“Relations between India and America should not be seen within the limits of just Delhi and Washington. It’s a much larger sphere,” he said. “The good thing is that the mood of both Delhi and Washington is in harmony with this understanding.”
But it was perhaps Modi’s reply to a straightforward question on Russia’s actions in Ukraine that was the most confounding. Zakaria asked him how he viewed Russia’s annexation of Crimea.
“Firstly, whatever happened there, innocent people died in a plane accident. That’s very saddening. These are not good things for humanity in this age,” Modi answered first. Ukraine is a difficult subject for India, given New Delhi’s deep ties with Russia.
“There is a saying in India that the person who should throw a stone first is the person who has not committed any sins. In the world right now, a lot of people want to give advice. But look within them, and they too have sinned in some way,” he added. Who he was alluding to remains unclear.
“Ultimately, India’s view point is that efforts need to be made to sit together and talk, and to resolve problems in an ongoing process,” Modi said finally, though his own government has refused to follow that policy with Pakistan.
Modi may be an astute media manager domestically, but his first big interview after taking office contributed little to remaking his image as a global leader of substance.
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