featuring Steve Jobs and a bunch of new Apple stuff is set to go in just under an hour, and for a few weeks now we’ve (we = people who enjoy Apple watching and the company’s products) been besieged by dozens of predictions. Jason Fried’s Apple Phone: My prediction in SvN and of course John Gruber’s predictions at Daring Fireball are pretty much the best of the bunch.
I’m not a professional Apple watcher like the others, but for my part I agree most with Fried’s prediction on the phone – and the iPod announcement is a good precedent to remember. The thing to remember about Apple is that their new products, when announced, often seem anti-climactic. Revisionist history posits that the iPod was a huge announcement, but I remember when it came out people were very underwhelmed – “what, is that it, an MP3 player?”
That’s not to say I don’t wish for, as Gruber puts it, “not an iPod phone, but rather introduces a new mobile device OS.” But that doesn’t seem to be how Apple does things – it may become that eventually, but it will take time for that to become obvious to most.
Update – Nevermind! I have only read about half of the features and it’s already clearly a much bigger deal than I anticipated.
