iPhone 5 News Blog Editorial: How The Tech Media Overthought the White iPhone 4
The white iPhone 4 is finally here, and guess what — it’s white.No A5 chip. No IOS 5. No 8 megapixel camera, or any other purported feature that will most likely find its way onto the iPhone5. Instead, the white iPhone 4 lived up to its name flawlessly: nothing more or less than a white version of the original iPhone 4. And yet, when you compare the end result of weeks of rumor-milling in the tech world, what we ended up with is far from what all the speculation promised us.
Here on the blog, the white iPhone 4 was quite obviously not going to be a game-changing device. As I explained in a previous article, the purpose of the white iPhone 4 is simply to buy time in lieu of a later-than-usual iPhone 5 release and give the iPhone 4 lifecycle an extension. While it may be true that few people remain in the marketplace that are true white iPhone 4 holdouts, whatever number that “few” represents is certainly a large enough number to substantiate Apple’s move to pour some white paint into their plastic molds and churn out a few million units of the white iPhone 4. In the end, it is a very obvious, inexpensive, and effective way for Apple to sell more product.
If it was so obvious, then why did the tech media get so confounded with unrealistic expectations about the white iPhone 4? Why did they get it so wrong?
Perhaps in a kind of subconconscious response to the growing reality that the iPhone 5 isn’t going to hit the stores until the end of the Summer at the latest, the tech media managed to weave an exponentially complex tapestry of rumored iPhone iterations, some of which are still rumored to appear in the interim. Not long after the white iPhone 4 rumors gained traction, fresh rumors abounded about how app developers were to receive a developer-only, A5-equipped device, tagged the “iPhone 4s,” as a means of getting a head start on next-generation app and game development. The iPhone 4s would be nothing more than a souped-up iPhone 4.
And yet, it only took hours for the tech media to meld the white iPhone 4 and iPhone 4s into a new rumor altogether.
What started as a reasonable expectation for a white iPhone 4 turned out to be a white iPhone 4 with improved features. The expectation was that this new white iPhone would feature the beefed-up A5, maybe the 8 megapixel camera, and a host of other new features that would make it decidedly un-iPhone 4′ish. Even though there is virtually no other marketing pattern in all of electronics to support such a preposterous idea, and that the advent of an improved white iPhone 4 would effectively kill the growing anticipation of the iPhone 5, it was this perspective that dominated the media.
For another week or so, we were treated to an audacious new iPhone release schedule from a host of different tech media outlets, claiming that we would have the white iPhone 4 in late April, followed by the iPhone 4s in June, followed by the iPhone 5 in the Fall, followed by the iPhone 6 in early 2012. This is when I started to get angry, leading me to the unfortunate circumstance of calling a bunch of people whose names I don’t even know “stupid,” which you can read with great mirth on the iPhone 6 News Blog. Heck, even level-headed iPhone 5 News Blog lead columnist Charles Moore constructed an entire post about the dizzying rumors of this torrid iPhone release schedule here.
During this time, dozens of comments flooded in from people who literally needed to be talked down from leaving the iPhone franchise altogether over this cocophany of rumors. In this way, blogs who report honestly on iPhone news have become a kind of detox from all the misleading and irresponsible reporting going out into the mainstream — sort of like iPhone 5 outreach centers. In essence, we’ve all become the iPhone 5 Truthers, exploding unfounded rumors by way of one tried and true approach — common sense.
Common sense indicated to us from the beginning that the white iPhone 4 would be just that: a big hunk of white plastic, with maybe a few different cosmetic features to ensure that not too much light would bleed into the camera or proximity sensors.
And yet, here on Thursday, April 28th, the tech media and a google of iPhone devotees are just waking up to a self-induced level of disappointment over a white iPhone 4 that didn’t manage to live up to expectations, even though it lives up to its namesake perfectly.
The good news is that there is a teachable moment here — something positive to take from the rubble of strewn white iPhone 4s along the trail of rumors leading to the iPhone 5: don’t believe the hype. It’s important to remember that tech blogs have a vested, cynical, and monetary motivation to inflate, conflate, and mis-state the very little bit of actionable intelligence that we receive about the iPhone 5 and all other iPhone stops in between. And because of the nature of the press, few if any tech pundits ever take responsibility for irresponsible reporting; they only take credit for when they get the story right.
Which, in the case of the iPhone, is only very rarely.
