But this sales boost will confirm to Apple that it's ok for them to just release the same phone for 2 years with some spec upgrades in the 2nd year.
No, I don't think everyone knows that. If we learned anything from the past few Apple product launches, it's that customers aren't shy about complaining even if they aren't completely sure what they're complaining about.
But this sales boost will confirm to Apple that it's ok for them to just release the same phone for 2 years with some spec upgrades in the 2nd year.
It is okay. The economics behind producing this many millions of a devices doesn't allow them to change the design every single year without jacking up the price. And for what?
A "tick tock" schedule, like the one Intel has adopted, makes tons of sense for Apple too. You just can't completely rethink a product design every year once it's matured.
And if you don't think they needed to change the design of the phone this time, just take a look at this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=e...
No wonder nobody wanted to "copy" its design and build. It's so weak, even some plastic phones are more solid than it.
Similarly, you don't see other manufacturers producing phones that they intend to still thoroughly support in a couple years time, which is why there is so much fragmentation in the Android ecosystem.
I think this is a key thing in Apple's market strategy across the board - you're not just buying hardware that will be out of date in 6 months time, you're purchasing a utility which will be more or less current for a couple years to come (like what we've seen in Macs).
I think its a smart move. It builds trust with the user base.
See the Motorola Droid 2 and 3, and the HTC Wildfire S and Desire S. And Apple's own 3GS. Essentially the same physical design as their predecessors, but faster. Actually, Samsung is perhaps the only major phone manufacturer who _doesn't_ do this; most of their phones do change reasonably dramatically on every revision.
It really is kind of remarkable how subtle the changes have been with iOS and the iPhone. A front shot of an iPhone on its home screen would show nothing new to someone in 2007 using the first iPhone (aside from the resolution increase). But I'd argue that what seems like a liability to industry-watchers and tech enthusiasts is a profound strength for everyone else - consistency and familiarity trump novelty.
Edge/GPRS -> 3G data speeds is a massive improvement on it's own.
In a way, you could say the iPhone 4S is just an original iPhone with some spec upgrades.
Why change the design of a product if that design still works? After all, how many radically different washing machine models have you seen in the last ten or fifteen years?
You mean like the 3GS? Or, in Android-land, the Droid 2, Droid 3, Atrix 2, HTC Desire/Wildfire S etc.? It's hardly that strange a thing to do. Keep the design for a year, make the device enormously faster. This is par for the course in computers, and becoming increasingly common on the mobile market.
The 3GS was already persuasive evidence of this pattern, though.