So that happened. Apple did its thing this morning at the Yerba Buena Center down in San Francisco and announced the iPhone 5, and I spent two hours of my actual life doing something I refuse to call "watching a keynote," because there was no stream. There never is, with these. You'd think a company worth what Apple's worth could point a camera at a stage, but no. The way you experience an Apple announcement in 2012 is by picking a liveblog and refreshing it like a lab rat hitting a lever.
I went with The Verge this time. Engadget's servers usually fall over around the halfway mark (they did again today, RIP), so I had a second tab open just in case, plus a third tab that was just Twitter search for "iphone 5" scrolling past faster than I could read it. Three screens of the same fifteen minutes of news, staggered by however many seconds it took someone backstage to type a paragraph on a Bluetooth keyboard. Is this the best way to find out your phone got a new plug on the bottom? No. Did I do it anyway, sitting at my kitchen table with cold coffee, instead of just waiting for an actual article twenty minutes later? Also no, well, also yes, obviously I did, I'm writing about it right now.
Anyway, the actual news, since apparently I have to get to it eventually.
The phone itself. Four inches now instead of 3.5. Taller, not wider, which is the smart way to do it if you don't want to break every app's layout overnight (a bunch of them are still going to look dumb with black bars until developers update, but that's a them problem, not a me problem). New chip, A6, they're claiming twice as fast, which is what they claim every year and I've stopped having strong feelings about. It's thinner too. Fine. It's a nicer phone than the 4S. I was never going to be shocked by that part.
The part that's actually going to annoy me: they killed the 30-pin connector. Dead. After ten years of every dock, every car mount, every alarm clock radio in every hotel room in America being built around that one plug, it's gone, replaced by something they're calling Lightning. Smaller, reversible (you can plug it in upside down, which, fine, that's genuinely nice), but it means every accessory I own is now a paperweight unless I buy the little adapter dongle, which they priced at twenty-nine dollars. Twenty nine dollars for a piece of plastic the size of a stick of gum. I get why they did it, since the old connector really was ancient and predates the iPhone entirely, but "we're going to sell you an adapter for the thing we already sold you" is such a specific kind of company move and I don't love it.
They also showed off new EarPods (not earbuds, EarPods, capital E capital P, somebody in marketing had a very productive afternoon), redesigned from scratch because apparently regular earbuds fall out of a shocking number of human ears, mine included, so I'm not going to pretend I'm mad about that one. New iPod touch too, thinner, comes in like five colors now including a red one that funds AIDS research through the Product Red thing, and a new iPod nano that's basically the old nano and the old iPod classic had a baby, with a screen glued on. And iOS 6 is landing next week, the 19th, with the new Maps app replacing Google Maps as the default — turn by turn directions built in, which sounds great until you remember every time Apple builds its own version of a Google product it's a little bit worse for the first year. We'll see. I'm not installing it day one, I've learned that lesson before with jailbreaks that stopped working overnight.
Pricing's the same as always, 199 for the 16 gig on contract, up to 399 for 64. Preorders start Friday, phones ship the 21st. I'll probably end up with one eventually, my 4S is starting to feel a little slow loading big webpages, but not this week. Not for 200 bucks and a new dongle I have to remember to pack every time I travel.
Also, somebody tell me why Nokia's Lumia demo from earlier this week keeps showing up in my feed next to all this. I haven't looked closely at it yet. Later, maybe.