Okay so preorders opened Friday at 12:01am Pacific and by the time I actually managed to get the Apple Store app to load without crashing, my shipping estimate had already slipped to "3-4 weeks." That's basically late October for something I tried to buy at 3am on the East Coast. I don't even think I'm mad about that part. Everybody predicted the sellout, everybody watched it happen in real time on Twitter, and there's nothing new I can say about a phone that isn't even in anyone's hands yet.
What I actually want to complain about is the dock connector.
If you weren't paying attention at the keynote Wednesday, Apple killed the 30-pin connector that's been on every iPod, iPhone, and iPad since basically 2003. Nine years. In its place is this new tiny 8-pin thing they're calling Lightning, and it's genuinely a nicer piece of hardware: smaller, reversible so you're not fumbling to get it right-side-up in the dark at 6am, and apparently it can survive being plugged in a few thousand more times than the old one before it gets loose and finicky (mine always did, eventually, that little wobble where you have to prop the cable at an angle to get a charge).
But here's the thing nobody at the keynote said out loud: I own four things with 30-pin connectors in my house right now. A clock radio on my nightstand that I paid maybe $40 for two years ago. A Bose dock in the kitchen that was closer to $180 and that my wife will not be happy to hear is basically an oversized brick now. A cassette-adapter-style dock thing in my car that a friend installed for me because I am not a person who should be near car wiring. And the charging cable I keep in my work bag.
None of those work with a new iPhone. Not one. Apple's selling an adapter, $29 for just the adapter, $39 if you want one with a short cable attached, and from what I can tell it doesn't even pass video, just charging and audio, so my clock radio might work fine but I have no idea yet what happens with the Bose dock. I'll believe it when I plug it in.
I get why they did it. The 30-pin connector is ancient in phone years, it's huge compared to what phones need now, and USB-C wasn't a thing yet so they built their own. Fine. Reversible connectors are objectively better and I will not pretend otherwise, my thumbs have fought that stupid 30-pin orientation problem in the dark too many times to be precious about it. But there's a difference between "this is a better connector" and "we are making a nine-year installed base of accessories obsolete overnight and charging you $29 a pop to bridge the gap." Both things are true at once and I wish more of the coverage this week would just say that instead of either gushing about the redesign or doing the performative outrage thing.
Also, and this is a smaller complaint but it's been bugging me, the new iPod nano lost the click wheel entirely and went full touchscreen, and the new iPod touch comes in like five colors now including this loud yellow one, and somehow that stuff barely got ten minutes of coverage next to the phone. I actually think the nano redesign is more interesting than anything about the iPhone 5's spec bump. It's thinner than a pencil now, which is a phrase I've now typed in about six different places today because apparently it's the only comparison anyone's allowed to use.
Anyway. I already ordered the $39 adapter-with-cable version because I'm lazy and didn't want to think about which one I'd actually need. It'll probably sit in a drawer with the thirty other cables I own for devices I don't have anymore. That drawer is basically a museum of connector standards at this point — 30-pin, mini-USB, that one weird Motorola one, a Nokia charger from a phone I haven't owned since 2008. Lightning gets to join the collection eventually too, I'm sure, whenever the next "better" thing shows up. That's just how this stuff works. You buy the dock, you love the dock, and then one Wednesday in September it stops being compatible with anything.