I preordered an iPhone 5 at around 3:05am on Friday, sitting in bed with my laptop propped on my knees, half asleep, hitting refresh on the Apple Store app like it owed me money. By the time I actually got through checkout, the ship date had already slipped from "in stock" to two to three weeks out. Apparently a whole lot of other people had the same idea that night. I've read the initial allocation sold out inside of an hour, which, fine, I believe it — my confirmation email felt like winning something.
But that's not actually what I want to write about today. What's been bugging me since Wednesday's event isn't the phone itself. It's the connector.
Apple killed the 30-pin dock connector. After nine years of every iPhone, iPod, and iPad using the same fat white plug, they've swapped it for something called Lightning: smaller, reversible (finally, an actual improvement instead of a marketing word), 8 pins instead of 30. And I get why they did it. The old one was huge and dumb by 2012 standards and took up space that could go toward battery instead. Reversible plugs are just objectively better than the guess-wrong-flip-it-over ritual we've all been doing with USB cables for a decade.
What I don't get is why my nightstand alarm clock, my car stereo cable, the dock speaker in the kitchen, and the little charging stand my mom bought me for Christmas two years ago are, as of Wednesday, basically artifacts. Apple will sell you a Lightning to 30-pin Adapter for $29, or one with a short cable attached for $39, so technically nothing is dead, it's just that I now need to budget close to sixty bucks to keep two of my existing gadgets working with a phone I haven't even received yet. Multiply that by however many people in this country own an iHome dock or a Bose SoundDock and you start to see why some of the accessory makers looked a little pale in the post-keynote interviews I read.
I'm not saying don't do it. Reversible plugs are genuinely nice and I'll take the tradeoff long term, probably by next year I wont even remember caring. I just think it's funny that the tech press spent Wednesday writing about the 4-inch screen and the new aluminum back (which, fine, is nice, the phone is stupidly thin at 7.6mm) and almost nobody wanted to dwell on the part where Apple quietly turned a decade of accessory purchases into clutter in one afternoon and is charging you $29 a pop to bridge the gap. Thats a pretty good business if you can get it.
The other small thing nobody's talking about enough: the new earbuds. They're not calling them earbuds anymore, they're "EarPods," which is such an Apple thing to name a pair of headphones, and the shape is actually different from every stock set I've used before, some kind of asymmetric vent design instead of the plain silicone nub. I haven't tried a pair, nobody outside Cupertino has yet, but if they genuinely stay in your ears better than the old ones I will personally throw a small party. The old Apple earbuds fell out of my ears if I so much as nodded at somebody across a room, it was embarrassing, I have chased them across a subway platform before.
Ship date on my order currently says early October. We'll see if that holds. In the meantime I've got a drawer full of perfectly good 30-pin cables that are, as of this week, decorative.
One last thing, mostly for my own future reference since I like going back through old posts here: I paid full price, no upgrade discount, because my current contract isn't up until next spring. Worth remembering next time I'm tempted to preorder something at 3am without doing the math first.