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Tuesday,  03/22/16  10:07 PM

Yeah so Apple announced the 5" iPhone SE*, so now I can finally get a new phone.  Yippee!

This is a picture from December 2012, when I first bought an iPhone 5 (I've since upgraded to an iPhone 5s).  At the time I thought *it* was too big :)  Yay, smaller phones.

It was a maximally boring announcement, and many are actually wondering if this kind of incremental update shouldn't be announced via a press release instead, saving announcement events for truly new things like Apple Watch or the iCar**.


 

The event actually started great but went downhill.  Apple did a nice little 40 years in 40 seconds video, which is kind of cool.  And Tim Cook's defense of Apple's customers' privacy was strong and unambiguous ("we will not shrink from this responsibility").

IMHO the green-ness was a little overdone.  A tepid response from the audience, and the blogosphere.  Carekit - okay, that's cool, and useful.  Points for that, but not big points. 

Then a whole range of incremental product updates: Apple Watch bands, new tvOS, 5" iPhone SE (yay, but yawn), IOS 9.3 (meh), and last but perhaps not least 9.7" iPad Pro (meh).  The most interesting thing in all of that was Apple's explicit positioning of the iPad Pro as a replacement for old PCs (by which they meant, old Windows PCs, but it could apply equally to old Macs too).  I still think iPads are great for consuming content, not for creating it.  I can't yet imagine that a tablet will be my everyday computer.  But of course for many it already is.

So what about my phone-y dreams?  Still just dreams.  Maybe truly revolutionary improvements to the smartphone will come from smaller companies.  Anyone want to embed a projector in their phone?  Or to design a new better input mechanism?  Please, go for it!

* So what does SE mean?  "SE Edition", of course :)

** The Tesla Model 3 event next week should be amazing