Some will transfer to the Android camp. Some will wait it out. I suggest if the iPhone 5 had been shown many more would have taken an upgrade rather than waiting or jumping ship to Android. Hence, it's not that releasing the iPhone 4S was "bad" as such, just that iPhone 5 would have been much much better.
I'm getting the most profound headache trying to create a small instance of the magical thinking necessary to generate the comments you've made here.
I don't even know where to start.
Like, how do you think this works? They have a magical golden goose shitting out new, feature complete design verification test models and they just decided not to "show" you the next one behind the curtain?
Apple is successful because they take their time creating their hits. The 3GS didn't imperil the company and neither will this.
I actually don't mind the (I assume) 2 year cycle they've got going now, with a new phone 1 year with a follow up "S" model the next.
That way, when people are on their 2 year contract cycles, you either sit on the "new shiny" or the "advanced shiny" cycle, so consumers rarely lose out depending which cycle their contract ends in, since there are pros and cons for both.
What's worrisome is that we're probably at the end of a long stretch where the industrial design drove the sales. From here on in, at least for a while, the innovations are turning inwards. Siri. Better camera. Better power consumption.
It's not like we're launching new networks every year or two, or individual ARM cores are going to make huge leaps in performance.
Have we trained everyone to worship the new/shiny when we're probably hitting a short-term asymptote?
Isn't that a risk Apple has taken ever since the first iPhones went off-contract in 2009? People have always had the choice to be disappointed in the latest model and jump to whatever they wanted, Android or not.
It looks like Apple has done pretty well in spite of itself. You're always going to disappoint a certain % of people (like yourself).
