Not Exciting at All

So after a few months of writing nowhere (not sure what happened to his Newsweek/Daily Beast gig), Dan Lyons popped up Wednesday with a piece for the BBC News trashing the iPhone 5. The whole thing is just preposterously trollish — e.g. “Somewhere up there, I can hear Steve screaming”; “This is what happens when a company is too cheap to invest in research and development”, or the fact that he wrote the whole thing before the iPhone 5 was even, you know, announced. But the crazy part, the part that really makes it a head-scratcher that the BBC News, of all sites, would run it, is the headline: “Apple’s iPhone Launches No Longer Excite”.

Do you want to count the number of news stories about the iPhone 5 over the past three days? Pre-orders that started at 3 in the morning on the U.S. east coast went so fast that the ship date moved to “two weeks” in just one hour. There are all sorts of subjective arguments we can have regarding the iPhone 5. But one thing is inarguable, a cold hard simple fact: millions of people around the world are excited to buy one. To argue that this iPhone announcement did not excite people is the most foolish thing I’ve seen all week.

★ Friday, 14 September 2012