With the new iPhone I get the feeling that we are nearing the good enough stage for iOS. Unlike previous phones, there was not one feature limited to the 5, essentially everything will be available to an owner of the 4S as well.
The user facing improvements are small, and they make the phone come close to perfection:
- the screen now has better colors, and will roughly match the new iPad
- it is larger, but now has clearly reached the limits of what can be comfortably reached with one hand,
- It has a somewhat better camera, but they are not showcasing the improved low light performance, which would be its main benefit. And the 4S already had a camera that would almost always pick the right color balance.
- They give prominent placement to their new AirPods, and do not include them with the older iPhones, even though the much cheaper iPod Nano does get them.
- There was no new app that would showcase what amazing new things you can do with all the extra processing power of the phone
Together this means that the phone is now finally close to good enough, and especially with the transition to a new dock connector I believe that people will now buy their next iPhone expecting to keep them for an extra year or two before they feel compelled to upgrade.
The one area where the phone could be better is in a more regular support of LTE. This will be important for the future as carriers will over time remove support for plain GSM and replace it with LTE. So the decision whether to buy the iPhone 5 will come down on whether it supports the LTE frequencies important to you. For the US it is a resounding yes, for Europe it is pretty much a no given the lack of 800 and 2600 MHz support. Especially the lack of the 800 MHz band is annoying, as it is most widely deployed where there is no 3G yet.
I expect the adoption of the 5 to be excellent in the U.S., as under the guise of family plans there is a strong price war brewing. The smartphone rate of $35 on family plans are just $840 over two years, of which 40+% would go to Apple in the form of a device subsidy, and people will want to take carriers up on the subsidy as the lack of cheaper, non-subsidized options means that you are simply throwing money away by not upgrading.
The situation in Europe is different, as the carriers offer equivalent plans without device subsidy for up to 25€ per month less, removing the subsidy inducement. This means Europe will be an interesting test case to see whether the iPhone is really good enough, with its economic troubles, the lack of carriers effectively subsidizing the iPhone, and one common standard making it easy to use your handset with the competition after your main contract has expired.