Apple Inc's iPhone 5s and 5c: Citius, Fortius, Vilius?

So Apple Inc (NASDAQ:AAPL) yesterday unveiled what everyone expected it to unveil – the iPhone 5s and 5c – at their Cupertino headquarters in California.

True to form, the new smartphones have a suitable amount of ‘world’s first’ tags appended to them.

Apple is brandishing the iPhone 5s as “the most forward-thinking iPhone yet” that comes pre-loaded with an “all-new A7 chip”, making it “the world’s first smartphone with 64-bit desktop-class architecture for blazing fast performance in the palm of your hand”. In addition, Apple notes that “with up to twice the CPU and graphics performance, almost everything you do on iPhone 5s is faster and better than ever”.

On the other hand, the iPhone 5c “comes with more LTE bands than any other smartphone in the world” in an “all-new design”. Apple maintains that “with download speeds up to 100 Mbps, you can browse, download and stream content even faster” with the iPhone 5c. In addition (and this is our favourite) it arrives in five colours – blue, green, pink, yellow and white. What, no black?

Moving on, the new iPhones are not only faster, but also stronger, says Apple. The iPhone 5s boasts of “a remarkable thin and light, precision-crafted design that customers around the world love, including an anodized aluminum body with diamond cut chamfered edges, a stunning 4-inch Retina display and glass inlays”.

And Apple has launched another colour in its top-of-the-end variant too. In addition to the vanilla white and boring black…sorry, silver and space gray, the firm has also launched the 5s in gold. But, taking a leaf out of Samsung’s books, Apple has designed leather cases in six colors – beige, black, blue, brown, yellow and red – with soft, colour-matched microfiber lining.

That’s pretty cool actually, but as I said earlier, all of this was expected. And while we were happy to finally see it all unveil on our screens last night, the wow factor was conspicuous by its absence. Even the Touch ID was something we all knew was about to be unveiled.

Now don’t get me wrong – fingerprint security is indeed a great addition to the smartphone domain and in a few months’ time, we’ll all be wondering why on earth were we living in constant fears of our phones being stolen when a simple (okay, not-so-simple to install in a device as small as a mobile phone) fingerprint reader could make our devices useless for anyone but us.

But as I said earlier, this is something that we knew was coming (Read: Faulty fingerprint sensors force Apple Inc. to cull 8m iPhone 5S).

We were secretly hoping that Apple would launch a transparent or at least a semi-transparent iPhone (Read: Transparent iPhone 6 confirmed by Apple Inc.) or at least a screen that allows us to scribble notes on it with a pencil (Read: Galaxy S4-killer iPhone 6 specs: Scratch-free screen, anti-crash ‘parachute’, 128GB) but alas that wasn’t to be.

And once we’d had a look at the devices (on our screens) and it became obvious that none of those ‘wow’ features were in them, we pinned our hopes on the price-point and crossed our fingers in the hope that Apple would at least surprise us on that front.

Agreed, Apple is not known for making cheap phones, but with the iPhone 5c, it did do away with tradition to launch it in multiple colours, didn’t it? Even that was already known to avid Apple fans and followers as long ago as early this year (Read: Apple multi-coloured iPhone 5S and iPhone Mini in June).

But no, Apple stuck to its $199, $299 and $399 price-points for the top-of-the-range device and $99 and $199 pricing for its lower-end offering. Before those of us in the UAE bring out our calculators and go, ‘just that?’, please note that this is the suggested retail price in the US for phones along with carrier (AT&T, Sprint, T-Mobile, Verizon Wireless) plans that have a minimum monthly requirement.

For the unlocked versions, a good guide would be the now-defunct iPhone 5, which was launched last year at the same price-points (with the plan) in the US, and was available for about Dh2,500 (16GB unlocked version) here in the UAE.

So while the new iPhones may be citius (faster) and fortius (stronger), they’re definitely not vilius (Latin for cheaper).

Again, don’t be surprised when, come September 20, and you see the longest ever lines in front of Apple stores in “select countries” or when you read about the largest ever online pre-orders (start September 13) or when Apple releases the first weekend sales data that makes every other smartphone maker in the world call an emergency meeting of its department heads. That is expected too, and that’s the beauty of the Apple iPhone.

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