What to do About this New Generation

I know all of the reasoning behind it, but I finally have to come out and say that it is driving me f’ing nuts that the second generation iPhone is being called “iPhone 3G“. This is is especially true in light of the fact that they openly named each successive generation of iPod after it’s respective generation number and the letter “G” so the second version of the iPod Shuffle that I have is called an “iPod Shuffle 2G“. Pretty logical, eh? It seems especially strange for Apple to name a product after an external technology, similar to what they did with “iMovie HD” (A move that they quickly righted with iMovie ’08). Sure there are internal nomenclatures that can help to differentiate models – Intel Macs and Firewire Macs for instance – but for an external brand it would seem wise to not utterly confuse the consumer.

To be honest, it seems that they are overestimating the technical knowledge of their consumer or they are targeting a different consumer than they have previously. It is similar to the “Exchange for the rest of us” tag line they slapped on MobileMe. The consumer of these products doesn’t care that their phone is on a 3G versus CDMA versus GSM cell network, in fact they don’t even know what they have now (I know the outspoken geeks like me do, but they are the suckers that paid $600 for the original iPhone and not the people you have to reach to sell 10 million units). The consumer Apple should care about only knows that they want the new and cheaper iPhone, the coolest, must have phone on the market. I suppose it could have been worse, they could have gone the route of the “iPod Classic” which might as well have been named the “iPod Obsolete”. It makes me wonder what the next iteration of the iPhone will be called, “iPhone 3G 2G”?

No related posts.

Related posts brought to you by Yet Another Related Posts Plugin.