iPhone 5: No Steve Jobs, no sizzle

Now I'm beginning to wonder if Amazon does better Apple keynotes than Apple does. This riff isn't a knock on Apple per se, but discipline is lacking. First, Apple saw most of its iPhone 5 features leaked ahead of time. Then, there's a question of editing. Would Jobs have combined an iPhone 5, iPod, and iTunes revamp, which happens to resemble Microsoft's Zune service, in one shindig?

Probably not.

Without the showmanship and Jobs' reality distortion field, these Apple announcements look like really nice upgrades -- for Apple users. A 4-inch screen is nice, but I already have one on my Android device. LTE is nice too, but I have that already. Apple execs today don't have me salivating over the iPhone 5. Jobs would have told me I had to give a crap and I would have.

The mesmerization routine is gone. Apple has solid engineering and gave you the iPhone you should have had last year.

Apple CEO Tim Cook will tell you that the company is firing on all cylinders. And it is. Apple's reality distortion field isn't at 100 percent these days, but the financials are. Apple's lock on an ecosystem is in place too. And oh by the way Apple will sell a zillion iPhone 5 devices around the world.

Cook said at Apple's powwow via CNET:

When you look at each of these, they are incredible industry leading innovations by themselves. But what sets them apart, and what puts Apple way out ahead of the competition is how they work so well together. Only Apple could create such amazing software hardware and services and put them together into such a powerful, integrated solution. Apple has never been stronger, and that's because of the dedication of our employees... they are doing the best work of their lives.

Cook is right to some degree, but he said the one word that makes me cringe: Solution. The word "solution" is what enterprise vendors say all day long. Solution is the word companies to sell you an integrated stack of stuff. Jobs would have never used a word like solution. Solution didn't sell and wasn't magical. "Solution" is used when you can't put in English what your products actually do. In Apple's messaging a word like solution is the equivalent of lobbing a nuclear missile into a force field. Perhaps the force field -- reality distortion field in Apple's case -- holds, but it'll be damaged.

This story was first published as "I miss Apple's reality distortion field" at ZDNet's Between the Lines.