Marianne Schultz

My alarm clock jarred me out of a sound sleep and it took me a few moments to remember why I’d set my alarm for 2:55 a.m. Oh, yeah. I needed to preorder my iPhone 4S. The thought of getting my hands on the new iPhone served well to rouse me and I reached over to my current iPhone to preorder one with the Apple Store app.

But the Apple online store was still offline and displaying that “We’ll be back soon” message on a virtual yellow sticky note. I was very familiar with that sticky note thanks to many previous preorder efforts for other new Apple products. I hated it. With a passion.

I dragged myself out of my warm, comfortable bed and hunted down some slippers and a robe to brave the cold floor and the fall chill that had worked its way into the house. I made my way down to my home office and sat down in front of my computer with a sigh. I woke it from sleep with a tap on the keyboard. Unlike me, it did not notice the late hour and woke without any disorientation.

I went to the Apple store site and saw the same cheerful virtual sticky note. And I kept seeing it for the next 30 minutes after refreshing the page over and over and over again.

I wanted to tear that sticky note into tiny little pieces.

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[frame]I’m incredibly sad about the passing of Steve Jobs even though I’d never met him personally. The world has lost an incredible visionary. My condolences go out to his friends and family and others who are touched by his death.

I began the remainder of this post (below) yesterday morning and was planning on completing and posting it last night but opted to delay it given the sad news about Steve Jobs.[/frame]

Yesterday was crazy, wasn’t it? All those rumors and the speculation frenzy came to a head as Apple finally unveiled the next Jesus Phone, the iPhone 4S that will be available starting October 14 (and go up for pre-order on October 7). Was it what I expected? Not really. Am I still going to buy one? You betcha.

As I’ve mentioned, I really expected Apple to come out with a new design to make a “real” iPhone 5 and differentiate it from the iPhone 4. Clearly, I was wrong. Perhaps this is Apple preparing us for how their iPhone cycle will work for the next few years?

The Loop points out an interesting article that speculates on what it takes to design a new iPhone, particularly one with 4G/LTE. It’s a pretty long piece but the general gist for you TL;DR folks is that it takes a lot of engineering work to move to a new cellular radio chipset platform and integrate it with custom hardware. Considering everything outlined there, I was probably underestimating the complexity of building a new iPhone model.

At any rate, this isn’t new to us long-time iPhone users. Apple did this no-design-change-but-other-internal-improvements dance when going from the iPhone 3G to the 3GS. It’s certainly easier when it comes to accessories, both for the manufacturers and consumers who upgrade to the new iPhone each year (since they don’t need to buy all new accessories for a new device). And I must admit that I am a bit happy I won’t have to go out and buy new cases, screen protectors, etc. Though I could also view this as an excuse to buy some new accessories I had held off from buying because I was expecting an iPhone with a new design – the TwelveSouth BookBook (affiliate link) comes to mind.

So far, it sounds like Apple will open pre-orders for the iPhone 4S at 12:00 a.m. Pacific time on October 7. Since I’m on the east coast, I’ll be setting my alarm to wake up just before 3:00 a.m. Eastern time on Friday morning to place my preorder for one shiny black 64GB iPhone 4S.

It will be possible to place a preorder using the Apple Store iOS app, which is the route I plan to try out first so I can try to avoid even leaving my warm and cozy bed in the middle of the night. Laziness FTW.

Will you be ordering an iPhone 4S?

Note: The title of this post is a reference to The KLF’s one-hit wonder (iTunes link) that came out in the early 90’s. Yes, I know my mind is a strange place.