jonas

Firstly, read Wil Shipley’s piece on this. It’s great, and the issue is very real. Remember Tweetie 2? Here’s a MacWorld article from 2009 about the same “no paid upgrades” policy.

What I want to share is a couple of screenshots I took more than a year ago. iPhone screenshot makes it especially clear that paid upgrades is (or was) being worked on.

However, as with many things with Apple, developers probably won’t be able to do upgrade pricing before Apple itself needs that.

For me, the most mind-blowing thing wasn’t the retina display, or 4G LTE, or even iPhoto (although it was far better than I expected). It was the name of the new iPad.

Simply “The new iPad”. Everyone naturally expected that it will be called iPad 3. Then there were predictions that it will carry HD moniker. Turns out, neither is true. Apple never, ever mentioned the name of the new iPad.

Or you can just go all Cmd+F’ing on the pages. iPad’s name is nowhere to be found.

“Have you seen the new iPad yet?”

“Apple’s newly released iPad”

That is absolutely amazing. When competitors compete for the craziest name, Apple drops out of the whole game. Their well-established release pattern makes it immediately clear which iPad is being talked about. And they can still refer to this particular generation as “iPad, 3rd gen.”, if there is a need (and I am sure tech journalists will still call it iPad 3, even though Apple never called it this way).

Just as with no-words logo, Apple pushes the boundaries with what is possible in branding.

And here’s a prediction: the next iPhone will simply be “The new iPhone”.