Recently I saw one of my friends tweet that she was still debating on upgrading her 3GS to either the iPhone 4S or the iPhone 5.

Umm, duh! It's a NO BRAINER. iPhone 5 is twice as fast, offers 4G LTE, sports a better camera. And the thing just feels mind-boggling ability to look big but feel small in your hand.

But when I talked to her about it, she brought up a totally valid point: the iPhone 5's new Lightning dock connector will not work on any of her accessories. (Well, she could buy adapters but seriously, who wants to spend that much money?)

So if she gets an iPhone 4S, she'll essentially be getting an extra two years out of her accessories. Assuming she upgrades to the next iPhone in two years, she'll be faced with the same dilemma. But hey, she would've gotten an extra two years out of use out of her accessories.

I've been in this situation before and I've learned to protect myself.

When I'm looking at buying a new device, I don't simply think of it as a device — I look at it as an investment into a platform.

Back when I was still in college, before the modern smartphone, I was big on the Windows Pocket PCs. Specifically, I had the Compaq iPAQ. I loved the thing. It could play music, videos, games…and it developed a nice ecosystem of "sleeve" accessories that I could slide onto it for extra functionality (e.g. GPS).

At one point, on top of the $500 device, I had dropped another $500 on accessories.

And a year after, they changed the design of the next-gen iPAQ; just like that, my iPAQ and $500 worth of accessories were outdated.

From that point on, I vowed to never lock myself to a hardware platform like that again.

As of today, I'm running on my third iPhone. I've also had three iPod shuffles and three iPod classics. And the only accessories I've ever bought for any of these devices are:

• cases
• USB chargers
• external battery
• replacement headphones
• iPod-enabled car stereo adapter

For the most part, these accessories are either under $30 or they can be used over the span of multiple generations. (The iPod-enabled car stereo adapter has an additional auxiliary port.)

As an early adopter that loves to stay on the cutting edge of devices, I've made a conscious effort to never commit myself too much to any one platform.

Even with my Mac, where I have spent a few hundred dollars on apps, I know that all of my data — music, photos, photoshop files, etc — can be liberated at any time and can be used on any other platform.

All of this forward thinking, in a sense, grants me a lot of freedom. So in times like this when Apple moves to a totally new Lightning dock connector, I know I can stay on the cutting edge without pissing away a few hundred dollars worth of accessories.

FJP writes:

The Newton was a double-edged sword for Apple. On one hand, it had a big "wow" factor and reminded the world of Apple's innovative DNA. On the other hand, it was expensive and Apple had to spend considerable time and energy explaining why a "portable digital assistant" was necessary. It failed.

Now Apple waits for markets to mature a bit before they enter. They've de-emphasized "first" in favor of "best". Facetime is just video chat. Retina Displays are just higher resolution. Siri is just voice recognition. But in all three cases, they grabbed a tremendous amount of mindshare in a short time.

Amen.

Fanboys and haters like to get caught up in the 'ol "We did it first! You guys copied us!" argument. But really, that's just pointless.

It's not about who does it first; it's about who takes it to the next level.

Alex Dobie, editor at Android Central writes:

The open -- or "openy" -- nature of Android has its advantages -- a wide variety of hardware, hackability and custom ROM support, endless choice in screen sizes, software customizations, multimedia chops, chassis styles and industrial designs. But it comes with one major Achilles heel -- the labyrinthine, time-consuming and expensive process of getting phones updated with a new version drops. It’s not anyone’s fault, it's a weakness that's built into Android's DNA, and one we doubt will ever be overcome.

This is why Android is just not for me.

Don't get me wrong; Android is a fantastic platform...but it just has too many hurdles that prevent users from getting their hands on the latest version.

I love well-designed software. I love using software the way the designer meant for it to be used. I love software designers that have the balls to say "No" to feature requests because they have a clear vision and they're sticking to it.

Whenever I see that New Software Update indicator, I jump on it immediately because I always want the latest and greatest. I may not have the money to upgrade to the new iPhone every year. But when Apple releases a new version of iOS, it feels like it's a new phone. And that's enough to keep me happy and hold me over through my two-year contract.

But the reality is there are some people that are the complete opposite. There are people that get annoyed by software updates and go on as long as possible avoiding it.

Those are the jailbreakers. The tweakers. The "I want to customize every bit of my smartphone to make it unique" kinda people. The people that want more hardware specs bang for their buck instead of well-designed out-of-the-box software.

Those are the people that will never have the latest version of Android running on their smartphones...and they're perfectly fine with that.

MG Siegler:

That’s the thing — when people say they’re disappointed about the new iPhone, what they’re really saying is that they’re disappointed it doesn’t look that much different from previous version(s). But again, not only is that true, Apple went out of their way to make sure that was the case. [...]

Apple is not and will not make changes just for the sake of change. And while some may now be clamoring for this change, the paradox is that if Apple did make some big changes, many of the same people would bitch and moan about them. Apple is smart enough to know that in this case, most people don’t really want change, they just think that they do because that’s the easiest way to perceive value: visual newness.

Perfectly said.

Welp, none of my bold predictions were right, lol. I ain't trippin' though. Honestly, that's part of the magic about Apple -- there's that constant wonder and mystique in trying to predict what they're gonna do next.

All in all, the iPhone 5 is a solid update to a solid product. And despite how people complain this update is "meh," the iPhone 5 is gonna be the greatest selling product yet.

If you haven't heard, tomorrow morning Apple will be hosting a media event to unveil the new iPhone. As an Apple geek, it is my duty to obsessively follow the Apple blogosphere like it's my job and and live my life one Apple event at a time, lol. Based on everything I've read, here are my predictions for what will be announced tomorrow.

First, let's cover the basics:

• Faster. HD-quality front camera. More magical. "Thinnest iPhone EVAR." Makes bacon.

And here are other predictions going around all the rumor sites:

• new design with more metal, less glass

• 4-inch diagonal screen

• 4G LTE.

• thinner dock connector. USB 3.0.

• headphone jack on the bottom.

• available for sale on Friday, Sept 21st.

This one hasn't been talked about much in the rumor mill but I'm sticking with it:

• same price points and same storage specs (16, 32, 64GB). Whoever started the "iPhone 5 will be $800" rumor deserves to be bitchslapped.

Okay, now for my actual, bolder predictions:

• Super iPhone IV Alpha Turbo Tournament Edition

• "iPhone with widescreen" — No "5". Everyone will keep referring to it as the iPhone 5, just as how everyone still refers to the iTouch. Hell, everyone keeps calling it "the iPhone" when Apple has always consistently referred to it as just "iPhone."

• Bluetooth 4.0. This has been built into the 4S for the past year but I think Apple will make a big push to tightly intertwine the iPhone into our daily lives. This brings me to my next prediction…

• Mobile Payments. I think Apple will pass up on NFC — just like they passed up Blu-ray — and will set out to make mobile payments mainstream with PassBook and Bluetooth 4.0.

• iPod nano watch — a companion device leveraging Bluetooth 4.0 to give you push notifications and basic controls (play/pause/next) right on your wrist. A couple years ago, someone close to me went to China and visited Foxconn. This friend saw a bunch of prototypes, including an iPod Shuffle-like device that was meant to be a companion for the iPhone/iTouch. While I don't think this is exact prototype will ever make it into production, my gut says Apple will eventually release something along those lines.

• Built-in water resistance. Rumor has it that Apple saw a demo of Liquipel and was amazed by it. I can see Apple trying to lock up a year-long exclusive on this technology.

• AirPlay Direct for streaming to an Apple TV without a WiFi network. (Source)

And my final long shot prediction:

• Tim Cook standing on stage, unveiling something totally unexpected, flicking off the crowd and saying, "SURPRISE, BITCHES. BWAHAH!" Okay, maybe not that far. But Cook vowed very publicly that Apple will "double down on secrecy" under his tenure. And as the mastermind behind Apple's supply chain, he would know the perfect places to leak fake parts.

That's all for now. We'll see tomorrow morning how piss-poor badly my predictions will be, lol. But no matter how wrong I am or what Apple unveils tomorrow, there is no doubt in my mind that this will be the best-selling product in Apple's history.

-Mel

Counternotions:

Suppose you were the CEO of Apple in 2005 when a couple of intergalactic visitors with time-warping technology offered you this bet:

Design and manufacture a small mobile device that seamlessly combines the functionalities of a cellular phone, a web surfer, an audio/video player and a small PC, and your company will double its market cap and establish a third mass-market computing platform after Windows and Macintosh.

Would you take it?

Before you say, "Are you nuts, why wouldn't I?" ponder just a few of the issues involved.

With the iPhone being so saturated in the world today, it's easy to forget how truly daring and revolutionary it's launch was.

Steve Jobs took that challenge by the horns and made it his bitch.

This chart by Ryan Jones is the reason why I sold my first-gen iPad yesterday.

Some people still have doubts because Steve Jobs infamously once said that 7" tablets are "dead on arrival." I, on the otherhand, am still betting on the iPad mini because of three reasons:

• this won't be the first time that Steve Jobs has backtracked on one of his bold statements.
• the iPad mini can produced cheaply by using the same touchscreen as the iPhone 3GS.
• the market and business opportunity is there. It wasn't there back then but the success of the Amazon Kindle has proven otherwise.

So I'm calling it now:

Apple is going to reassert its market dominance. It's gonna address that gaping hole under its price umbrella and be the hottest seller this Christmas shopping season. It's going to change the way an entire generation of children will learn in school.

The iPad mini is coming. It's gonna completely suck out all the air from the room and suffocate the competition, just like the iPad mini did to the mp3 player market.

I can't wait.

I'll admit, I had some serious doubts on App.net. At the time I was still close-minded and thought of it as a Twitter clone.

Then I came across this post by Andrew Chen:

• To build a feed within your app, you’d publish every action that any of your users do within your product, and then you ask App.net for the subset of the global feed that was published with your application.

• To build an API to let other apps publish on your feed, you don’t have to create your own API. Instead, you would just configure your app’s filter of the global feed to show posts from other applications, and voila, they would show up.

• To post to other feeds, you would just write into the global feed, and then ask the other apps to allow posts of your type into their feeds.

• To build a reader client for any other app or collection of apps, you would just filter the global feed based on posts from those apps.

That's the part that caught my eye.

Today we have cross-posting across multiple social networks (and mini-social networks), which is awesome. I can post on Instagram and have it go to my Twitter, Facebook and Tumblr, etc. But as more of these mini-social networks pop up with cross-posting abilities, our various newsfeeds get flooded with more and more duplicates.

How many times have you seen a friend do this:

1. post on Instagram
2. Instagram pushes to Twitter
3. Instagram pushes to Tumblr
4. Tumblr auto-pushes to Twitter
5. Tumblr auto-pushes to Facebook
6. Instagram pushes to Facebook
7. Facebook auto-pushes to Twitter

That's the same Instagram post published seven times. I don't know about you but I still see that happen. And that annoys me to no end.

The more I thought about this, the more I started to appreciate the dream behind App.net.

What if everybody just published everything into this giant river and then developers give us the ability to selectively choose exactly what we want to see? Sounds to me like that could be the next generation of real-time information.

From a non-developer standpoint, going back to my original thoughts of App.net, I was concerned about none of my personal friends forking over $50/year. But you know what? Just because a technology isn't mainstream doesn't mean it can't change the internet.

Just look at RSS. I would say that 95% of my friends -- including the social media saavy ones -- don't have the slightest clue of how to use RSS feeds. But for geeks and influencers of the tech industry, RSS feeds are CRUCIAL. And its these influencers that eventually have an affect over the mainstream.

So on second thought, I was totally wrong about App.net. Instead of thinking App.net as "another Twitter" that will never go mainstream, I've embraced the idea of it as potentially becoming the next generation of RSS feeds for the tech industry. Even if it never grew past the 10,000 initial backers of the project...that 10,000 could be the most influential people on the internet.

And that would make it worth the $50/year.

Pledge App.net

MG Siegler:

We’ve seen this story before. Indenti.ca was going to be the “open Twitter” before App.net was going to be the “open Twitter”. Diaspora was going to replace Facebook by giving it back to the users. OpenID. OpenSocial. Open. Open. Open. Free. Joy. Wonder. Peace. Perfection.

As much as I love the idea of technology being open, the reality is it takes a big boss at the top to call the shots and direct the innovation. It takes a Steve Jobs, a Bill Gates, or a Mark Zuckerberg to say, "fuck you, this is how we're gonna do it," for any technology to reach the top.

You just can't do that with "open" because you simply just can't please everyone.

Marco Arment also commented:

But the bigger problem is that I just don’t see a social platform growing quickly enough to overcome the network-effect barrier when it’s not free to join, especially when the goal is effectively to replace an existing, free, extremely successful network.

I totally agree.

I'm an early-adopter-type. I'm always down to sign up for any new service or app that comes my way. But to put a $50 cover charge on a small party that doesn't have any of my friends in it? Sorry, that's not gonna happen.

The reality is this:

1. people will always choose the path of least resistance.
2. people will stick with wherever their friends are.

And App.net is on the losing end of both of these.