Tim Cook’s best idea so far has been a gold colored smartphone

Tim Cook’s best idea so far has been a gold colored smartphone

Love him, hate him, or not even remotely care about him, Steve Jobs made Apple relevant. In the modern Apple era, he had a great track record of popularizing genres of consumer tech. To date, Tim Cook has only helmed iterative hardware refreshes. For better or worse, his best ideas so far have been coloring a phone gold, and not releasing a smartwatch.

It might not be great when a company viewed as a prime innovator in the tech world (whether or not it actually is) is helmed by someone whose best moves so far have been not making a product, and picking a color out of the Crayola box. However, yesterday’s iPhone 5S and 5C event showed that’s precisely what Apple has done since the loss of Jobs. Apple’s stock dropped around 5% yesterday after the announcement, and that’s where it remains at the time of this writing. That’s not a huge drop, but it does show that the market didn’t care very much about the 5S and 5C, and perhaps lack of anything else.

One thing to remember, though, is that phones introduced last night weren’t supposed to be innovative, but the new colors and fingerprint scanner made the devices seem newer than they actually are. The iPhone 5S, for instance, is on the S line of Apple phones. This line is decidedly not innovative. The numerical line of iPhones — the 4 and 5, for example — are the innovative products with the radically different designs. The S line just swings in afterward and spruces everything up. If the iPhone was a video game, the S would be patch 1.1, while the 4 and 5 would be standalone sequels.

Funnily enough, this time around, the 5S is actually more innovative than the S line has been, thanks to the new color options and the inclusion of the fingerprint scanner. However, it looks just like an iPhone 5. It acts just like an iPhone 5 (your thumb only having to touch one key now thanks to the Touch ID, instead of multiple of keys). It’s priced like an iPhone 5, and you likely won’t notice the iterative SoC upgrade while checking Twitter or playing intensive iOS games; Plants vs. Zombies 2, for instance, runs flawlessly on an iPhone 4S.

The reign of Tim Cook has thus far been boring — not bad, but just a shrug. It’s unfortunate that his first reveal of a new product would’ve likely been a smartwatch — a type of device that has so far only been met with that same shrug summarizing Cook’s Apple reign. IfApple released the smartwatch, and it ended up similar to all the others, that would’ve been worse for the company’s image than not revealing one and chugging along with phones that don’t really hurt the company if they aren’t radical new devices (since we’re all buying smartphones anyway).

Yes, Apple has been stagnant, but considering the most innovative products in the tech scene right now — Google Glass and the Oculus Rift — don’t do much at the moment, the entire scene is stagnant right along with Apple. There’s one thing to remember, though. While introducing a comparatively radical color to a flagship and not releasing a smartwatch are boring maneuvers, Cook hasn’t yet had the time to do something innovative, and the tech industry isn’t at a place where it can make something truly new. Perhaps we should wait until the iPhone 6 to see if Apple will continue its current snoozefest.