Apple iPhone event kind of bland, tweets show
More than 70 percent of tweets about the event were neither positive nor negative, according to Crimson Hexagon. Could this mean Apple's ability to dazzle us with its iPhone announcements has come to an end?
Apple gave you two new iPhones -- one with a futuristic fingerprint sensor -- and all you could muster up was a "yep, got it" reaction if early Twitter data gathered by social media analytics firm Crimson Hexagon is any indication.
Crimson Hexagon looked at the sentiment data behind tweets about the Apple event and found that 73 percent of the more than 1.5 million tweets that trickled in during the past 24 hours were neutral, meaning a majority of people tweeting about the highly anticipated event were just merely passing along the news without sharing their love or hate for the collection of announcements.
Could it mean that Apple's ability to dazzle us all with its iPhone announcements has come to an end? Perhaps, though surely plenty of the muted or unemotional reactions can be chalked up to a frantic news cycle and the fact that a majority of the specs and features of the iPhone 5S and 5C devices had leaked prior to Tuesday's unveiling.
On the plus side, those who did tweet their 140-character opinions were more positive than negative. Crimson Hexagon determined that 21 percent of tweets about the event, spanning the past 24 hours, were positive and just 6 percent were negative. And awe us or not, Apple still managed to command our attention, as suggested by the fact that during the first hour of the event, which was not broadcast to the public, there were more than 350,000 tweets about it, according to the firm's calculations.
As for the new iPhones, tweet-tracking company Topsy highlights that the Twitterverse was equally preoccupied by Apple's low-end iPhone 5C and the iPhone 5S, which both spiked at around 7,500 tweets per minute when they were first announced. Between 10 a.m. and 12 p.m. PT, there were 330,590 tweets about the iPhone 5S, and 314,210 tweets about the iPhone 5C, a Topsy representative told CNET.
Tweet sentiment around the iPhone 5C was far more positive than negative in the first 20 minutes, but sentiment eventually leveled off. The iPhone 5S, by comparison, generated a pretty split reaction from Twitter users, as seen below.
Correction, 3:07 p.m. PT: Due to a miscalculation, a previous version of this story incorrectly stated that the number of tweets about the iPhone 5C when compared to tweets about the iPhone 5S.