In Apple's iPhone 5 ads, everything old is new again
In a splendid touch of marketing brilliance, one of Apple's two new iPhone 5 ads highlights something that competing phones have had for quite a while: noise canceling.
They often say that Apple never really invents anything. It only does things better than anyone else.
They also often say that making a call on an iPhone is as reliable as putting a bet on a sheep in a horse race.
So here's a new iPhone 5 ad that may confirm one of these alleged truisms, while defeating the other. For it features a revolutionary new noise canceling microphone on the iPhone 5.
Well, when I say "revolutionary," I might be prematurely full of Thanksgiving spirit.
I remember my fine engineer friend George offering that noise cancellation would be in the iPhone 5 and that it had been around on other phones already.
LG, for example, announced its intentionto implement noise cancellation in, um, 2009. And here's Google's Nexus One that had noise cancellation capabilities in 2010. But that isn't the point.
If people didn't know about this technology -- and I fancy many didn't -- then why not do a little ad that informs them in a reassuring, Applesque way?
That's exactly what this ad does. Oddly, it's as techie as an Apple ad has been for quite some time.
The second new iPhone 5 ad is a special for Thanksgiving. It features the Shared Photo Stream, a very fine way of sharing photos. Again, here Apple makes what could be complicated blissfully simple.
Just like family relationships this time of year.