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Adventures In Tech
Why the iPhone 4 is the best iPhone ever
Spellbinding hardware and incredible longevity are just a few reasons why Apple's fourth smartphone is the definitive model.
3:55 /
Transcript
Hello and welcome to Adventures in Tech.
Coming up the reasons why the iPhone 4 is the best phone that Apple's ever built.
There's no one thing that makes the iPhone 4 the best iPhone ever and that's because, like bacon or being asleep, there are lots of things that are great about it.
For starters, check out it's incredible
life span.
The iPhone 4 arrived in June 2010 but Apple didn't stop selling it until September 2013.
Even as newer models were released, Apple kept the iPhone 4 on as a cheaper model.
Impressive!
Especially, compared to the iPhone 5 which Apple scrapped in less than a year.
And even though the iPhone 4 isn't on sale anymore, that doesn't mean that it's dead and gone.
Apple has anointed the iPhone 4 with iOS 7 and it handles it surprisingly well.
Elsewhere, the 3.5 inch display
-stands as one of the best around and that design still looks gorgeous.
Yes, like a fine wine, the iPhone 4 has aged well.
But it doesn't only look at in hindsights.
Back in 2010, this thing blew our tiny minds.
For instance, we got our first look at the exceptionally detailed retina display, the powerful A4 chip, and let's not forget the front-facing camera that introduced the world to awkward stilted FaceTime calls.
-Hey Johnny, how you doing?
Then there's the look.
With two sheets of custom glass and a stainless steel frame, the iPhone 4 look like it came from the same lump of metal as Thor's hammer.
It was a unique, original style that Apple is yet to abandon.
There was one teensy problem.
To save space, Apple built the phone's antenna into the steel band around the edge.
But this cause signal to drop whenever you grip the bottom left of the phone.
-This made the iPhone 4 particularly impractical for left-handed folks.
But hey, maybe lefties don't really feature in Apple's vision of the future.
-Geniuses parades in our bones!
-Antenna-Gate wasn't Apple's only crisis.
The company's famous secrecy fell apart when a prototype iPhone 4 was lost in a bar.
And though Apple promised to sell a white iPhone
4 on day one, manufacturing woes meant it didn't actually go on sale until 308 days later.
The iPhone 4 gave Apple it's fair share of PR troubles but these humiliations didn't put a dent in the phone's popularity, then or now.
Apple sold $1.7 million in the first weekend.
And three years later, Tim Cook would credit the iPhone 4 with continuing to keep overall sales up.
Longevity, cool features, and the resilience to public
disgrace helped made the iPhone 4 the best iPhone ever.
But there is another factor and that's a general lack of efforts from every iPhone since.
The iPhone 4s looked identical and forced us to befriend a snarky robot butler.
The iPhone 5 had a bigger screen but Samsung had been doing that for ages.
The 5s and 5c are cool but they haven't introduced as many amazing features as the iPhone 4 did.
The first three iPhones were important gadgets but they were still missing lots of important stuff.
Compared to the iPhone
4, they look like prototype experiments.
While later versions look like lazy copies.
In the end, the iPhone 4 was just unstoppable.
iOS 7 didn't stop it, antenna-Gate didn't stop it, even subsequent iPhones couldn't stop it.
That's why I think it's the best but do you agree?
Let me know and check back next time for another Adventure in Tech.
Coming up next
Adventures in Tech: Just the Skits
TV tech through time Part 2
TV tech through time - part 1
Nintendo DS: When casual gaming got epic
Apple: Tech's greatest comeback story
The making of Raspberry Pi
Netbooks: What were we thinking?
Could Android have saved Nokia?
RIP iPod
How the Galaxy Note changed smartphones
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