It’s the time of the year again when millions upon millions of seemingly mindless iSheep cannot wait to wax lyrical about the latest generation of the iPhone. “It’s the best phone ever!” baa’d one, while another lauded the phone for being “ideal for people with small hands”. Confused? You’re not the only one – I couldn’t work the last one out either but it appeared in an article on northjersey.com

So what’s so great about the iPhone 5? For me, and most other sane individuals, it’s not that different to the last one and I wasn’t a fan of that or any other Apple device before it. The design is pretty much the same as the two year old iPhone 4 but in comes a slightly bigger screen, improved processor, 4G connectivity and a “Panoroma” tool that helps the user stitch together a series of photos. And that’s it folks, Apple have once again revolutionised your life. Or so it would have have you believe. Forget about the free panorama apps have been around for years, Apple invented panorama photography, just as it invented phones with round edges, icons and slide to unlock.

The truth of the matter is that Apple is nowhere near as innovative as many people think. The company has trotted out a barely-improved device once again, which is vastly inferior to many Android devices on the market, yet millions cannot wait to part with their hard-earned cash. Indeed, it’s been reported that delivery times for the device doubled within hours of it going on sale. Although Apple fanboys irk me no end with their unflinching devotion to the church of Steve Jobs (we’ll come to that later), the company’s sheer hypocrisy annoys me more than anything. The tech giant’s recent patent lawsuit victory over Samsung is evidence of this. Setting aside the obvious bias involved in holding such a lawsuit in San Jose, a mere 10 miles from Apple’s Cupertino base, any claim that Apple has been copied is hilarious. It’s quite simply a case of the pot calling the kettle black.

This was Steve Jobs in 1996: “We have always been shameless about stealing great ideas”.

And this was Steve Jobs in 2011: “I’m going to destroy Android, because it’s a stolen product. I’m willing to go thermo-nuclear war on this”.

In true Apple style, I’m shamelessly stealing this graphic as it beautifully illustrates the degree to which Apple is as much the thief it accuses Samsung of being, if not more.

And that’s excluding other misdemeanours such as copying Creative Technology’s user interface for the iPod or stealing the name of the iPad from another company. How nice it must be to live in a world where oodles of cash rectifies the fact you’re not living by the rules you want everyone else to follow.

But back to Apple fanboys. It’s always amazed me how readily people will shell out a large sum of money for a supposedly premium device. Shouldn’t a premium device be a tad resistant to being dropped on the floor every now and then? I’ve dropped all of my phones many a time and none have shattered the way that iPhone’s do. I’ve lost count of the number of people I’ve seen squinting into their iPhone as they try to decipher text through multiple cracks in the glass.

Smashed iPhone - a common sight

But Apple has Siri i hear you say. So what! Android phones have had deep voice control and dictation for more than two years now and thanks to some third-party apps, you can enjoy the same level of voice control as iPhone 4S/5 owners. I’ll shy away from mentioning the Samsung Galaxy S3’s S-Voice feature, which apparently, much like a chap eager to please his missus after 10 Stellas down the pub, has “performance issues”. Lest we forget that Apple didn’t develop Siri (remember, it’s really not that innovative), it acquired it back in April 2010.

For me, one of life’s nagging mysteries, like the female mind, is trying to figure out why people love the iPhone so much. Especially when there are better (and much more affordable) devices out there. Multi-tasking is still archaic, there’s no flash support or NFC, you can’t customise the device, you’re forced to use iTunes (which, let’s face it, is shit), you can’t replace the battery and you can’t expand the memory. However, the real pièce de résistance is the fact you’ll now have to go and pay $29 for a Lightning to-30-pin adapter if you don’t want your Apple accessories to become obsolete. Apple couldn’t join everyone else in the phone industry and adopt micro USB connectors could they?! Oh no, Apple knows best!

Although this video is tongue-in-cheek, I can imagine scenes like this taking place in phone stores when the iPhone 5 is released in the UK on September 21st.

I’ll give Steve Jobs his due, he was a marketing genius and thanks to his efforts, the media is putty in Apple’s hands. As Malcolm X once said, “The media is the most powerful entity on earth. They have the power to make the innocent guilty and to make the guilty innocent, and that’s power. Because they control the minds of the masses.”