S Club 7?
September 10, 2016 at 9:30 PM by Dr. Drang
As a rule, I don’t buy a new phone every year. I like my iPhones, but a new phone every other year is good enough for me. I’ve come to prefer the S versions. With an S, you don’t get the newest enclosure design, but you do get the refinements that come with a year of experience, and you typically get a serious improvement to the internals. But it looks like that pattern will be broken with the 7.
I switched to the S Club with the 5S. I had a 5 (actually, I had three 5s—two of them were replaced because of dust between the camera lens and sensor), but I went ahead and bought a 5S because my son’s 4 was on its last legs and needed to be replaced. He got my 5 as a hand-me-down.
The 5S, as you may recall, was a big jump up from the 5 despite having essentially the same case geometry and overall look. The processor went from 32 bits to 64, the home button got Touch ID, the camera got burst mode, and the case became more scratch-resistant. Also, I never had any problems with dust under the 5S’s camera lens.
I skipped the 6 and waited for the 6S,1 which meant I got the way way faster Touch ID, the stronger frame, twice the RAM, improved LTE networking, and the usual faster processor and better camera. S Club wins again.
But the 7 is the third version of this enclosure design, and it seems extremely unlikely we’ll see an S version of it.2 More important, next year is the 10th anniversary of the original iPhone, and Apple will certainly mark the occasion with a major change in case design. Sadly, there will be no S Club 7.
What will I do? Get the 10th Anniversary iPhone? Wait around another year for what will certainly be a distinctly better version of that design? I suspect I’ll be unable to resist whatever comes out in 2017, and I’ll have to tear up my S Club membership card.
