It seemed as if hardly anyone had bothered with the launch of the new iPhone 6S and iPhone 6S Plus in September 2015. So much so that I didn’t think making my yearly video about the new iPhone was worth it this time.
It was a very different story the previous September.
For three weeks, I filmed outside Apple’s flagship store on Regent Street in London during the UK launch of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus. The buzz was incredible. I loved popping by the store almost every day to film the fans queuing day and night to be among the first people in the country to get the new iPhone.
Apple fans are usually well behaved, mostly funny and charming, and slightly geeky. After a few days of turning up and hearing their daily stories about the night before, we established a warm connection. They started to get to know me just as much as I got to know them.
Some of those who had been queuing for days even became my camera operators while I was making the video.
Above all, we had a lot of fun.
I would stop people entering the Regent Street store and offer them a present they just didn’t want — not even for free: my old iPhone 3GS.
Having suffered constant nagging from friends about the state of my phone, I decided I was going to give it away to an Apple fan.
As it turned out, they weren’t interested in old pieces — not even as collectors’ items. These fans wanted the latest, brightest and shiniest phone.
My iPhone 3GS screen had broken a few times, the answer button hardly worked, and I had heard it all:
“Oh, that phone is bringing you bad karma.”
“Take it to a museum.”
“You are a filmmaker. How can you survive with that?”
So why, then, were the barriers almost empty this year?
Outside Apple’s Covent Garden store, the number of people queuing for the newly released iPhone 6S wasn’t quite what I had expected after the excitement of previous launches.
The metal barriers outside the store were nowhere near as full as they had been the year before — or the year before that, when I had also made a video about the launch of the iPhone 5.
The new iPhone 6S and 6S Plus had an improved camera, a quicker fingerprint scanner, a faster processor and the new pressure-sensitive “3D Touch” screen. But they essentially looked the same as the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus.
One of the things that still annoyed me was the battery life. And if I may add my own complaint, Apple really needed to get cracking on making an almost unbreakable screen. Breaking an iPhone screen was, and remains, a very expensive experience for many users.
But the days of queuing overnight seemed to be losing some of their allure.
Why queue when you could simply pre-order the phone online?
Perhaps the people still queuing were the ones who enjoyed being part of the spectacle — or those hoping to get their hands on a phone early enough to sell it on for a profit.
Whatever the reason, something had changed.
The queues that had fascinated me so much the previous year were no longer quite the same.
And yes, in the end I did buy an iPhone 6.
Maybe I had bought into the whole buzz surrounding me during those weeks. But I’m actually quite happy with it.
