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Why it doesn't matter
commentary It's easy to point to yesterday's iPhone 4S unveiling as a ho-hum affair, that is, if you were expecting something more. And the truth is, most of the tech world was.

Look no further than the slew of rumors that took on a life of their own in the extended wait between last year's model and this one. A bevy of canada goose expedition parka silicon cases flying out of China sporting a dramatic new design derived from an allegedly leaked Foxconn prototype? Check. Gorgeous renderings of devices with a huge display, tapered design, and a change to the iPhone's iconic home button that's gone unchanged four versions over? Check. And hey, how about two new iPhones this year? Add that one to the pile too.

What we got instead was the iPhone 4S, a phone that looks just like the iPhone 4 on the outside but with faster innards. Will people still be lining up for the thing when it's released next week, and will it sell even better than last year's model? Yes and yes.

Apple watchers will north face sale remember Apple pulled a similar move going from the iPhone 3G to the 3GS. Almost identical to the 4S update, the 3GS too was a collection of inside changes. The processor got a boost, as did wireless networking with speedier HSPA. The 3GS also brought a better camera, and Voice Control–the voice recognition software that let users launch a song, or make a phone call with their voice.

As the 3GS' spiritual successor–the 4S–does that same trick once again. There's a considerably zippier processor, a better camera, more built-in storage (if you want to pay for it), and faster cellular data networking that works in more places since it's got both CDMA and GSM hardware built-in. That, combined with the iPhone 4S-specific Siri voice recognition feature, makes for cheap tory burch a solid update, especially for 3GS users who are itching to update their devices. For people who bought last year's iPhone 4? Probably not so much.

The thing to point out to those who may have been expecting the next big hardware jump is that Apple's not just marketing to those two groups. The goal is to keep pulling in new users from competitors as well as those still using feature phones. Apple CEO Tim Cook said as much yesterday while pointing to a chart of how much of the handset market Apple currently occupies.

"Despite all of this success and all of this momentum, the iPhone has a 5 percent share of the worldwide market of handsets. I could have shown you a much larger number if I just showed you smartphones, but that's not how we look at it," Cook said. "We look at the entire discount ralph lauren market of handsets because we believe that over time, all handsets become smartphones. This market is 1.5 billion units annually. It's an enormous opportunity for Apple."