UPDATED 07:37 EDT / SEPTEMBER 13 2013

NEWS

Wondering Why The New iPhones Look So Freakishly Familiar?

If you attended the Apple event last Tuesday, or you were tuning in on a live blog, did you get a sense of familiarity when the two iPhones were finally unveiled?  You didn’t?  Are you sure?  Think far back into your childhood and you’ll probably understand what I’m saying.

Remember these?

Yes, the new iPhone 5c looks hauntingly familiar, especially with the silicon microfiber case, because it looks like (among other things) a food grater, Ikea’s plastic bag collector, Crocs footwear, and a game we used to play when we were kids (can’t remember what it’s called!).

Is this a bad thing?  Not really, but it shows how Apple’s design team lack originality.  Also, having colored handsets isn’t exactly something new, as Nokia has been doing it for years.  So you could say Apple took a leaf out of Nokia’s book.  And Nokia UK was quick to point that out on Twitter just after the iPhone 5c was revealed.

What about the iPhone 5s?  See anything familiar?  If you’re a Star Wars fan you probably already spotted it.

Yes the colors of the iPhone 5s looks like Darth Vader, a stormtrooper, and R2D2.  So will these iPhones be able to take down the Droids?  We’ll see but that’s highly unlikely since the Touch ID seems to be the only interesting feature of the iPhone 5s, and even that wasn’t that original.  Back in 2011, the Motorola Atrix was launched.  The device was the first smartphone to feature a fingerprint scanner, but because Motorola doesn’t have hordes of fanbois, the biometric device did not gain any traction.

If you want to refer to the features brought about by the new iOS 7 as something new, then I beg you not to open your mouths as you’ll just incur the wrath of Android users – note that many of the features found on the new iOS have been on Android for years.  So that’s something fanbois can’t really brag about to fAndroids.

Because of the iPhone 5s’ color scheme, Nokia UK also did not let this slide and was quick to tweet,

Nokia’s tweets were all in good fun of course, but if you’re too sensitive or too serious to take this as joke then you better stay away from gag sites, Twitter, Facebook, or any other media that may want to highlight how unimaginative Apple was with the iPhone’s new design.

In the end, what we can take from the new iPhones is that either Apple’s design team doesn’t have any original ideas left in its box, or that they’re in fact geniuses because they know that even if people have seen these things before, they’re gonna  be lining up to buy the iPhone regardless.


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