This article is ridiculous: it poh-pohs speculation as such and then combats the various speculative theories being tossed about with…speculation. Gruber (or s

This article is ridiculous: it poh-pohs speculation as such and then combats the various speculative theories being tossed about with…speculation. Gruber (or some Gruber-like person) argued that we may be seeing a decrease in the tempo of hardware innovation in the iPhone space coming out of Apple due to the product's asymptotic approach of the iPhone's Platonic ideal form. Before long, if not with the iPhone 5, then with the 6 or 7—or whatever they'll be called—we may see product introductions that are footnotes as processor speed, memory, and battery life are incrementally bumped. (NOTE: Having a relatively well-defined platform to develop for is something mobile developers love about iOS vis-a-vis Android; to me that would indicate that the bumps might come clumped together enough to provide an inducement to upgrade in a lock-steppy manner. But I'm pulling that out of my ass.) iOS is an ecosystem. There's Apple's hardware but, as we saw during the iPad 2 intro, the software is just as important. And don't forget AirPlay. Apple wants to create a compelling ecosystem for consumers, developers, and content providers, and people who think that bumping the clock speed or the amount of memory beyond certain good-enough points are the sorts of people who might think that the next step for AirPlay after supporting 24bit@96kHz sampling rates is to move on to 32bit@192kHz. In other words, they're spec whores, and don't appreciate what Apple's doing, which is, to re-phrase and repeat (and paraphrase and augment Steve's twice-delivered spiel), the intersection of commerce and tech and the arts.