This is a serious question, no sarcasm: What would not have been a marginal update? I’m not quite sure myself. The iPhone 4 was clearly a major update compared

This is a serious question, no sarcasm: What would not have been a marginal update? I’m not quite sure myself. The iPhone 4 was clearly a major update compared to the iPhone 3GS: On the outside the design and materials improved. The resolution of the screen quadrupled and they switched screen technologies to IPS. They improved the camera, added a gyroscope, doubled the RAM and improved the processor. All that at no loss or improvement of battery life. The iPhone 4S does three (or maybe four, depending on whether the RAM was doubled) of the same things. That’s certainly less major. But what could they have done? They could have changed the design. That said, one thing I like about Apple is that they are willing to stick to a design if they like it. Maybe they should have tried to make the phone thinner or lighter (with an otherwise unchanged design), though that would likely have cost battery life. Increasing the resolution of the screen was in no way practical. That’s for all intents and purposes a done project. The pixels are invisible to the human eye and that’s that. Apple would only quadruple the resolution anyway and that’s clearly not practical. Switching technologies would also have been an option, but whether you prefer OLED or (IPS) LCD is more a question of taste than opinion. They could have increased the screen size but I again think that’s more a question of preference. A larger screen is not automatically better and Apple clearly thinks that consistency is worth more than a marginally larger screen. Could they have added sensors? I honestly don’t know. Maybe NFC? Maybe they prefer Bluetooth? They could have switched to 4G but I don’t think that would have been practical. It would just cost too much battery life for too little benefit. Getting everything out of 3G (which they did) is, I think, for now good enough. Yes, this update was less major than the last, but maybe that’s to be expected. I’m not sure whether I would want to call it minor and I don’t think that jumps like from 3GS to 4 are possible every year. Maybe the next update will be of similar scale than the 3GS to 4 jump: They will probably at least switch to 4G.