Critical Consensus: The iPhone scorecard
The iPhone scorecard — The first four hands-on reviews of Apple's new wonderphone came out yesterday. The critical consensus? Buy the amazing device, if you can afford it. We gave scores out of ten — in ten categories.
Context & Ripple Effects
The scorecard lands two days before Friday's launch, by which point customers had already been queuing outside Apple's Fifth Avenue store for days and tens of thousands more were expected to line up nationwide. The day before the reviews ran, Apple and AT&T jointly published service plans starting at $59.99 a month with unlimited data and visual voicemail — which is what turns the critics' 'buy it if you can afford it' caveat into a concrete monthly number.
The story travelled beyond Valleywag on pickup day itself: Wired ran it under a cautionary banner ('Beware the Magical IPhone') while the San Francisco Chronicle's Technology Chronicles zeroed in on the touchscreen keyboard. That split captures the consensus's internal tension reflected in the wider commentary — a columnist calling the iPhone a marvel that still isn't the best cellphone available, even as retail kiosks began demoing the UI in stores.
First-order effects
- Launch-week buyers get a multi-outlet green light just as queues form, handing Apple quotable ten-category scores to deploy against the one objection its new $59.99-and-up AT&T plans don't fully erase: price.
- AT&T's exclusivity means the review enthusiasm converts to subscriptions only through its three data-inclusive plans, making the carrier the gatekeeper on the 'afford it' condition.
Second-order effects
- Rival handset makers get pulled into software-experience comparisons rather than feature-checklist ones, and the reviewers' keyboard reservations give them a concrete attack surface against the touch-only interface.
- Other carriers face pressure to match the unlimited-data-plus-visual-voicemail bundle now anchoring what a premium smartphone plan looks like.
Third-order effects
- If this launch template holds — embargoed hands-ons released together, scored across categories, days before sale — gadget verdicts consolidate into single news cycles that manufacturers must time their entire marketing around.
- The 'amazing device, imperfect phone' framing points toward evaluation criteria for mobile hardware shifting permanently toward UI and software, with phone specs demoted to secondary status.
The trend: Flagship consumer-electronics launches are consolidating into embargoed review-consensus events where the software experience, not the spec sheet, decides the verdict.