The Most Un-Apple Stuff About the Apple Watch and iPhone Announcements

“Think different.”

That’s been Apple’s on-and-off slogan for a number of years now. And at this Tuesday’s unveiling of the Apple Watch and iPhone 6, Apple did indeed think different — and sometimes, it thought a lot differently from the way Apple usually thinks.

Indeed, there was much about Apple’s event that was totally un-Apple, or at least representative of some of the traits we’ve come to think of as un-Apple. Whether these changes are a gut reaction to the success of Android or more of a sea change for Tim Cook’s new Apple, we can’t say.

Whatever drove them, here are some things from Tuesday’s Apple event that felt, at present day, awfully un-Apple to us.

Large phones
What? Apple released a phablet? No way!

The giant iPhone 6 Plus (left). (Associated Press)

It seems like just yesterday that Tim Cook and Apple television advertisements were explaining how perfectly the iPhone 5’s 4-inch screen fits in the human hand. Change of heart, fellas?

Of course, understanding that the most recent version of the iPhone was among the smallest of the popular smartphones on the market, and with its worldwide lead in smartphone share evaporating in the past few years, Apple followed companies like Samsung and LG into Big Phone World. So not only did the company release a now-tame (but still much larger) 4.7-inch version of its popular smartphone, but it gave us a pocket-filling 5.5-inch version, too.

All that means we can now deem this “How Does the iPhone 5 Fit in Your Hand?” GIF guide useless. Who saw any of this coming two years ago?

Customization
As pointed out by our columnist David Pogue, the introduction of the interchangeable-band, multisized, and multidesign Apple Watch shows that the company once known for its “Here’s the look we’ve chosen for you” attitude is lightening up a bit.

And that’s not just on the hardware side. Apple’s iOS 8, the mobile operating system its new iPhones will come with, also goes a long way to allow for the replacing of mandatory Apple apps with non-Apple options. Though Android phone owners have enjoyed these types of customizations for some time, we never quite thought Apple would ever break down and allow for third-party software keyboards, complete app-to-app sharing, or full system privileges for alternate Web browsing apps.

Nevertheless, the hard walls of iOS have come down. Do our eyes deceive us?

Fragmentation
Hey, Apple, are you ready for a full taste of that Android app fragmentation that you’ve always mocked?

Back when Apple had one iPhone size. (IBTimes)

“One thing is that we’re not fragmented … We have one phone with one screen size, one resolution. So it’s pretty simple if you’re a developer,” Cook said in an interview before the release of the iPhone 5.

Obviously those words seemed empty when Apple released the iPhone 5, touting a larger display than the iPhone 4s (and every other iPhone before it). Even today, apps optimized for the iPhone 5/5s/5c don’t function quite as well on the smaller screen of the iPhone 4/4s. Our guess is that adding two new screen sizes, bringing the grand total to four different iPhone display types, will force the company to soften its stance on the way other mobile operating systems try to accommodate various screen sizes. An un-Apple stance to take, we’d say.

NFC and wireless charging
NFC (near-field communication) and wireless charging are two features that eventual Apple Watch owners will be able to enjoy. But the company hasn’t always seen the need for these pieces of tech, with Apple’s senior VP of marketing Phil Schiller saying as much in an interview just two years ago.

(Yahoo Tech)

The NFC capabilities, which have also come to the iPhone in the two newest versions, were once upon a time not considered to be “the kinds of things customers need today,” Schiller said. And a wireless charging system was, in 2012, too “complicated,” Apple thought.

Following other companies
Something we found conspicuously absent from yesterday’s presentation was that lovely “We’re Kicking Your Butts, Android and Samsung” bit with charts, tables, and the whole nine yards. Why is that? Well, maybe it’s because Tuesday’s event was all about catching up to those guys in features and device categories.

After all, the iPhone 6 Plus has to be considered a direct answer to the success of Samsung’s Galaxy Note. And it could even be argued that Apple would have never introduced the Apple Watch a half a year before its release date if not for the buzz surrounding already-available devices like the Moto 360 Android Wear smartwatch.

It seems fair to credit Apple with creating the high-end smartphone category, as well as bringing the market viability of the tablet to life, a great former track record in innovation on both counts. So to see other gadget companies take a lead ahead of Apple — well, that seems like a fairly new development.

No release date? Really?
Harping on the fact that Cook and company showed us the Apple Watch without saying more than “Coming early 2015” may be nitpicking, but it’s still very un-Apple.

The company has typically patted itself on the back for verbosely announcing things like “available today” from the stage, like it did with its beta version of OS X Yosemite in June. And specifically with hardware products, Apple has been known to pin a hard release date to product unveilings, as it did with the iPhone 6 and 6 Plus (available Sept. 19).

Leaks
One of the biggest changes we’ve seen in the last couple of years at Apple, and something that may be directly related to the absence of Steve Jobs, is the degree to which the company’s products are now leaked prior to their unveilings.

With the exception of an Apple employee once leaving an iPhone 4 prototype in a bar, Steve Jobs’ ship was run so tightly that, were he around today, we speculate that no one would have been tipped off to the fact that Apple was set to release two larger iPhones. And never would we have imagined that we’d actually get to see them in leaked pictures ahead of the official announcement show.

(Weibo)

But with the veritable leak spree we saw surrounding the last few runs of iPhones, as well as iPads, the old days of tight-lipped Apple may be gone.

Yes, we were all struck with surprise when Tim Cook gave us our first glimpse at the Apple Watch, but we weren’t shocked that it existed. Trusted reports as far back as last year announced the development of an “iWatch.” And though the name was wrong, many of the other details were not. We might even go so far as to say that it’s possible that it was only because the device’s release is still far off that we never got leaked Apple Watch images ahead of time.

Perhaps Apple will find that last element to be the only way it can keep eyes off of its secretly developed devices in the future.

Was there any un-un-Apple stuff at Tuesday’s event?
Having said all of the above, there’s still no reason to worry about your favorite tech titan going completely lame on you. Apple is still Apple.

To prove as much, the company went back to the old Apple well at points during the event. Tim Cook’s invocation of Jobs’ famous “One more thing …” before the Apple Watch portion of the show got everyone excited. And featuring U2, the band Apple used for its impactful iPod commercial campaign in the early 2000s, felt like a calculated move to say: “Hey, we may have a bigger phone now, but we’re still the Apple you’ve always loved.”

So maybe this will all be for the best. It’s entirely possible that the new Apple will incorporate a little un-Appleness to bring you the best Apple yet. You dig?

Have questions, comments, or just want to tell me something funny? Email me at danbean@yahoo-inc.com.