Despite the endless claims that the iPhone 7 is a minor update compared to previous models, the reviews clearly indicate that it’s a whole lot more significant in many ways. To see what I mean, do a little online research about the major changes in new iPhones in recent years. Other than form factor — and the switch to larger displays beginning with the iPhone 6 — there are usually a very few significant enhancements.

So, as I reported in this weekend’s newsletter, consider the iPhone 5s. One memorable change was the Touch ID fingerprint sensor, Apple’s first implementation of technology it acquired when it bought AuthenTec. There was one more change of note, although the benefits are probably more difficult to describe, and that’s the A7 processor, the first 64-bit chip using ARM technology. While the competition at first derided the news, it wasn’t long before they were desperately trying to match Apple’s achievement.

With the iPhone 7, the tech media has been hammering home the claim that it was nothing more than a relatively minor refresh, so might as well wait until next year when the “real” changes will occur. A key addition may be the use of an OLED or AMOLED display. The latter is already in use on the Apple Watch, so it would seem to be only a matter of time before it scales up to an iPhone display. Supposedly.

That would mean this year’s display isn’t supposed to be quite as good, but recent reviews indicate the improvements are significant.

Now before you consider display quality, consider the fact that the competition is touting higher resolution displays on their high-end models. That’s supposed to be an advantage. But all iPhones feature Retina displays, meaning that, at a normal viewing distance, you cannot see the individual pixels that make up the image. Specifically, it’s 326ppi, or 1334×750, on the iPhone 7, and 401ppi, or 1920×1080, on the iPhone 7 Plus. The latter doesn’t provide any visual advantage whatever, nor do even higher resolutions on Samsung’s and other handsets. If you can’t see the difference, what’s the point.

This is the problem TV makers are having with 4K models. Unless you have a set with a pretty large screen, and that can be over 60 inches at normal viewing distances, you won’t see the resolution advantage, for the same reason that you can’t see the pixels on a Retina display. But newer sets, particularly the more expensive models, are offering wider color gamuts. If your source material exploits that advantage, you will see colors that will just pop. But not so if you download 4K content from such sources as Netflix.

Apple has already begun to move in that direction. Last year’s iMac update, in addition to the usual processor enhancements, also sports a DCI P3 color gamut, which makes a noticeable difference, particularly if you compare it to the previous model. This spring, Apple introduced a 9.7-inch iPad Pro with a “True Tone” feature along with a similar color enhancement.

Dubbed Wide Color, it’s on the iPhone 7.

Now this is the sort of change that probably went unnoticed by the media, and was given passing reference by reviewers. But according to a DisplayMate report, the iPhone 7’s Wide Color displays are regarded as the best of the breed, with very high contrast radios, low reflectance, and amazing color accuracy in for both normal and Wide Color content.

Now I mentioned this advantage on my radio show, but it doesn’t appear that my guests really appreciated the difference. It’s one of those things that most customers probably wouldn’t notice either unless they compared it to gear without Wide Color, but it is visible. Or it was to me when I compared the review sample of the 9.7-inch iPad Pro I had here for a while to my wife’s iPad Air 2.

While the early reviews haven’t mentioned battery life specifically, Apple advertises a two-hour improvement in the iPhone 7 and one hour on the iPhone 7 Plus, which already had a pretty decent rating. Assuming those specs bear out in real-world testing, this would definitely answer one of the oft-stated concerns about iPhones. Maybe it won’t reduce sales of battery packs, but if you have to charge the battery less often, it means fewer charge cycles over the year, and a longer lifetime before it has to be replaced. That can be a money saver.

And don’t forget a water-resistant design.

The camera improvements seem to be mostly garnering good press. Reviewers describe noticeable improvements compared to previous iPhones and competitors. It’s not quite at the DSLR level, and Apple isn’t claiming that it is. But for most snapshots and even some portraits, it apparently does a pretty good job. This may be a key reason why the iPhone 7 Plus has what appears to be a larger-than-expected demand due to its twin-camera system.

The solid state Home button may be controversial, and the loss of the headphone jack may be off-putting for some, but for most it isn’t going to make a difference. Apple’s decision to supply the free headphone jack to Lightning adapter, and to sell replacements for $9, does help lessen the inconvenience.

I’m not considering processor enhancements, improved LTE performance and other changes. The long and short of it is, compared to previous iPhones, this one appears to be a pretty major upgrade. But I hope to have a reasonable amount of hands-on experience to offer soon.

Every single year, there has been one constant about the iPhone. After the three-day launch weekend, in which customers actually receive them, Apple has revealed sales figures. Year after year, those numbers have increased, thus breaking records. But it wasn’t always so simple. In 2013, when Apple announced record sales for the iPhone 5s, moving a record five million units just wasn’t enough, because some tech pundits and industry analysts said it must be 10 million or bust. Ignored was the fact that Apple claimed more product could have been sold if they had enough stock on hand.

No matter that neither Samsung — or any other handset maker — ever reported that many sales for flagship smartphones in so short a time. Apple was in danger of losing its luster because it failed to achieve the unrealistic goals set for them by third parties. Indeed, the iPhone 5s was long regarded as a failure even though sales were higher than those of the previous year. But launch weekend results and misleading reports from the supply chain about reduced orders, caused Apple’s stock price to dip and reduce the company’s market cap by billions of dollars, at least until the market regained its senses.

In 2015, Apple reported sales of 13 million on launch weekend. But the luster of the iPhone 6s and iPhone 6s Plus dimmed this year as sales dropped for the very first time in the product’s history. So expectations for the iPhone 7’s launch weekend were also diminished.

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Back in 1998, Apple did the impossible, so to speak. With the introduction of the first iMac, the famous Bondi Blue model — Apple ditched the ADB, LocalTalk and SCSI ports, and replaced them all with USB. This was USB 1.0, thus fairly slow, but usable for anything but a hard drive. The floppy drive vanished, and you can bet lots of people complained.

True, there were adapters for your old input devices, printers and drives that mostly worked. If you had to have a floppy drive — and who didn’t in those days? — you could buy an external USB device instead. This gave third-party manufacturers a chance to try out a new format, SuperDisk (no resemblance to Apple’s SuperDrive optical devices), which used media similar to a floppy. But the capacity was 120MB at first, later doubling to 240MB. But it never caught on and died a few years later.

The floppy drive was quickly dispatched from other Macs. Other portable drive formats, such as Iomega’s Jaz, hung on for a few years. Eventually optical drives with CDs and DVDs, along with small bus-powered external hard drives, served the needs for higher capacities and easy transport. A tiny Flash or thumb drive is the ultimate in portability nowadays with capacities usually ranging from 16GB to 256GB.

Clearly Steve Jobs and Apple’s hardware engineers realized floppies had to go. In addition to the tiny capacity, they weren’t so reliable. Eventually the PC industry caught up.

Over the years Apple has moved from FireWire to Thunderbolt and faster versions of USB. The USB-C format used on the MacBook and some PCs has the advantage of using a reversible cable and managing multiple protocols.

Every step of the way, customers were irritated, or outraged, and the critics complained that Apple didn’t care about its high-paying customers. It was all about finding ways to ditch ports to make products slimmer and lighter, and inconvenience users. With the move from the dock connector to the all-digital and reversible Lightning format on mobile gear, you can bet that there were concerns about what would happen to all those old accessories. The solution was to get an adapter. After shipping hundreds of millions of Lightning-enabled iPhones and iPads, people mostly got used to it.

From a technology standpoint, Apple evidently believes that making these changes to connection ports serves the needs of future products by providing more design flexibility and, one hopes, reliability. Well, except for people who have Lightning cables that have become frayed near the plugs, a not uncommon occurrence.

Apple’s latest move, perhaps the most controversial of all, was to ditch the headphone jack on the iPhone 7. Unlike the other connection ports, which arrived during the personal computer era, the 3.5mm headphone jack dates back to the 1950s, based on technology dating back to the late 19th century. The major change for the miniature jack was the move from mono to stereo. It’s simple, it works, at least when you haven’t accidentally broken the pin on a headphone plug.

This move is just the beginning. The next iPad will no doubt come bereft of a headphone jack, and there’s already speculation that future Macs will come without them too. But don’t forget that there is no Lightning port on a Mac — at least not yet.

Apple Senior VP Philip Schiller used the “provocative” word “courage” when explaining the reasoning behind the change at the iPhone 7 rollout event. That got the dander up on the part of some journalists, because of the hubris. Or because they felt Apple made this move more for design reasons than practicality, reliability and technology. But the headphone jack can be a point of failure. It’s easy to push or bend the headphone plug, only to have it break while it’s connected; it’s often impossible to remove. So you’re left with a serious repair bill. It happened to me once years ago, at a time when it was possible for a skilled technician to repair a PowerBook on the component level. Apple would have charged me hundreds of dollars to replace the logic board.

But people survived.

Apple is looking to a wireless future, where your iPhone, your iPad and your Mac can exist mostly without connecting to anything, including a charger. Imagine being able to use a Mac Pro without plugging it into the wall socket, connecting external RAID drives, or attaching printers. Well, we can already use printers wirelessly in a way that’s hardly noticeable. High speed drives? Not quite, but soon. Every time, I confront the wiring nightmare on the floor behind my main computer desk, I fervently wish it was already happening.

Today, the iPhone 7 is supplied a headphone jack to Lightning adapter. It’s $9 separately, if you fear the loss of the one you have. I expect Apple will continue to offer such adapters for a while, but eventually they won’t, just as they killed the Rosetta PowerPC conversion app on the operating system formerly known as OS X some years back. Apple does not believe training wheels should be permanent.

It may probably take two or three years for Apple to fully realize a wireless future, but when it arrives, you’ll soon come to appreciate the advantages. And the freedom.

When Apple announced it would no longer be releasing launch weekend sales totals for the iPhone, the stock price dropped. This is a key metric used by the media, and evidently Wall Street, to assess the new model’s sales potential, even though Apple is alone among tech companies to reveal such information. But such data is, for Apple, equivalent of the first weekend’s box office receipts for a movie. If the numbers aren’t huge, the movie, or the Apple gadget, will be declared a failure.

Sometimes media or industry analyst expectations are overwrought, and Apple is blamed for it. So in 2013, when iPhone launch weekend sales of the iPhone 5s, despite hitting a record, failed to match inflated analyst predictions, it was regarded as a failure. The veneer of failure followed that model until its successor arrived in 2014, even though it continued to break sales records. So it’s a situation where Apple sometimes just can’t win.

That said, Apple knows full well how many units are available to ship. It may well be that supplies will not be quite what they were last year, when 13 million units were reportedly sold, or not much more. So regardless of demand, the iPhone 7 would appear to be a failure.

It’s the no-win situation, assuming any of this is true, and there are already reports of constrained supplies. But it’s not above some tech pundits to suggest Apple deliberately holds back stock at the start of a product launch to foster the illusion of high demand. It doesn’t take much. Even though there’s the risk that some people will delay their orders, or go elsewhere and adopt — or stay with — another platform, the positive buzz may be sufficient to overcome any such negative effects.

That said, stories about possible high demand for the new iPhones has been enough to fuel a fairly large rise in Apple’s stock price. Expectations were raised by reports from Sprint and T-Mobile that preorders were as much as 400% higher than last year. That’s a surprising development, and if the trend has spread to other wireless carriers and other vendors, it could mean that Apple will be behind-the-curve keeping up with orders for quite a while.

It doesn’t hurt that Samsung had to recall the Galaxy Note 7 due to reports of exploding batteries.

Certainly Apple is only too happy to read stories indicating extremely high demand from third parties. But could it be that Sprint and T-Mobile are outliers, that demand is otherwise not so high? Verizon reported that preorders were at normal levels, but AT&T claimed a year-over-year increase without giving any specifics. That appeared to stop the stock market increase in its tracks, at least for now.

But the key may be how many units actually ship before the end of the September quarter. Those results could still demonstrate a potential resurgence in iPhone sales, if it holds true. But even if a sales dip is less than expected, it would also be reason for optimism.

It would also go against the media meme that the iPhone 7 is a minor refresh and thus doesn’t stand a chance of doing any better than the iPhone 6s. Of course, it’s not minor when some rail against Apple’s decision to ditch the headphone jack. But that might actually be a non-issue for most customers, who probably use the standard ear buds that come with an iPhone and don’t really bother with any third-party product, unless the original is damaged along the way.

Remember, too, that most people who will buy an iPhone 7 currently own an iPhone 6 or something older. To them, it’s a major improvement over what they own now. The promise of longer battery life, often on the top of customer wish lists, is itself a major development. Add to that the improved camera — and the two-camera system on  the iPhone 7 Plus — and it may be regarded as a very compelling upgrade. It does appear that the enhanced camera system may boost interest in the iPhone phablet, which thus raises average sale prices. The solid state Home button might also be attractive for some people around the world who evidently fear early failure of this heavily-used feature. But it’s not that this is a known form of failure.

Most iPhone repairs probably involve replacing broken displays, and nothing about the iPhone 7 would necessarily prevent that from happening. Being water-resistant, however, would help deal with another potential source of failure.

On the other hand, if Apple manages to move more product than expected, I suppose it’s always possible that there will be some news about that development come Monday. Not that I expect it to happen, because Apple has tight control of the supply chain and information about shipments and deliveries. The final numbers are already baked into the data they had at hand when they announced that such numbers would no longer be released.

That decision also reduces pressure on Apple to have to announce record sales every single year, which is clearly impossible. This short-term results doesn’t always predict total sales. It didn’t with the iPhone 6s family, where demand dropped over time below the previous year’s totals despite the strong start.

But the prospects for the iPhone 7 may be a lot better than many expect.