So the press has a new theme today, and that is that Tuesday’s Apple media event was a huge disappointment, simply because the new iPhone looks the same as the iPhone. Reminds me of an old Who song about the new boss being the same as the old boss.

In any case, Apple often keeps a form factor through several product revisions. Consider the MacBook Pro, and the iMac, both of which have gone through several refreshes without changing the basic looks. But you don’t hear too many complaints about the lack of a new case design. If form follows function, Apple has hit on the right formula for the standard and thin note-books. All right, the MacBook Air had a decent revision last year, which only means that the current design will persist for a while.

So in keeping with that tradition, and, in fact, the tradition of the iPhone 3 series, Apple kept the same case design for the iPhone 4s, but revised the innards, substantially in fact, almost as if Apple threw out everything and started over. From an A5 processor with twice the power, graphics hardware capable of seven times the performance of the previous model, to substantially improved camera components and even video stabilization for 1080p high definition movies, clearly Apple made major improvements. It’s not just a shave and a haircut, even if some members of the media want to express that fiction.

The new antenna system, sort of similar to the diversity antennas you find on autos, sounds really terrific in theory, being able to switch from one antenna to the other for receiving and transmitting. Maybe it’s also a workable solution for that so-called death grip, but that won’t be certain until the iPhone 4s reaches customers and product reviewers who will put it through, I’m sure, extreme tests. I wonder what Consumer Reports, reportedly not invited to the Apple media event, will say since they refused to recommend the original iPhone 4.

And don’t forget the Siri voice assistant, which appears, at first brush, to be the realization of the dream of being able to converse with a computing device in plain language without encountering lots and lots of errors. Hal, we can hear you now!

On the other hand, you should expect that the media would love to bring Apple down on its knees, and turn the fact that the iPhone 4s is a major upgrade topsy-turvy. It sells papers, gets ratings, and garners lots and lots of hits. Indeed, I can just now see a certain online commentator, who has gotten his comeuppance frequently in these columns, writing his iPhone epitaph, explaining why you shouldn’t buy the new phone since it’s really just a “minor” improvement over the older model.

Now I suppose Apple could have actually delivered a whole new form factor, sporting that so-called tapered aluminum unibody design that’s become so prominent in Mac note-books. It would satisfy some of the more virulent critics, but would it make the iPhone any better? And consider the cost to accessory designers who would be forced to redo their cases as the result. Now, more or less, they can sell you last year’s case for this year’s model. Your existing iPhone 4 bumpers ought to work, though, truth to tell, the Verizon Wireless version was a little off. So maybe it’ll be a poor fit; we’ll know soon enough.

Now there is one area where the old design doesn’t quite compete, and that’s against Android smartphones with larger screens. To some 3.5 inches isn’t enough. You need four or more, and there was a theory at one point that the iPhone 5 would have an edge-to-edge display to accomplish the same trick with a smaller case.

While anyone who is not as young as they used to be would appreciate a larger screen, there’s also the practical matter of the physical space the gadget occupies on your pocket, purse, or smartphone holster. How big does the iPhone become before it becomes just a tiny iPad? Wait, they used to consider the iPad nothing more than a bloated iPod touch, and look what happened?

This isn’t to say that Apple won’t produce that vastly redesigned iPhone 5 next year, replete with larger screen and support for 4G or LTE network architecture. Indeed, what Apple doesn’t tell you when they tout the superior download speeds of the iPhone 4s is the fact that it’s something near-impossible to achieve in the U.S. Sprint and Verizon Wireless use a different technology. AT&T has only limited support for 14.4 Mbps HSDPA (high-speed downlink packet access), which means most users in this country will be forced to contend with roughly half that speed, which really happens at peak levels anyway. But it’s still faster than what the other two carriers offer.

In any case, what really matters is customer reaction and how many are going to be buying the new iPhone when it hits the streets next week. Will you see lines snaking around Apple Stores? What about servers going bust under the load of preorders? In the end, if Apple sells boatloads of them, as I expect they will, and customers are satisfied, it won’t matter what the skeptics say.

Although the news wasn’t unexpected, I felt very sad to learn Wednesday afternoon that Steve Jobs died peacefully, after a long illness. According to a statement from Apple’s board of directors: “We are deeply saddened to announce that Steve Jobs passed away today. Steve’s brilliance, passion and energy were the source of countless innovations that enrich and improve all of our lives. The world is immeasurably better because of Steve. His greatest love was for his wife, Laurene, and his family. Our hearts go out to them and to all who were touched by his extraordinary gifts.”

As with many geniuses, Jobs was temperamental, apt to scream at someone for messing up, but he was also considered one of the greatest CEOs of our time. I met him several times, and can recall two instances where I spoke with him briefly. That story was written some weeks back, when Jobs stepped down as Apple’s CEO as the result of his deteriorating condition.

You’ll be reading a lot about his life, about Apple, and about the future of the company. I’ll have more to say in the days to come. I realize we all filled with sadness, but we should also celebrate his glorious life and his amazing achievements. That’s the best way to remember Steve Jobs.

I suppose you could call Apple’s iPhone launch the lesser of what was expected, although the hardware changed quite a bit. But I don’t want to get ahead of myself.

The anticipation for Apple’s iPhone media event, at the corporate headquarters in Cupertino, CA, was unprecedented. Early on, it almost seemed as if the cat was already out of the bag ahead of the event, with the report that Apple Japan posted information about the iPhone 4s. So out went talk about a possible iPhone 5 with an all-new external design.

Ahead of the main announcements, newly-minted CEO Tim Cook took to the stage to deliver the usual round of statistics about stellar sales of Apple products, along with the news that some six million copies of Lion had been downloaded, giving the new OS a 10% share of the entire Mac market, estimated at 60 million users. But he didn’t mention how many Macs with Lion preloaded had been sold, although that will be more obvious later this month when Apple’s quarterly financials are revealed. And, in passing, his presentation was professional if stilted. We’ll, let’s give him time.

Scott Forstall, senior VP of iOS Software, delivered a pretty standard presentation outlining iOS 5’s key features, such as the revised Notification Center, the new Camera app, full Twitter integration, Newsstand and other cool features. All this joy will come your way to download on October 12th.

While all this was going on, the online updates about the event various tech sites sputtered, as the systems all labored under heavy loads. I imagine browser Refresh functions were triggered at a record pace.

At the end of the iCloud presentation from VP Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of Internet Software and Services, it was announced that it too, as expected, would drop on October 12th. No doubt Mac OS 10.7.2, an expected update for Lion that supports iCloud, will arrive the very same day, since there are now reports the GM has been seeded to developers.

Marketing VP Phil Schiller assured everyone that Apple still loves music, as they announced new versions of the iPod nano with an improved user interface, no doubt to respond to customer complaints, at $129 for the 8GB version and $149 for the 16GB edition, down from $149 and $179. This model is available today. A slightly revised 8GB iPod touch, also available in white, starts at $199 for 8GB, $299 for 32GB and $399 for 64GB, and it’ll be available on October 12th, when iOS 5 is released. Nothing was said about the Classic or shuffle, which continue unchanged for the holiday season.

Then came the  main event.

In announcing the iPhone 4s, Schiller pointed out that the iPhone is the number one smartphone in the world, and gets a higher customer satisfaction rating than any competing product. Despite the expectations of an all-new form factor, the actual product looks the same as the previous model, with the glass front and rear casings, but the internal workings are changed significantly, starting with Apple’s A5 processor, the same chip the iPad 2 uses, making it twice as fast as the A4 processor in the original iPhone 4. The dual-core graphics are said to speed up performance by up to seven times, with games as the major beneficiary.

The new model also boasts eight hours of 3G talk time, 14 hours of 2G talk time, and six hours for 3G browsing. No doubt in response to last year’s brouhaha about the infamous “death grip,” where the phone’s reception would dip if you held it the wrong way, Apple has a solution. The antenna system has been overhauled, automatically switching between two antennas for transmitting and receiving, something Schiller said had never been done before. But it sounds suspiciously to me like the diversity antenna systems you find on many cars that hunt for the best signal. But as a result, data downloads are said to be twice as fast as a result, up to 14.4 megabits per second, which he said was as fast as so-called 4G phones achieve. But it doesn’t appear as if this higher speed is yet available in the U.S.

So, yes, the iPhone 4s won’t support LTE, or 4G, or whatever carriers choose to call it. Wait till next year. However, the iPhone 4s will also be a world phone, with both CDMA and GSM capabilities included. The camera is enhanced from five to eight megapixels, as expected, incorporating a five element lens, and is said to provide superior color accuracy, resulting in a “perfect” 8×10 photo.

Other features include 1080p video recording, including image stabilization, and a personal assistant, known as Siri, which promises more accurate speech recognition from plain language requests. The demonstration was impressive, and it would be nice if the auto makers would try to license the feature to fix their sadly broken voice recognition capabilities.

The price for all this goodness? It’s the same as the original iPhone 4, with the 16GB configuration at $199, and the 32GB configuration for $299. For an extra $100, you can get a version with 64GB of storage. That price is for a standard two-year contract. Preorders begin October 7, with the actual on sale date set for Friday, October 14. So prepare for huge crowds at every dealer selling this device. In the U.S., Sprint will share in the joy, in the wake of published reports that the company is betting everything on a multibillion deal with Apple.

For those who are on a budget, an 8GB iPhone 4 will be available for $99; the 8GB iPhone 3GS remains available free, and both require a two-year contract. But the latter is only available in GSM form, meaning you won’t be able to get it for Sprint or Verizon Wireless.

Unfortunately, the media wanted a new look to go with the new components, so the iPhone 4s was declared underwhelming according to some reports.

In closing the session, Tim Cook returned to the stage to label the iPhone 4s as “the most amazing iPhone ever.” But he’ll be saying the same thing next year when the 4S’s successor is released. And, no, Steve Jobs did not appear, nor did the media seem to notice. No doubt he didn’t want to upstage his successor.

In case you didn’t notice, Microsoft took the occasion to announce that the failed Zune music player is no more, nor will there be any updates now or ever.

From time to time, I like to read some of the curious blogs from certain controversial online tech commentators, while always worrying whether they are just making things up because they’re seeking more traffic. Certainly I understand that people are entitled to their own opinions, but I also believe in that old saying, that people aren’t entitled to their own facts.

Now some commentators delight in telling you exactly what a certain company must do in order to survive. While they are free to make all the suggestions they want, bear in mind that few of these people have any experience actually running a large multinational corporation. But they want you to believe that they know better.

In some cases, they may be right. Certainly the well-heeled board at HP doesn’t have a clue how to run that venerable company anymore. The founders must be spinning in their graves by now, considering that their dreams are not being fulfilled. Even though they run the number one PC division on the planet, HP can’t make much profit from those sales. They have rushed to the bottom, same as most of the rest of the industry aside from Apple, seeking volume above profits, hoping enough of the former will ultimately help the latter.

In dumping Leo Apotheker as CEO, the board picked one of their own, Meg Whitman, former CEO of eBay, to replace him. But it’s not as if Whitman has any actual experience running a company that builds hardware for both the consumer and business markets. It’s a far cry from running online auctions, and even there she had some troubles during her last year at eBay, where they made the foolish decision to buy Skype. No wonder Wall Street wasn’t impressed. Further, it’s not as if she has expressed any unique vision for HP. So for the time being, maybe the PC division will be spun off or sold, maybe it won’t, but you won’t see any unique ideas for a while, if ever. Surely a smart tech blogger can come up with some better ideas.

One commentator, a former industry analyst, is often on the wrong side of the argument. He has variously embraced and then rejected Macs, iPhones, and iPads. It seems he’ll work with them for a while, encounter some real or imagined bug, and then move on to the competition. While nobody expects perfection, you often think his reasons for jumping ship over and over again are simply made up. Sometimes what he believes to be the benefits of the competing platform he adopts next are also made up.

So, the other day, he was telling us how text display under Windows 7 is so much better than on the Mac. While Apple and Microsoft have different ways of rendering text, achieving different results, I fail to see that one method is necessarily demonstrably better than the other, although the anti-aliased look under OS X is usually more readable for me.

What concerned me, however, is the commentator’s complaints about constant crashes and some other oddities after installing Lion. Certainly he’s been at the game long enough to know that point-zero releases are perennially buggy. But one of his issues, erratic Wi-Fi performance, appears to have been improved with the Mac OS 10.7.1 update. But his particular problem, signal strength being reduced to a third of its former level, seems more of a router or Mac hardware problem than the OS. At least he could have waited for another one or two maintenance updates before bailing. But that’s just me.

Just recently, the commentator adopted a note-book using the Google Chrome OS. Now understand that a computer running Chrome is a limited function device that runs everything through the Chrome browser. That forces you to remain online, and you are largely restricted to what Google offers you for documents, email, and so on and so forth. It’s not as if you can just install the apps you want, unless they, too, work in the browser.

The alleged advantages to this scheme are instant start and shut down, plus the snappy performance you expect from an OS that has very little to do. I’m not even sure if you can print with the thing; you are forever tethered to the cloud.

Well, sure enough, the commentator ultimately decided that a Chrome-book wasn’t for him, and thus he will return to a more conventional note-book, probably running Windows 7 unless or until he decides he can’t stand Microsoft’s OS for some real or imagined offense, and returns to a Mac.

Understand that Chrome-books haven’t set the computing world afire, and the same is true for Google TV, which sort of married the failed WebTV concept with a TV set top box similar in function to an Apple TV. Indeed, Logitech struck out when they released the overpriced and underpowered Revue, a Google TV gadget. It cost the company millions, and they ultimately cut the price substantially to fire sale levels in a desperate bid to improve sales.

Oh yes, the commentator in question loved the Revue too. Or maybe he just has a knack for being on the wrong side of history. But, as I said, he’s entitled to his opinion, and I wish him the best.