Insanely big-ass iPhone future is already here

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The bigger iPhone screen unveiled by Apple could have happened much sooner, according to deputy technology editor Ben Grubb. Illustrated by Rocco Fazzari.

I can only imagine that my personal invite to Apple's Festival of Shiny Things went missing in the post. I stood by the letter box every day waiting for Tim Cook to write. When the day arrived and I found myself abed, asleep, when I should have been in the front row knocking mugachinos with Jony and the boys, I was, to quote the internet, disappointed but only with the post office for losing my invite. Never with Tim.

Unlike every tech journalist ever, I wasn't disappointed with the new phones or the Apple Watch. They were cool, if a little bemusing.

The iPhone has always been a compact device, but these latest versions are what Americans call big-ass and insanely big-ass. The Plus-sized model will fit nicely into a man bag. (Don't you judge me it's not like I'm wearing pocket squares). But it will look bizarre, like a silicon boogie board, strapped to your arm when you're out running or at the gym, which is how millions of people currently use their phones every day.

Illustration: Glen Le Lievre.

The Apple Watch, meanwhile, is beautiful and amazing, but in the way that visions of retro-futurism from 1975 are beautiful and amazing. It would look totally right, for instance, if worn by Barbara Bain, to match her spankyest bell-bottomed jumpsuit while Moonbase Alpha is blown out of Earth's gravity in the pilot episode ofSpace 1999.

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While I'd have happily accepted Tim's invite to hang out at the Flint Centre, it was a lucky thing that having been spurned, I didn't get up at quarter to three in the morning like some other addicts. (One hopeless iJunkie of my acquaintance is a gentleman farmer, who probably curdled the milk of his moo cows cursing at the stuttering video and unexpected Chinese voice-over Apple pushed out to his iPhone at omigod-thirty in the morning). Apparently a couple of lines of wonky code on the website trashed the live stream of the event for millions of viewers around the world. Yes, a phone launch rates like Wimbledon now but then so do web casts of video game tournaments you've never heard of, or YouTube updates from some guy walking across the jaggy, 8-bit world of Minecraft. It's like William Gibson quipped, the future is already here, it's just unevenly distributed.

The future seems to have finally caught up with ageing Sith Lord Rupert Murdoch, despite his best efforts at creeping just out of reach. Rupe took to the Twitterz this week, genuinely baffled about whether his life long crusade for the truth was helped or hindered by running a bit of scruff on page three of his tabloids.

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Insanely big-ass iPhone future is already here