Droid Sheds First Tear for Nonexistent iPhone 5

The fervor surrounding the rumored teardrop-shaped iPhone 5 was freakishly high in late September 2011. And when a familiar-looking, boxy iPhone was revealed on October 4th, it sincerely disappointed the masses. However, just because Apple didn’t release a slope-shaped smartphone, overeager companies still manufactured cases for it. Motorola went as far as releasing the new Droid Razr, a teardrop-shaped smartphone designed to compete with a nonexistent rival.

Rumors about Apple products have cemented their place along side such tried-and-true boring conversation topics like “the weather” and “traffic.” If you find yourself waiting at a bus stop for more than forty five seconds, it’s likely an elderly person will corner you and explain how they just heard that Apple was going to release small and mid-sized iPad 3’s in just a couple weeks.

Companies are betting vast sums of money trying to predict Apple’s next move, and basing their bets largely upon rumors, which holds true whether they’re making form-fitting jackets for gadgets that have no form, or they’re making clones of phones that only exist as images in blogs, vlogs and somehow major media outlets too.

People have been talking about Apple’s entrance into the television market for years, but somehow television manufacturers aren’t taking the same cues. It doesn’t take a lot of research to determine what an Apple computer monitor looks like, and the same goes for an iMac. Is it impossible to produce a simple, yet beautiful TV set that mimics these classics?

Startups like Boxee can turn up out of nowhere and churn out low-cost products that harness and organize video content from the web, and output it to a TV. Is it inconceivably difficult for a mammoth television manufacturer to put two and two together and stick Boxee-like guts inside a beautiful TV? There’s been a sustained opportunity to beat Apple’s iTV to market. It’s someone’s chance grab the golden ring before the father of the iPhone arrives.

Who knows. Perhaps Apple’s iTV is just another disembodied spirit of a product that will never actually exist. I understand this stuff isn’t easy, but with the unthinkable success that Apple enjoys, one would assume that more companies would be thinking and acting a few steps ahead, rather than coming out with the same old teardrop-shaped black rectangles we’ve already forgotten about.