iPhone 7 - what the hell, Apple?

You can't have escaped the fact that Apple announced a new smartphone last week in the glossy black shape of the iPhone 7. What might have escaped your attention, if you're not particularly interested in the ins and outs of consumer technology beyond 'does it play games?' is that not everyone is massively thrilled about it.

The YouTube parodies are already pouring forth, the forums and tech website comment sections are full of LOLs (from Android fans) and WTF!?s (from lapsing Apple fans), and while the negative sentiment is far from universal, you can cut the antipathy with the front edge of a MacBook Air.

As someone who follows the tech industry pretty closely, I can understand many of the negative comments.

So then: the iPhone 7. What the hell, Apple?

Let's get the good stuff out of the way first. The iPhone 7 is much faster than its predecessor (which will be good for games), it's got a bright screen (ditto), there's stereo sound (ditto number two), its battery life looks to have been improved, it's officially water and dust resistant (IP67 don't you know), and its camera is a considerable step forward.

That's the good stuff. To be honest, most of them are the kinds of improvements you would expect to see from an 'S' model. Which brings us neatly to the first criticism.

The iPhone 7 basically looks the same as the iPhone 6S. It's got a slightly different antenna array, and the camera module is a bit curvier, and it's available in two new tones of black. But it's essentially the same core design.

Now, that isn't necessarily a problem in itself. After all, the iPhone 5S looked like the iPhone 5, the iPhone 4S looked like the iPhone 4, and the iPhone 3GS looked like the iPhone 3G. But that kind of highlights the problem many people have.

Apple's smartphone design team traditionally operates on a two year cycle, with the 'S' models keeping the looks and bolstering the internal specs of the full-numbered models immediately before them. But the iPhone 7 isn't an 'S' model. The iPhone 6S was, and so that looked exactly like the 2014 iPhone 6.

With the iPhone 7, people were expecting an all new design from Apple, but what they're actually getting is an emo version of the two-year-old iPhone 6.

Oh, and the glossy black model Apple used in all its promotional stuff? Yeah, good luck keeping that clean-looking and scratch-free.

The headline reason for people's ire, though, isn't something that Apple has kept the same or even added. It's something Apple has taken away.

Apple has removed the 3.5mm headphone jack. This means that if you've invested in a set of wired headphones some time over the past few years - and with Apple's sub-standard bundled EarPods, you really should have - you'll no longer be able to use them natively with the iPhone 7.

You'll need to use an adaptor instead. Now, Apple has bundled said adaptor in with the iPhone 7, which might sound generous. More likely, it tells you that Apple knew people would be really upset about this.

Either way, it's a workaround at best. No-one wants to have to worry about an extra piece of equipment, and it'll inevitably get lost in no time - at which point you'll be forced to buy another for £9 / $9.

The alternative is buying an expensive set of Bluetooth headphones (which is what Apple is pushing for here) or a new set of headphones with a Lightning port. Or make do with the new Lightning EarPods, which will doubtless be as mediocre as the 3.5mm examples were before them.

Oh, and if you go the wired route, good look trying to charge your iPhone 7 whilst you listen to music on it. That will require two adaptors.

It's true that the 3.5mm standard is extremely old (more than 50 years old, in fact) and a lot more can be done with digital connection standards (such as on-device noise cancellation). But it doesn't stop the fact that this 'feature' makes the iPhone 7 tangibly worse than the iPhone 6S before it when it comes to personal audio.

Another iPhone 7 feature that's getting the goats of some early testers is its home button. The clicky home button is one Apple's most iconic control inputs. It's the tactile, dependable anchor to all of its touchscreen-driven devices.

With the iPhone 7, Apple has removed the physical click. It doesn't move at all. Rather, there's a 'Taptic' motor that aims to replace the click sensation with a sophisticated vibration, just like the latest MacBooks and their non-clicky touchpads.

That's the idea, anyway. In practice, many early testers have found the vibration to be just plain weird and a not-at-all-convincing fill-in for a physical button.

So those are the main gripes concerning the iPhone 7. PG will reserve judgement until we've had a full play with the hardware ourselves, and of course as a mobile gaming site we're looking forward to the boost in performance that the new hardware will bring.

But we're already wondering whether 2016 is a year to skip on the perpetual iPhone upgrade train.