Apple will sell a lot of these. Any criticism that you hear today will be shut down with the counter-argument that Apple is going to sell millions of iPhone 5s and we all know it.
While the (reversible!) lightning connector is a good idea, the name is a bad choice. I can see people getting “lightning” and “thunderbolt” mixed up.
The four inch display is very nice to look at, but stretching the device vertically to accommodate it does make the iPhone look a little odd. Maybe it’s just one of those things that will take me some time to get used to.
iOS 6 is lovely. I’m particularly looking forward to the new Do Not Disturb setting that silences alerts while you sleep. I’m concerned about the shift away from Google Maps, but with a company that needs to be in control of everything like Apple does, it was inevitable that this would happen eventually. It’s possible that Google will introduce their own mapping app for the iPhone in similar fashion to this week’s new YouTube app.
Much of the criticism I’m reading on the Reddit keynote reaction thread and its equivalent on Hacker News seems to boil down to people being upset about a lack of genuine innovation. Many of us were hoping Apple would knock our socks off with something so absurdly impressive that we would all feel the way we did when the first iPhone was announced. Unfortunately I don’t think we’ll ever feel that way again, about any product, from any company.