Few products change the world, but the iPhone has reshaped the consumer market so thoroughly that it can affect the United States’ GDP.  Every year Apple reveals an updated version of the iPhone, and yesterday marked the release of the 5th generation.  Love it or hate it, the iPhone is here to stay, influencing design, retail and the whole of the consumer electronics experience.

But there’s a marked shift in Apple’s way with products, as we could see with the iPhone 5 launch event, the drifting design of its cousin the iPod Nano (it looks more like a Nokia Lumia than an iDevice), and the disappointment of waiting for “one more thing” to offer up the product we’re all really waiting for (iPad mini anyone?).  Steve Jobs is no longer the creative mind behind Apple products and it’s the unavoidable truth, even as the notoriously secretive company couldn’t seem to squelch leaks of nearly every aspect of the new iPhone 5, readily fed to the public in the weeks leading up to launch from all corners of the world.

But Apple as a company remains dedicated to quality and convenience,  steadily improving the most necessary of capabilities on its entire lineup of devices every year. This year’s iPhone 5 is actually an engineering victory, as John Furrier points out during a recap at Brocade’s annual event this week (more details on Brocade below).  One distinguishing update is the new dock connector, slimmer and stronger.  But it’s rendered all your existing iDevice products obsolete, only adding to the costs of being an iPhone owner.  Let’s not forget about that convenient ecosystem, made up of developers who have new costs to consider for the iPhone 5’s widened screen and improved resolution.  These are all topics we’ll be discussing at SiliconAngle in the coming days, providing analysis and insight on the long-term implications of Apple’s “next big thing.”

This week was also big for GoDaddy customers, but not in a good way.  The often controversial GoDaddy experienced a massive outage earlier this week, leaving websites and webmail users locked out for hours.  The aftermath was ugly, with irate customers taking to Twitter.  While early reports pointed at a DDOS attack as the cause of GoDaddy’s outage, a lone Anonymous hactivist claiming credit, it in fact turned out to be a router failure in the end.

Indeed, the very core of web architecture is evolving, and the rise of the new data infrastructure is a key topic for all of the events we covered this week with live broadcasts from TheCube (watch them all at SiliconAngle.TV).  Splunk is bringing big data closer to internal business processes, as we learn at their third annual .conf, held in Las Vegas this week.

And then there’s Brocade, changing the way we’re all wired and bringing a new perspective to the networking industry.  Their annual event for analysts was an opportunity to hear from customers, executives and analysts on a market that’s being shaped by a very mobile, connected world, and there’s no turning back.

Get a weekly dose of our top stories: subscribe to the SiliconAngle newsletter here.