I absolutely love this bit from the beginning of his review:

Niceness is my explanation. The bored-by-the-iPhone tech press/industry experts surely value niceness, but they do not hold it in the same top-tier regard that Apple does. They are not equipped to devote an amount of attention to niceness commensurate with the amount of effort Apple puts into it. Apple can speak of micron-level precision and the computer-aided selection of the best-fitting of 725 identical-to-the-naked-eye components, but there is no benchmark, no tech spec, to measure nice. But you can feel it.

And that is what resonates with millions of people around the world.

It’s the type of thing that I’ve been trying to put into words for over five years — whenever anyone would ask me why I bought an iPhone. And, it’s the exact type of thing that the tech press is absolutely horrible at explaining to consumers. Apple hardware is just nicer than anything else I’ve ever used. From the large, extremely comfortable to use trackpads on their laptops to the beautiful Retina displays on their mobile devices. Everything feels nice.

Apple devices are much greater than the sum of their parts and Apple takes the time to make sure that is the case. When you spend any meaningful amount of time with these devices you can tell the difference between something that’s truly well made and something that was hastily put together, to be sold alongside the company’s six other similar offerings. Nobody else designs gadgets quite as nice as Apple’s.

Gruber also addresses a concern I had regarding the larger screen size:

Consider the windshield wipers on a car, and how, because they swing in a radial arc, they can’t reach the passenger-side top corner. Using the iPhone 5 is like that. There are two specific touch targets where this gives me trouble, both of which I invoke frequently.

I’m a little worried this will become an issue for me. My hands are (I would guess) slightly smaller than average and I have a feeling that I’ll have trouble reaching touch targets in the corners opposite from the side my thumb is on. I’ll certainly have to try using the iPhone 5 for a bit before I know for sure, but it’s definitely a concern for me.