Meet the new iPhone. Same as the old iPhone.

Late-night TV host Jimmy Kimmel conducted a remarkable experiment this past week. He sent cameras out to record people testing the new iPhone 5, which of course is not available yet. The lab rats were handed last year’s model.

“Oh, it’s way better,” one man said, holding the iPhone 4S. “Yeah, it’s nice. That’s definitely, noticeably better.”

Another mark: “It seems a little bit faster.”

“Oh my God, it feels a lot lighter,” according to a different reviewer. “Just a lot more higher quality.”

Yet another: “Colors are brighter.”

The joke was obvious: People can’t tell the difference between a new ­iPhone and an old iPhone. But underlying the gag is a more serious message about where we stand in the digital age, particularly with the era’s marquee device, which has become an appendage for hundreds of millions of people.

Farewell, innovation. Hello, iteration.

In the olden days of gadgetry — by which I mean 2007, when Steve Jobs introduced the iPhone — differences between devices from year to year could be so dramatic that buyers would often skip generations, hopeful that the next one would offer an even greater technological leap. Perhaps version 2.0 or 3.0 would remotely take out the trash.

We will also see, according to Forrester analyst Sarah Rotman Epps, more uses for the phone’s sensors. IPhones and accessories will tell us about our health (glucose levels and blood pressure, for example) and, knowing our location, will make us instantly educated shoppers, eaters and parking-space-finders. Expect newer iPhones to have the ability to control everything in our houses, even the dishwasher.

“The next phase of computing won’t be a battle for our pockets (as this one has been),” Epps wrote recently in a blog post, “but for our sensor-laden bodies and the environments we inhabit.”

Acclimating to this future — focusing on the digital ecosystem,playing down the device — might not be easy, especially for consumers and the gadget press corps coveting new, now, awesome, I want it, I need it, I have to have it phones. Early coverage of the new ­iPhone frequently used the word “boring.” Not long after it was introduced, this headline appeared on the Wall Street Journal’s Web site: “Is Apple’s iPhone 5 Boring?” Wired announced: “The iPhone 5 Is Completely Amazing and Utterly Boring.”

And Mashable, the hourly bible of our digital times, had this headline: “Apple, It’s Time to Make Something New.” The site wants the company to be astonishing again, like it was when it first introduced the iPhone — to build something on par with Google’s Project Glass, which will allow users to see a Google-overlaid world through lenses.

“The world’s most valuable company has chosen to play it very safe indeed,” the site said, “throwing all its engineering know-how into microscopic levels of innovation in a handful of hardware products.”

But Mashable also acknowledges that the iPhone 5 “seems certain to become the world’s bestselling smartphone.”