Except many of the same people currently criticizing the lack of design innovation would be first in line to mock it and last in line to cover the bills when it failed. Hell, BlackBerry made a Pop-Tart-shaped one and that certainly did the trick.
That it needs to embrace change for change's sake-something that many of us who've watched Apple for a long time have previously said would be the real sign that the company was becoming reactionary and getting into real trouble.Īpple could, after all, make a triangular or donut shaped smartphone to win back the coveted analyst and media "innovative" award. Hence, the narrative that Apple needs to abandon the tock, ditch the S, and switch to annual redesign. It puts the company under enormous pressure from shareholders, analysts, and media alike.
Microsoft mocks apple doomed touch new upgrade#
And, globally, what happened to the PC industry is happening to phones-for most people, most of the time, what they currently own is proving good enough that momentum might be swinging away from faster and towards slower upgrade cycles.Īll of that hurts iPhone and, since iPhone is Apple's biggest business, hurts Apple. India hasn't let older iPhones in and newer ones haven't been priced to move. China is also showing signs of being more protectionist, and the iPhone less in demand, than anticipated. That's in sharp contrast to today, where the iPhone rollout is effectively complete across carriers and regions, and a range of display sizes are all on the market and up to date. In other words, there was significant growth ahead for the iPhone. And the even big and bigger iPhones were still two years away. NTT DoCoMo and China Mobile were still on the horizon. Then, Verizon had just launched the year before and Sprint and T-Mobile were following suit. Wait, no, Apple posted record sales and this year returned to a version of that very same design-now beloved and referred to as "iconic"-for the internally-upgraded iPhone SE.Ģ016 is different from 2012, though. Forget the then-new 4-inch, 16:9 display and the then-new chamfered edges, it was still a rounded rectangle, Apple had clearly lost its ability to innovate, and you know the rest: Apple went out of business. I wrote about the sentiment in 2012-and, in doing so, got to use one of my favorite titles ever.īack then people were up in arms about the iPhone 5 looking too much like the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4s. For some, even the tick changes are not enough. That way, even if you have the same design as before, you can make damn sure that the color still shows everyone you have the newer version.įor some, though, it's not enough. More superficially-and hence likely more effectively-Apple has also used the tock years to introduce new finishes, including gold with iPhone 5s and rose gold with iPhone 6s.
To sort-of solve for the lack of design changes in the tock years, the company has added whiz-bang new features, like Siri, Touch ID, and most recently, 3D Touch. It started in 2009 with iPhone 3GS and continued through last year's iPhone 6s. For the last few years Apple has been following newly numbered design tick updates with S-variant, feature-enhanced tocks.
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