Was having high-level tech discussion with my wife this morning and concluded that the mobile phone market has hit maturity in the mass market. Those who have owned a mobile device for 20+ years have watched the evolution of mobile communications - voice, text messaging, picture messaging, pseudo “smart phones”, and ultimately iPhone and Android devices. Phones went from slow, clunky plastic devices to slabs of precisely formed metal and glass which play music, take pictures, browse websites, play games, make video calls, and on and on. Large, tangible innovations were being added yearly and the push was to get mobile devices on par with the average desktop computer.
The result: today’s phones pretty much do everything the typical person needs or wants. Large, tangible innovations have been implemented which means that customers are given fewer and fewer reasons to upgrade at the aggressive pace of the past. If I upgrade my 2-year-old iPhone with a new one, what am I really getting? What does “2x faster” even mean for the typical doom scroller? Is liquid glass really going to revolutionize my productivity, or is this just the latest take on GUI fashion? Waiting one more year to upgrade is becoming easier and easier.
Bringing this idea back around to the iPhone Air, should we really be surprised by its existence? To the average person, the regular and pro iPhones are essentially identical. Tangibly, the $300 premium gets you a third camera, but what else? Seriously, think about that. Now has never been a better time to buy the regular iPhone! And because of that lack of differentiation, the Air opens up an opportunity for an alternative purchase (albeit with compromises). Historically, “skinny” phones always shipped with compromises*, but this is an opportunity for Apple to recoup R&D dollars and maybe even sell a fashion statement. It certainly has people talking and asking questions. Maybe the Air is ultimately a segue into next-year’s foldable phone, and it’s purpose is to train the customer to expect similar compromises to battery life or camera selection.
*Apple’s marketing group gave it their best effort convincing everyone that battery should be measured in video hours and not average or mixed use. More deplorably, a 2x crop was referred to as “optically equivalent” of a narrower zoom which is disingenuous at best.