Faster, golder, cheaper, more plasticky... Yawn
Comment Apple's keynotes seem to command more
mainstream front-page press attention than ever before – but each time, there's
less and less to report. Is the modern smartphone era limping to a close?
Apple's announcements on Tuesday about the iPhone 5S and 5C were wearily
predictable. Cupertino just doesn't seem to be where the action is any more.
Innovation? We've heard of it
From 2008 to 2010, Apple made stunning additions to the iPhone with each
iteration – quite a feat considering that when it set out, it didn't really know
how to make phones, and was learning along the way. Samsung then raised the
market expectations further, with spectacular hardware, making the most of its
imaging and displays expertise.
Today, the pair cream off almost
100 per cent of the hardware profits to be made, and most people look no
further than some model of iPhone or some model of Galaxy S when choosing a
phone. But the risk-taking is gone: they now copy themselves.
Perhaps the lack of innovation is simply the consequence of corporate
profit-skimming. Perhaps you and I would do the same thing if we were running
either company, given the happy position we would be in. Apple has the brand and
the much stronger app marketplace, while Samsung has the distribution and throws
a range of Galaxys at the market across every single conceivable price point.
Both corporations are in strong, if not quite unassailable positions.
Peak SMARTPHONE?
But the warning signs are there. Samsung reportedly
held "crisis talks" this after sales of the Galaxy S4 failed to meet its
expectations, Apple iPhone sales have declined for the past three quarters, and,
well, "Peak
Apple".
Samsung piled on gimmicky and slightly creepy features like eyeball tracking,
simply because it could. Apple's user-facing innovation (the
A7 64-bit chip is the real star of the show) entails building in a
fingerprint scanner - a commodity laptop part for the past 10 years. Indeed, the
only "radical" moves by Apple are adding colours to a slightly cheaper (but
certainly not cheap) iPhone and rejecting NFC (or "Not F*cking Connecting", as
it's known around here), which is a technology flop. Not so radical, then.
The stark truth is that smartphones, like computers, were only ever a means
to an end – and once the services and apps markets matured, the smartphone
itself became less ... important. It didn't really matter what access device you
were carrying. The PC reached a point where the devices became beige boxes
competing on price, and the smartphone era is drawing to the point where it
doesn't really matter what black rectangle you're carrying – provided it
accesses the services and apps you want. Fetishising the access devices is as
strange as thanking LG or Panasonic for creating BBC2. No wonder both Samsung
and Apple are looking at new higher-margin peripherals such as watches.
Jobs a good 'un
Back in the Steve Jobs era, the Apple founder looked around at industries
which had ignored digitisation and networks and sought to place Apple in the
chain, helping to create new markets. For example, the iTunes Music Store gave
the major labels the long overdue kick up the bum they needed – which almost all
will now acknowledge. That kind of ambition died with Jobs, it seems.
Surely nobody – not even the most avid fanboi – now believes that Jobs left
"four
years of new products" in the pipeline, as his biographer Walter Isaacson
reported in 2011. Assuming Isaacson was inspecting Apple's lab in 2010, the
first "three years" will soon be up. Which raises the question: is anything
left? ®
Source: Theregister
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