If you listen to Apple’s inflationary marketing spiel,
every time the company launches a new iPhone, it “changes everything.”
The prosaic truth, however, is that most iPhone releases aren’t all that
revolutionary. Apple, like everyone else, sometimes takes multiple
iterations to complete its most ambitious goals. But as we face up to
the culmination of another year of hyped-up iPhone speculation, I do see
three particular ways in which the iPhone 8 (or whatever Apple calls
its new flagship) will indeed be the harbinger of massive and
irrevocable change.
Phone screens
Most Verge readers will by now be fully
habituated to seeing phones like the Galaxy S8 and Note 8, LG G6 and
V30, or the Mi Mix and Essential Phone showing off a modern phone design
with negligible bezels around the screen. But while geeks can already
take them for granted, the vast majority of people still haven’t seen
one of these bezel-deprived screens in person, and their first encounter
with one will be — prepare to feign surprise — on the iPhone 8.
— Benjamin Geskin (@VenyaGeskin1) August 31, 2017
The new iPhone will be the biggest reconfiguration of the front of Apple’s smartphone since its inception a decade ago. The mechanical home button was ditched last year
in favor of a fixed pad with haptic feedback, and this year Apple is
removing the whole thing. The iconic outline of an iPhone, featuring two
big bars of bezel at top and bottom and a round home button, is going
to be no more. We’re all underestimating just how massive a change this
will be, and how strong the reaction to it will be. Those of us in the
know have grown blasé about bezel-less screens, while most people just aren’t yet aware of what’s coming from Apple.
Whether
Samsung likes it or not, September 12th will be the date when the
majority of people first learn about bezel-less screens. So yes, for
many people, Apple will end up having “invented” the new display form
factor. An amusing parallel to the original iPhone: back then, LG beat
Apple to market with a device with a full capacitive touchscreen, but it
was terrible and mostly forgotten. LG also beat Apple to market with
multiple phones with a minimal bezel this year, of which only the latest
V30 stands a chance to be remembered.
In any case, once Apple drops its hype-rogen bomb in a
week’s time, every person with even a passing interest in tech or
smartphones will have the iPhone 8’s bezel-starved look as their new
paradigm for an ideal design. It won’t take months or weeks for everyone
to start demanding bezel-free phones, it’ll be instant. Sony’s still
unreleased Xperia XZ1 models
will sink out of sight and relevance, as if weighed down by their big
bezels from circa 2012. Even the OnePlus and the HTC U11, two phones
with plenty of reason to recommend them, will appear a step behind.
Individual opinions won’t matter with this shift to trim
bezels off the front of phones. It’s happening, it’s inevitable, and
Apple’s participation will turbocharge the whole thing. Everyone that
hadn’t already been working to beat Apple to the punch will have to
hurry to catch up. In six months’ time, when Mobile World Congress gives
us our look at the next batch of smartphone launches, companies that
still use bigger bezels around their screens will have to justify
themselves. Another six months later, people will likely start hiding
their older phone’s bezels inside elaborate cases. By 2019, hipsters will probably start using “fat bezel” phones as a symbol of their rejection of the ultra-modern society.
Flagship prices
Same story as with displays: Apple’s pricey new iPhone
won’t be an isolated exception, but rather it will be the foam at the
top of a gradually building wave of change in the mobile industry. By most predictions,
the new flagship iPhone will be priced somewhere in the vicinity of
$1,000, probably starting just below that mark and topping out somewhere
above it, subject to spec. This is going to be the biggest upward push
that Apple has made with the price of its top iPhone model, though
indications are that demand will still likely outstrip supply. I’ve gone
into more depth on the potential reasons and justifications for a
$1,000 phone price in my article discussing that pricing with respect to Samsung’s Galaxy Note 8, which starts at $930 in the US.
The broader market trend in 2017 has been for all phones to get more expensive. Huawei’s P9
was one of 2016’s hidden gems, a bargain of a flagship phone that had
design and performance far above its price point. The same is true of
the OnePlus 3 and even its successor 3T, all great phones that were better than their price. Well, in 2017 Huawei priced the P10 at a much higher level, OnePlus pushed the OnePlus 5
into more familiar flagship pricing territory, and other companies like
Sony moved to introduce super flagship models such as the Xperia XZ Premium.
It’s an irony of the tech industry that when innovation
starts to slow down and easy upgrades are fewer and further between,
prices go up instead of down. To achieve a bezel-less screen such as the
one Samsung, LG, and soon Apple will tout as their unique selling
point, it takes years of research and development work. Most
companies have decided that it’s in their best interest to move up the
smartphone food chain — by adding dual cameras or using exotic materials
like ceramic and titanium, as with the Essential Phone — than to
continue trying to eke out ever smaller upgrades every year at more
affordable prices. That’s the simple reality of the phone market today,
and it’s the thing Apple’s new iPhone pricing will reiterate to a wider
audience.
Apple’s elevated iPhone pricing is likely to grant some
much-needed respite to its Android competitors. I myself have been hard
on Huawei and OnePlus for abandoning their faithful fans who expect them
to keep producing devices at a certain price point — but if Apple is
stretching the smartphone market up into previously unexplored cost
ranges, everyone else starts to look a little better by comparison. The
Galaxy Note 8 is going to hit retail shelves at roughly the same time as
Apple’s new iPhones, and its own lofty price won’t look out of place
when compared against the nearest Apple alternative.
Augmented reality
When it comes to bezel-free screens and more expensive
smartphones, you could argue that those trends would have materialized
with or without Apple’s participation. In both cases, it seems like
broader technological and economic developments were going to force the
market in a certain direction, and Apple’s involvement is more an
accelerator than a cause. But if you want a change that Apple is likely
to drive from the ground up, look no further than augmented reality.
The ARKit
toolset for creating AR experiences that Apple unveiled as part of its
new iOS 11 is a massive upgrade over anything else that’s come before
it. That operating system will come preloaded on the iPhone 8 and will
be distributed to the majority of iPhones already in use, making for an
immediate user base of hundreds of millions of people. But its core
advantage is that it doesn’t require special hardware like the Google
Tango system, ARKit apps just work with your regular iPhone or iPad
camera. It’s augmented reality done in the most unintrusive way
possible, and I foresee it being a runaway success because of how well
it will synergize with Apple’s new bezel-less screen and because of how good the early attempts with it have been.
measuring a kitchen shouldn't be this satisfying...like, at all https://t.co/7nhacasdnO → app by @SmartPicture3D pic.twitter.com/eztjNbDVyL— Made With ARKit (@madewithARKit) July 12, 2017
ARKit has the potential to be the App Store of augmented
reality. Nokia and Sony Ericsson had apps before the iPhone, many of
which were useful and fun, but it was Apple that truly delivered on the
promise of a coherent and comprehensive mobile app store. Instagram
would never have become a billion-dollar business if it had to run on
Nokia’s Symbian platforms. The same is true of AR apps: we’ve had
sputtering attempts at making them a mainstream thing for at least a
decade, and what’s needed now is a leader to organize and systematize AR
into a coherent system. Who better than Apple for such a task?
How many retweets must his virtual Tesla get...— Made With ARKit (@madewithARKit) September 4, 2017
Before @ElonMusk hires @JelmerVerhoog https://t.co/eILzTHBk3y pic.twitter.com/evOryAAmJU
Apple CEO Tim Cook has repeatedly expressed his belief that “augmented reality will be bigger than virtual reality,”
and with the instant user base that the iPhone promises to ARKit
developers, it’s easy to foresee AR taking off with the launch of the
iPhone 8 and iOS 11. Google is certainly hurrying to keep pace, recently
introducing its own competing offering in ARCore.
Joost van Dreunen, CEO of SuperData Research, has noted that it “seems
like augmented reality is the new frontier for big tech firms,” while
also underlining just how much bigger Apple’s ARKit will be relative to
ARCore: “Just to be clear here, Google is aiming to have ARCore
operational on 100M units at the end of the preview, but Apple is likely
to crush that number five-fold.”
The scale of Apple’s existing user
base and the continuity in software that the company has managed to
maintain over so many years are both going to augment its efforts at
making AR a big thing in 2017. It’s obvious there will be an initial
burst of enthusiasm from unsuspecting users, but then it will be up to
developers to convert that into long-lasting change by delivering AR
apps with more substantive utility. The original iPhone was also not the
finished article in its first generation, and it took Apple a few years
to perfect it, but we celebrate it now as the start of the iPhone
transformation. The same could be true with ARKit on the new iPhones.
Source : https://www.theverge.com/circuitbreaker/2017/9/6/16254802/new-iphone-change-event
