The iPhone, Apple’s big influencer
In 2007, the handheld communications market was split into two sections. In one, you had the likes of Motorola and Nokia producing mass consumption mobile phones made for calls, texting and not much else. In the other, you had the likes of Blackberry and Microsoft who were putting out “smartphones” that could access the web, cycle through emails and replace the functions of a PDA, these phones served a business-oriented niche.
When Steve Jobs, the founder of Apple, strode out on stage at the 2007 Macworld Conference, this was the state of the industry — hardly anyone cared about accessing email on their phone. Jobs unveiled the iPhone, Apple’s idea of reinventing the phone with a capacitive multi-touch touchscreen which would allow the user to interact with the fluid “OS X” user interface.
The 1st generation iPhone received plenty of criticism, especially due to its lack of 3G radios. Most of this pushback was overcome through favourable reviews in the mainstream media, The Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg wrote, “despite some flaws and feature omissions, the iPhone is, on balance, a beautiful and breakthrough handheld computer.” While Time magazine named the device the Invention of the Year in 2007.
Fast forward a decade and Apple has released a total of 18 iPhones and there can be little doubt over the success of the series with over a billion units sold. On the 12th of September, Apple CEO, Tim Cook — who took charge of the technology mogul months before the passing of Jobs in 2011 — introduced three new iPhones, the 8, 8 Plus and X (pronounced “ten”) with the slogan “Say hello to the future.”
The X will be up available in early November for the base price of $999 USD and what you get for that premium price is a device that The Verge Editor-in-chief, Nilay Patel describes as “feeling like the future of the smartphone.”
So what underpins the iPhone’s unprecedented success? Senior Editor of technology website Pocketnow, Juan Carlos Bagnell believes the iPhone didn’t bring an abundance of new features to the market but it made the previously intimidating concept of interacting with mobile services and touchscreen interfaces more approachable and consumer-oriented.
Bagnell says he fought off the urge to plunge into the iPhone as he was happy in the world of PalmPilots, Windows Mobile and Pocket PC. In fact, he admits he was a part of the naysayers, he believed the $500 iPhone was too expensive for a product that was heavily restricted and couldn’t load the programs most other smartphones at the time could. He was confident this Apple experiment would fail.
Ten years on, he admits he may have been a tad off the mark. The initial uptake of the iPhone didn’t indicate the success of a product that would help Apple become the most valuable company in history by 2012. Bagnell puts it down to Apple’s ability to tug at consumer’s emotions and position themselves as a lifestyle brand. When Jobs returned to Apple in 1997, his prime objective was to redefine the image of the company, Bagnell says, “Jobs put the customer experience first but the customer conversation was just as important.”
Apple’s famous marketing strategy has shaped the consumer conversation around the iPhone and these concepts are reinforced by their main salespeople, their customers. Users describe their iPhones using words like simple, stylish, user friendly and innovative and with a retention rate hovering around the 90% mark, sooner or later these users become ambassadors of the brand by either convincing others to buy an iPhone or upgrading their own. These users promote Apple’s core values that have been an integral part of their advertising campaigns stretching back to the 1980s and as Bagnell highlights, through this strategy, “Apple made it cool to sit at the cool kid’s table with a piece of tech in your pocket.”
Apple has been criticised in recent years for its iterative design with the iPhone 6s, 7 and 8 which share a nearly identical design to the iPhone 6 which came out in 2014. This is an area Bagnell believes Apple is reflective of a majority of the smartphone industry. He labels smartphones as “mission critical devices which are just as important as your keys, your wallet or your ID.” Because we rely on our smartphones so much, the market has become extremely conservative and now favour refinement over bold innovation.
The iPhone X goes against this recent trend with a number of marquee features debuting on the iPhone such as a near edge to edge display, Face ID and wireless charging. The features, though, are not new, near edge to edge displays have become a common feature on 2017 flagships, face unlock has been present on Samsung phones dating back to 2012 and wireless charging has also debuted on Android back in 2012. So why do the media make a big fuss over these features in the iPhone X? Because Apple has developed a reputation for only putting a feature in its products once all the kinks have been ironed out so they just work, as Bagnell informs me, “People don’t care about the features, they care about the experience.”
Apple’s control of the iPhone’s hardware and software plays a key role in their commitment to the consumer experience. Proponents of Android on forums across the internet lambast the iPhone for having subpar technical specifications in comparison to other flagship smartphones but in the heat of battle, the iPhone has remained one of the most consistently snappy performers. Apple builds the hardware to specifically run their software which can’t be said for the likes of Samsung and LG who customise Google’s software to run on their hardware. Bagnell sees this as an area Google has taken inspiration from Apple with the launch of the Google Pixel series in 2016 which superseded the Nexus program. He reminds me that Apple and Jobs’ ethos always comes back to the consumer experience, “users want to handle a device and not worry about whether or not it’s got a Qualcomm 820 or 825, they just want it to work.”
Outside telecommunications, perhaps the biggest sector to be disrupted by the iPhone is photography. The iPhone transformed the art of taking a photograph from being a profession or hobby to a part of everyday life. In 2011, it is estimated the 50% of photos were taken on phones while in 2017, that figure has climbed to 85% or a staggering 1 trillion photos.
What happened just before the steep climb in snaps being taken on phones? The release of the iPhone 4, the first iPhone to deliver a picture that could rival most entry level point and shoot cameras. At the time, it wasn’t the most capable camera on a smartphone, Nokia’s N8 boasted a crisp 12.1 megapixel sensor with Carl Zeiss optics and xenon flash. However, a combination of a pickup and shoot interface, bevvy of photo editing applications in the App Store and the rise in social media platforms such as Instagram gave everyone the ability and the reason to shoot, edit and post photos — something that had usually be left in the domain of professional photographers.
A man who is an example of these two worlds colliding is sports photographer Brad Mangin who has been on the pro sports scene since the early 1990s. Mangin works as a freelancer and he has covered major sporting events in MLB, NFL and the PGA Tour and these days he rarely pulls out his DSLR, “Nowadays I am shooting almost exclusively on an iPhone and last year was the first year where I actually made more money shooting paid gigs on my iPhone than with my Canon.”
Mangin publishes his best photos on his Instagram account where he has over 100 thousand followers, this formed the base of the book, Instant Baseball: The Baseball Instagrams of Brad Mangin. His iPhone photography has also been published in Sports Illustrated and used in Apple’s renowned “Shot on iPhone” ad campaign.
He says he took a while to give up his flip phone but he recalls the moment he did, “Most other photographers were using iPhones [for leisure rather than professional use] and I couldn’t believe it when I discovered the picture quality of the phone’s camera.”
A good photo usually comes down to who captures it rather than what captures it is a sentiment Mangin agrees with and he says he loves the iPhone’s versatility. While there is little doubt “Shot on iPhone” photographs are put under the microscope in Photoshop, Mangin is adamant the photos he posts a simply shot using the default camera application before being edited in Snapseed, his photo editor of choice.
A decade is a long time in consumer electronics, so I asked Bagnell what he thinks the iPhone will be like in a few years time, “The phone isn’t what is important, it is the services it provides and I hope companies figure out a way to deliver those services without the user needing to be so plugged in.”
- This article was written for a Magazine and Lifestyle Journalism assessment at UOW.
