Since June 29, 2007, few items have inspired more considerable envy than the latest iPhone. The touchscreen, the retina display, the selfie camera, the 6.9 mm thickness, the portrait mode, or whatever new feature Apple offered, caused owners of the old model to lament their phone’s obsolescence and scrounge up the many hundreds of dollars needed to upgrade and keep up.
As the iPhone got thinner, taller, shorter, squarer, more curved, it kept getting more expensive. For the last two years, iPhone users have been shelling out a thousand dollars for the iPhone X.
But then last week, things changed. Apple unveiled a cheaper iPhone 11 at Apple’s fall event, retailing for a mere $699. This price cut comes despite several modest hardware upgrades, including an improved multi-lens camera and a longer-lived battery.
This new iPhone will be substantially cheaper than top-of-the-line Android phones such as the latest-model Samsung Galaxy and Google Pixel phones. The iPhone 11 will be more affordable than even the refurbished iPhone X models that Apple began selling earlier this year for $769. In short, Apple appears to be changing its strategy and finally aiming for a less affluent market.
In abandoning high prices, Apple is abandoning its most distinctive feature.
The company that initially gave birth to the smartphone has in recent years distinguished its products and its walled ecosystem mostly with signature premium prices. Apple laptops and desktops come at a much more extreme markup than iPhones do, but by design, they all work together. It is a sign of high class in the modern age to check an iMessage on your $499 Apple Watch nonchalantly before responding on your $1,000 iPhone X at the coffee shop, simultaneously typing away on that $2,099 15-inch MacBook Pro. Likewise, what good is life without being able to judge your in-laws, whose text messages show up on your phone in that telltale green color, instead of the custom blue of another iPhone using iMessage?
This walled iGarden is a charmed and elite place. Worldwide, iOS controls only 22% of the market, compared to the more customizable Android’s 76%. (In the wealthy United States, iOS is much closer to Android.) With a new phone at a lower price, iOS may finally claim a majority share in the U.S., but it will never happen worldwide.
So why go cheaper? Because there’s nowhere else to go.
The era of major hardware innovations on smartphones may be reaching its end. Major manufacturers can get only so much out of fiddling with slightly improved cameras and processors. They have nearly maxed out phones’ screen sizes (with or without notches), and screen resolutions have reached the point where human eyes can no longer appreciate further improvements in resolution and color. (Your eyes don’t even see in 4K, so why should you care if your screen does?)
Twelve years after the first smartphone, they may cease to be status symbols. But they will still be tools.
