Did you hear? There’s a new iPhone — and it’s thinner! Exactly what everyone has been asking for.
I joke, of course. Real people want phones that are durable, have a decent camera, and allow them to get through the day without charging — not ones that compromise on all those key features. The new iPhone Air does just that: it has the shortest battery life and the worst camera system of any of this year’s iPhones. Given how thin it is, you have to imagine the company is bracing for a new “bendgate.”
Apple is spinning the iPhone Air as a glimpse into the future, and I’m sure some of its hardcore fanboys will buy it. But this isn’t a MacBook Air moment. iPhones are already quite thin. Instead, it looks like a repeat of when Apple went too far with thinness in its Mac lineup, resulting in too many feature compromises, a lack of ports, and a wave of bad keyboards that ultimately enraged its customers.
When it finally reversed course and released a thicker MacBook Pro with a bigger battery and more ports, customers (and reviewers) celebrated it — and bought them up. Unfortunately, the company does not seem to have learned its lesson — and not just on the iPhone front. Recent reporting from Mark Gurman at Bloomberg suggests Apple is preparing to push thinness across its product line once again. The iPhone Air is just the beginning.
To me, it’s yet another example of how rudderless Apple has become on the product front under Tim Cook. Its days of doing serious innovation are behind it. It might roll out some nicer new cameras and other attractive features from time to time, but it’s not truly revolutionizing how people engage with digital technology anymore. Apple is just trying to find new reasons to entice people to upgrade their devices before they give out. And for all the talk of planned obsolescence, the devices are lasting longer.
Paris Marx
Last year, I wrote about how smartphone innovation had died — and why that was completely fine. All that’s left is find those gimmicks that can get customers to hand over their hard-earned money for a new device they don’t really need. We’ve long seen a lot of that on the Android front, as device makers didn’t just have to compete with the iPhone, but also with all the other Android phones vying for people’s attention. As Apple struggles to do meaningful innovation, it has to turn to gimmicks too.
That’s how I see the iPhone Air. It’s not just a gimmick in its own right, but a preview of the gimmick that will follow. This year, the pitch to a subset of the market that’s willing to pay a premium for an inferior product is that they can own the thinnest device — as though that really matters. But there will surely be some segment of the fanbase that will see that as enough of a reason to get one. It’s more of an intermediary product to the real pitch that will likely come next year.
When I see the iPhone Air, I immediately think of what it’s going to look like when two of them are smooshed together, until you fold them open into a book. Apple is commercializing a preview to make some money off its recent work on what will form the foundation of the foldable phone it will deliver in the next product cycle — and unfortunately, not even in the folding form factor I find intriguing.
Don’t get me wrong, I still see all foldables as a gimmick. They’re a way to try to convince the public that they need to buy the new form factor because there are few features that are really worth upgrading early for anymore. But if Apple was planning something like the Samsung Galaxy Z Flip — a hybrid of a smartphone and flip phone — I might give it a look. Sadly, it seems far more likely to make one in a book-like form, which I just think is far too big for a phone.
Paris Marx
There were other baffling decisions this year, like the lack of a black color option in the iPhone Pro line, and those worthy of praise, such as its decision to downplay generative AI features that commentators had criticized it for not moving more aggressively on, but that truly are not very useful for most customers. More than anything though, this September’s iPhone reveal did not say much new about Apple.
The company needs to keep the line going up and the money to keep flowing to shareholders. It’s lost any real vision in favor of iterating on what it has, occasionally hiking prices, and predictably rolling out new gimmicks to entice a purchase. I guess that is until the Vision Pro revolutionizes everything.
I won’t be holding my breath.
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