The iPhone is Boring (Premium)

Next week, Apple will host WWDC 2017, the latest rendition of its annual developer show, and it will announce any number of new hardware, software, and services updates. But the stakes are high this year for the world's most valuable company, as its core product, the iPhone, has just reached a dubious milestone. It's become boring.

And, no, it's not just the iPhone. Once you look past the device that is responsible for about 70 percent of Apple's revenues, you're faced with even more boredom. Most of the firm's other products are updated at a glacial pace, utilizing designs that debuted many, many years ago.

But let's focus, shall we? The iPhone is, after all, the single best-selling smartphone in the world, and this product line is likewise responsible for triggering a modern smartphone market that not only doomed the PC to obsolescence but has also easily eclipsed subsequent attempts---tablets, smart watches, VR/AR/MR---to displace it.

How could such a thing be boring?

Pretty easily, as it turns out. That's what happens when you're dominant: You do the minimum with each revision in order to protect your market position. What you don't do is turn the world upside down, as Apple did with the original iPhone. To see that kind of revolution in smartphones today, we need to look to Samsung, with its innovative curved screens and form factors, or to a rising tide of Chinese companies, many unfamiliar to us in the west.

The Samsung example is interesting because that company also happens to be the world's biggest maker of smartphones overall. So why is Samsung able to keep pushing forward in big ways while Apple only takes baby steps?

It's almost certainly because of an inferiority complex: Samsung's win comes with an asterisk because it must sell dozens of phone models, many at low prices in poor markets, in order to collectively beat Apple. The iPhone, meanwhile, handily outsells Samsung's comparable flagship devices, and by a wide margin. That's gotta hurt.

Especially when you consider how badly Apple has been coasting.

There have only been three basic iPhone designs over the years, the original generation with their plastic bodies, the Antennagate models with hard edges, and the curvier current design that debuted with the iPhone 6. That the iPhone 7 is really the iPhone 6S2 should bother more people than it does---talk about milking a design and pretending otherwise---but the real issue here is that it highlights how thoroughly out of ideas Apple really is.

I've owned almost every single iPhone model over the years, and I used the iPhone 6 Plus, iPhone 6S Plus, and now the iPhone 7 Plus basically full-time over the past three years. And that latest device isn't just boring, it's a step backward: This is the first time I've ever been disappointed by an iPhone camera. And it's not just inferior to other smartphone cameras I've owned---like the Nexus 6P, Pixel XL, and Galaxy S8+ to name three obvious choices---it's ...