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 inferior to that of its predecessor.

But what makes the iPhone 7 Plus, in this case, so patently uninteresting is that Apple allegedly made big strides with this phone’s camera: It has a dual-lens system and is the first mainstream smartphone to offer real optical zoom (albeit at a paltry 2x zoom). But the camera is terrible: Pictures are generally washed out, you can’t leave HDR on, and the vaunted Portrait mode is a joke. Talk about the hype not matching the reality.

But the camera isn’t the real issue with the iPhone 7 family. This thing is boring from top to bottom. Apple itself has a boring problem.

And it starts at the top. Apple management is boring, from the slow-talking process efficiency manager running the show to the cabal of Steve Jobs-era acolytes who should have been put out to pasture years ago.

Apple’s software is boring. In iOS, you can’t even put icons where you want them on the home screen, they must cascade down from the top left. Presumably, because Steve Jobs liked it that way.

Apple’s services are boring. Actually, they’re all terrible, not boring. The less said about that, the better.

But the biggest problem? Apple’s customers are boring. You don’t sell 75 million of anything in a single quarter without specifically targeting the less discriminating. And that’s the thing: How can a product that is designed for everybody, for normal people, ever be interesting to someone who actually gives a crap about personal technology?

Answer: It can’t. And there’s a reason I don’t drive a Toyota Camry, though I understand that these cars are reliable and will work trouble-free for years. The Camry, like the iPhone, is predictable and dull. It’s boring. But you know what? Toyota sells fun cars, too. They have a luxury brand, too. They at least try to compete with the BMWs of the world.

Granted, there’s a not so fine line between “it just works” and the Wild West of constant betas and questionable software quality. But Apple is too far to one side on this measure, and it offers no solution for power users. The iPhone isn’t about us anymore. It’s about them. All of them.

And that is boring.

That relationship between Apple and its customers is, I think, the real problem. This product only could have come from Apple, a company so used to a culture of acceptance from its user base that it long ago stopped even trying. There’s a reason so many people stand around Apple Stores waiting to get their phones fixed and yet still reward the firm with overly-positive customer service reviews. They have an unhealthy relationship with this company.

But this can be fixed.

Apple can keep selling the iPhone 7SS or whatever they’ll call it. But what it needs, I think, is an iPhone Pro, a new product where it can experiment with leading-edge technologies that will later filter down to the mainstream, pedestrian iPhones and thus to the masses. Something the power users can embrace. Something that doesn’t suck.

And hope springs eternal. As noted, WWDC 2017 is next week and there is always the chance that Apple will step back from the boring precipice on which it now teeters, wake up, and start innovating again. That the company that created this market will start owning it again.

You never know.