A Few Thoughts Ahead of the 2016 iPhone Event

On Wednesday, Apple is going to announce the iPhone 7, and I’m going to spend the day on Twitter skewering them and their terrible marketing as they so richly deserve. But before this time of great frivolity, it is perhaps worth remembering and examining why the iPhone matters quite a bit. And will continue to matter for the foreseeable future.

I have always had a complex relationship with Apple. Like Microsoft in the late 1990s to early 2000s, Apple today is in fact a terrible company, and it’s hard to reconcile the hubris and unilateral thinking with the brilliance the hardware designs they make, if less frequently these days. (Apple’s software and services are mostly terrible and always have been.)

But Apple is unavoidable. Again, like Microsoft was back in the day. Yes, there are differences, but Apple owns personal computing today, or at least sets the agenda that the rest of the industry follows. And as its dominance and influence continues to grow, Apple is doing exactly what Microsoft did before it: Innovating less and acting its in own self-interests, at the expense of customers and forward progress, to protect its hugely-successful iPhone business.

The iPhone.

It is, as I wrote before, the meteor that killed the Windows dinosaur, and the most influential and important product in the history of personal computing. Today, the iPhone is the last truly innovative product that Apple has ever created, and it is still incredibly noteworthy. It is, like Apple itself, unavoidable.

And yet over the past year, I’ve advised Microsoft fans who wish to retain the best-possible relationship with the Redmond ecosystem to consider Android over iPhone, and to specifically pay attention to pure Android solutions such as those provided by the Google Nexus products. I’ve done this because it’s pragmatic and correct for this audience. And because the locked-down nature of the iPhone means that Microsoft will never have the inroads on that platform that are afforded to it on Android.

But if you were to ask me which smartphone I prefer personally, which choice I’d make if I could only use a single handset, my answer would be clear and immediate. I’d choose iPhone.

The reasons for this are varied, and include such things as consistent performance, reliability, and software consistency. But forced to choose a single reason, the answer is obvious, though this will gall many. The iPhone just works.

Too often with Android devices, and this is as true on tablets as it is on phones, it just doesn’t work.

The performance is either uniformly terrible, as it is on the woeful Nexus 9, or intermittently terrible and inconsistent, as it can be even on the Nexus 6P, which is generally pretty excellent. I’ve had to hard reboot Android devices regularly, something I rarely—not never, but almost never—need to do with iPhone. And Android’s user interface? It’s gotten tons better during this Material Design era, especially in Android 6 and 7. But it’s just not as consistent and clean, overall, as that afforded by iPhone’s iOS.

You can pick out individual features in certain Android phones and, if those things matter to you, make your choice that way. Some phones, like recent Samsung devices, have even better cameras than the iPhone. Some are waterproof(ish), or offer wireless charging. Whatever. But if what you’re looking for is consistency and reliability—“it just works”—then there’s only the iPhone. Sorry.

In this way, today’s smartphone world mirrors the PC vs. Mac battles of the previous generation, and it is perhaps not coincidence that the only commonality between these two eras is Apple. This is one of the reasons I often describe Android as the new Windows. It offers tremendous hardware choices, more open software and services ecosystems, and there are less expensive options available for those who don’t drive around in Rolls Royces. But Android is also more inconsistent, less reliable, and less polished.

When it comes to the PC, the Mac offers no real advantage: It’s more expensive and the software is harder to use. But in smartphones, Apple has the edge. The devices are personal, with us all the time. If I want a complex relationship, I’ll turn to my wife and friends. I need my phone to just work. I need to know that when I open the camera app, I’m going to be able to take a picture. Right now. That when I visit the store, I can upgrade to the latest apps, and not just stare at a spinning circle. That the thing won’t spontaneously reboot when I’m in the middle of responding to a text message from my brother.

All of these things, and more, have happened to me recently with the Nexus 6P, which again, is a fine phone. A fine Android phone. But my iPhone, which I’ve used far more, just chugs along, and works fine.

It is also interesting—to me, at least—to chart my iPhone usage over the years against what Microsoft has done in the smartphone market. Ideally, Microsoft would offer an alternative to Android, iPhone and other smartphone platforms that provide advantages over the “whack-a-mole” UIs found on those systems and be viable commercially. A smartphone that combined the range of choices seen on Android with the consistent performance and reliability of iPhone.

Windows phone didn’t ship until 2010. So for the three years before that, I was an iPhone user. And from the release of the first model in 2007, to the release of the iPhone 3GS in 2009, I owned every device that Apple made. I did so because Windows Mobile 6.x was a sad, sad joke, and because the iPhone was in fact notably innovative and trend-setting. It was excellent.

But when Microsoft announced Windows phone in early 2010, I knew I wanted in, and I immediately contacted friends at the company and my publisher at the time about writing the first-ever Windows phone book. And that year, I gained early access to the system, and was able to complete Windows Phone Secrets before August, months before the system shipped publicly.

Windows phone was everything I could have hoped for, at least at first: Truly innovative, customer-focused, an open platform from a hardware perspective, and markedly superior to anything offered by Apple or the then-me-too Android competition. I was hooked.

And sure enough, when you look at the next few iPhone releases, you can see my shift in focus. The only iPhones I did not buy—the terrible iPhone 4, from 2010, and the iPhone 5, from 2012—were released during the Windows phone heyday, when I was much more interested in and focused on what Microsoft was doing. I did buy the iPhone 4S (2011) and the iPhone 5S (2013) during this era, but only because I needed to keep up with what the competition was doing, something I’ve made a point of my entire career. But my heart wasn’t in it.

Of course, Windows phone fell apart, and while I held on perhaps longer than was necessary or made sense personally, by the time Apple shipped the iPhone 6, I was ready to think differently again. I bought an iPhone 6 Plus in 2014 and an iPhone 6S Plus in 2015, and that latter device has been my primary phone for the past year despite some interesting inroads by the Nexus 6P. And I’ll get an iPhone 7 Plus, or whatever they call it, as soon as I can. I’m back in Apple land. For now.

That said, there’s no sense of excitement with the iPhone 7, which we all know to be a minor upgrade—another “tock”—over the iPhone 6 and 6S lineups. It will have a better camera. It will have better antennas, something Apple has been trying to fix ever since the awful iPhone 4. It will have a few new colors, even. Woo?

This year, I’m a bit more interested in what Google will do with Nexus. Which Google may rename as Pixel. Which makes no sense to me. But the Nexus 6P came this close to dislodging the iPhone from my hand, and I’m thinking the right combination of hardware and Android 7.0 Nougat could push me over the edge. And who knows? Maybe my next few years will be more Android-focused. It could happen.

But the thing is, even if I do go full-blown Android, iPhone will always matter. Even if Apple continues to trail the industry in offering features that only its dumbest users think are innovative—haptic feedback, software buttons, dual cameras, wireless charging, whatever—Apple and its iPhone will still, in many ways, set the stage. Thanks to its out-sized influence, Apple can essentially formalize our the mainstreaming of new technologies, even when they don’t debut first on iPhone. (Microsoft did this with 2-in-1s, thanks to Surface Pro; Samsung did this with the phablet form factor, with its Galaxy Note.)

So, Apple and iPhone will continue to be important, and influential, and I think we just need to sort of accept that. It’s easy to make fun of; and seriously, stay tuned to my Twitter stream on Wednesday, I could make a career of this. But the iPhone is a force of nature. And all we can really do is acknowledge that and withstand its wake.

Even when the rest of the industry seems to have gotten there first.