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...