Apple recently announced a handful of new Health features coming to its operating systems including mental health tracking, vision health monitoring, and daylight exposure measuring, and while these were far from the flashiest features showcased at WWDC 2023, they might have been the most interesting to me.
I'm not sure any product in American history has reshaped the way we operate more than the smartphone. Maybe that's too bold, but I don't think it's unfair. And while there are clear benefits to having the entire internet's worth of information at your fingertips, all it takes is one look at how pale the average 5th grader is in July nowadays to see giving anyone and everyone a smartphone also has downsides. The iPhone has tremendous side effects.
It seems like Apple first started grappling with these side effects in 2018 with the launch of iOS 12, which was the first to feature Screen Time. Screen Time was a major acknowledgement from Apple that maybe we shouldn't be spending more time with our Home Screens than our kids, and it's a feature I still use quite frequently today (even if my main interaction with it is just overriding the Screen Time limit I have on Twitter).
All three of the health features mentioned above — mental health tracking, vision health monitoring, and daylight exposure measuring — all came with this same underlying IOU sentiment: "We want to help correct some of the health problems we know the iPhone helped create." But even if I can believe the developers and Product Managers mean well when building these features, I just don't think deep down Apple wants these features to succeed.
I can't overlook the irony of Apple saying, "We want you to be smarter about when and how you use your iPhone, so we're launching new iPhone features to solve this." That's hilarious in its own right. But it goes deeper than that. The whole reason Apple does these annual software refreshes is because they need to continually reinvigorate excitement in the iPhone. That single product line consistently makes up over half of Apple's revenue. They can't afford for consumers to lose interest or loyalty in the product. So the way they solve that is simple: commit to launching a new model and a new major software update every year. Every new feature Apple launches on its iPhones is an attempt to dig that moat trapping your head in your iPhone just a little bit deeper. Sure, the two minutes they devoted in the keynote to demoing the new mental health and vision health features were great, but the other 30 minutes of demoing more ways to live even more of your life on a 6-inch Gorilla Glass screen begs to differ.
At the risk of being too cynical, I also don't think Apple would be doubling down on health if it hadn't proven profitable. Allow me to resurrect the solid gold Apple Watch Edition as a way to remind you the Apple Watch was originally positioned as a fashion-forward product, and it only became a health-forward product when fashion wasn't working. I think Apple is now trickling that health-forward software design throughout its ecosystem partially to complement Apple Watch sales and partially because, much like its recent double-down on privacy, making health-forward products is just a great branding move right now.
But let's face the facts. Even if Apple is going full steam ahead in trying to lodge your iPhone deeper into your life and creating features that I'm not convinced they're rooting for, at least they're publicly owning these side effects and offering people genuinely actionable solutions. Launching these features is a watered-down apology for the impact they've had, and that's far more than we're getting from Meta for similar damage done. We've seen no indication that Zuckerberg has any interest in making Instagram less toxic or addicting; in fact, his focus on Reels seems to have only strengthened that conviction.
So I'll be interested to see how Apple continues grappling with these side effects in the coming years, especially as we look down the barrel of the Vision Pro platform shift. I don't think these new health features are the most sincere apology ever given, but sometimes even an insincere apology repairs the relationship.
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