Today was Apple's annual September iPhone event, and like always, I have a ton of thoughts coming out of it. But it's late, and I need to get to bed, and nobody really wants to hear every glorious musing I have on the "Dynamic Island" user interface anyways. So I'm sticking to three ideas top-of-mind that were my biggest takeaways from the event. Here we go.
1. Apple doesn't really care about making money on the Apple Watch Ultra.
The Apple Watch Ultra is categorically a niche product. Sure, a handful of Apple nerds and aspiring badasses may buy it and randomly start monitoring their walk to the mailbox with intensive GPS precision, but for 98% of iPhone users, the standard Apple Watch model will still be the go-to companion. And it doesn't make a lot of sense for Apple to chase such a niche market for financial reasons. Its market cap is $2.5 trillion right now. If it's going to keep showing growth that satisfies investors, it needs to take big bets in gigantic markets, not sell a million bulky watches to off-grid hikers, many of whom may have already been Apple Watch customers.
I think Apple is launching this product purely for branding reasons. There was once a day where Apple was a brand for "the crazy ones" who would "think different" and had "no respect for the status quo." Those days are long behind us. Now, everyone on the subway is head-down in their iPhone with their noice-cancelling AirPods blocking out the metal screeches, and all of that proud rebel spirit that Apple had has vanished down a pit of mass market dominance.
But the Apple Watch Ultra brings the idea of Apple catering to "the crazy ones" back to life again. They might not sell an awful lot of them, but it's a really slick branding move for Apple to be able to say, "Any activity on the planet that you could want to do, there is now an Apple Watch for that. The world is your oyster." They're trying to recapture a bit of that rebel spirit, and I like it.
2. Apple has settled on its form factors, and we should stop expecting any radical changes.
Every year around this time, people begin talking about how boring iPhones have gotten and how this year's design is just last year's design with another camera and how Apple is just looking for a reason to slow your old phone down and force you to upgrade. Each of those statements is largely true, but that doesn't make them bad. Consumers don't want constantly changing technology. If Samsung came out tomorrow and said they are launching a dramatic redesign to the television that will completely change the way you interact with your TV, few outside the tech community would probably buy it. TVs are a solved problem. We have a standard form factor that we like, and we all understand how to use it well, and we'll accept small quality of life changes, but we really don't want the entire way we interact with them to change anymore.
I definitely see the iPhone in that bucket, and quite possibly the Apple Watch and AirPods too. Maybe the iPhone will change pretty radically if Apple ever commits to foldables, but I don't see another step change in personal communication coming until AR glasses. So until then, I will keep happily accepting better cameras and better battery life and better displays and all of the little things that make my next upgrade just a little bit more enjoyable. It's probably safer to start thinking about these devices as appliances; they do a job, and they do it well, and it's definitely not necessary to upgrade to the newest model as soon as it comes out, but when you do decide to upgrade, you'll like it more.
3. Apple is soon going to discontinue the iPhone SE and rework its standard model into being the easy-access gateway into the ecosystem.
It's very clear that at this point that Apple is positioning its Pro line of phones as the guinea pigs for cool new innovation, and I would expect the Pro lines to continue getting exclusive first-to-market features that Apple geeks will continue drooling over. On the contrary, the standard numbered model will always remain "the best iPhone choice for most people," but the new feature pool is drying up significantly, and I don't see that changing in the next few years.
So the question becomes: how many lower iPhone tiers can Apple continue having in its lineup? Can the iPhone SE and the regular iPhone 14 coexist for long? And I really think the answer is no. As the standard iPhone model continues to get more and more standard in its design and features, the iPhone SE continues to feel more and more archaic for not fitting that standard. The SE was always intended as a low-cost option to attract some switchers, but I don't think many people who haven't already transferred are going to be wooed into the ecosystem with the SE, not to mention Apple appears to be keeping some iPhone 12 and iPhone 13 models in its lineup for now to fulfill this low-cost target. The SE also has a very small screen size, and if the failure of the iPhone 12 mini taught us anything, it was that fewer people actually want smaller screens than we might think based on all the phablet banter. And since Apple needs to continue to squeeze every bit of revenue growth out of its iPhone lineup as possible, it seems at least plausible that Apple will try to get more money out of its current iPhone customer base by cutting off the low-tier option and making them transition to a more premium model now that they are locked within the ecosystem. We'll see if this plays out, but in any event, there seems to be much more evidence to destroy the SE at this point than there is to protect it, and I don't mind that.