So we have the iPhone 8 and Plus instead of 7S and Plus, which means a new form factor. In this case, it’s back to glass, literally, as we have a glass back of the sort last seen on the 4S. And with that we get…wireless charging using the Qi standard. Which is nice…but…
Then we get the iPhone “X” (pronounced “ten”) which has the simultaneous effect of insuring the civilians will be calling it the “echs” forever AND making the just-announced iPhone 8 seem wildly out of date already. And it has a new OLED screen with no bezels and uses facial recognition for unlocking. Which is nice…but…
The thing that stuck in my craw was that Phil Schiller, my old hockey-shit-talk nemesis, used that same Gretzky quote about skating to where the puck is going to be. And yet the existence of facial recognition in Android, or OLED displays on Androids for literally years, or Qi as a standard for Android wireless charging…it kind of puts the Stu Grimson to his Gretzky quote. Apple can’t claim to be on the cutting edge here. All they can claim is that they’re implementing these things right, somehow. Or that the addition of the Apple Watch, AirPods, ARkit and CoreML somehow makes the Apple ecosystem more advanced and out on the cutting edge as a collective implementation.
But ten and a half years on from being one of those first people to gasp at the original iPhone, there was nothing there today – at all – that made me loosen my grip on my iPhone SE, even a little bit. Processor is faster, camera is better, fine, these are basically the same incremental improvements every year since the iPhone 4S finally delivered point-and-shoot camera performance and 1080p video recording back in 2011. Wireless charging is okay, I guess, but when you already have the cables everywhere and would just end up plugging a pad into them, the use case is basically “put your watch and earbuds on the same pad and save an outlet.” Which is dearly to be desired, sure.
Apple – and not to pummel them exclusively because every other maker of phones is in the same boat – is still coming to grips with the fact that the smartphone crossed the finish line in 2013. For four years, we’ve had endless incremental improvements, marginal gimmicks, and constant attempts to overlook the fact that nothing is more important than battery life. And my phone, the thing that steers my life, is a year-and-a-half-old upgrade of a 2013 design, just a little better processor and a little better camera and Apple Pay built in is all.
Apple really has gone full Tesla. Cutting edge technology married to a luxury experience, and if you have to ask don’t bother pricing it. Yes, the iPhone “X” is big and without bezels and with OLED that may – may – give it plausible battery life, but I’m still waiting for the killer app that makes it better to have than a 4-inch pocket phone that doesn’t require me to set down my drink to use or take off my sunglasses to unlock.
Tim Cook is an Auburn man, so I trust he will understand when I say: Apple has gone frog-stickin’ without a light. They may be sorry they did.