The iPhone Needs Help

I purchased a 1st generation iPhone and had it the day they were available to the public. Later that afternoon I was having lunch at a local restaurant and a small group of people gathered to ask questions when they saw it. Everyone wanted to touch it, to listen to it, to experience it. That iPhone was from the future, it would change how we all used phones and everyone knew it.

I have owned in addition to my first generation iPhone a 3GS, a 4S, a 5S and now an SE. My wife has a 6. I have also owned iPods, iPads, various Macintosh computers (desktop and laptop) and Apple TV. So I understand Apple’s ecosystem.

The iPhone has become increasingly irritating and its deficiencies are especially frustrating because most of them are self-inflicted not technical limitations. Almost as many people choose a Samsung phone as an Apple phone. And many more people choose an Android phone than an Apple phone. The market is signaling clearly that Apple has a problem.

At the end of April 2016 Apple missed the consensus earnings expectations from Wall Street and had its first quarter of negative growth in more than a decade. It sold fewer iPhones than in the year previously for the first time ever. Samsung sold 79 million phones and Apple sold 51 million. Apple’s revenue per phone is down and its cost per phone is up.

Something is rotten at the core of Apple.

What Went Right

The first generation of iPhone was a solution to a substantial number of problems:

• Voicemail was unpleasant to use
• Contacts were hard to manage
• Smartphone user interfaces were too complex and relied on buttons and pointing devices (styluses) that worked poorly
• People were accumulating multiple devices — pagers, MP3 players, laptops, cameras, GPS receivers, calculators, and phones
• Email on smartphones was hard to use and barely more functional than basic text
• Web browsing on smartphones was slow and pages rendered badly
• As storage increased and the number of songs people were carrying exploded people found that the “clickwheel” UI for iPod was becoming less and less useful

The first generation iPhone solved all these problems. Once you saw the iPhone you realized how bad the prior experience had been and you wanted to get to iPhone as quickly as possible.

User Interface Discipline

A key to the iPhone success was the discipline Apple employed at developing the user interfaces for the software and the hardware of the phone. Each app on the device had very easy to understand “rules” for how it worked. Virtually nobody read a manual for iPhone. You could give it to little children and they could figure out how to make it work without any assistance.

The “rules” for Apple’s User Interface had been evolving for decades and by 2007 they were excellent. The transformation of those rules from the desktop Macintosh experience to the handheld iPhone experience succeeded. The iPhone “just worked”.

Hardware

The iPhone engineering was revolutionary. The screen used almost the whole surface area of the phone. That screen used “multi-touch”. The phone was unbelievably slim. The lack of buttons, keyboards, antennae, and other encrustations let the phone slip in and out of your pocket simply. It was powered by a serious compute engine with plenty of horsepower; video played perfectly. Solid state storage meant the phone could be dropped, jostled, and toted around in purses and bags without any worries about loss of data.

It was constructed from an extraordinary piece of glass that resisted scratches and could withstand a surprising amount of abuse.

iPod + Phone + Internet

When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone he said that Apple was introducing 3 revolutionary devices that would change whole categories of products.

• It was the best MP3 player
• It was the best cellular phone
• It was the best way to access the internet on a handheld device

After iPhone every other smart phone had to be upgraded to be at least as good as iPhone in those three categories to compete. There was a 2 year gap before most companies could ship anything close to iPhone. A 2 year lead in technology is an entire product generation. On the day iPhone was announced every other smartphone then in the market became obsolete and every plan for future phones had to be thrown out and new plans written.

That incredible leap essentially destroyed the competition. Within a few years all the companies that had been leading the cellphone industry were dead or irrelevant — Nokia, Blackberry, Palm & Motorola.

Microsoft was completely blindsided by iPhone. Windows Mobile died on that stage. Nobody ever seriously cared what Microsoft had to say about mobile computing again.

2nd Generation Success

Apple used its 2 year head start to keep making innovations that created distance between itself and its competition. Those innovations were not as crucial as the iPod + Phone + Internet nexus but they added features that have become embedded in our daily lives.

• iPhone added turn-by-turn directions to the map app and killed the GPS receiver market.
• iPhone’s camera became a high quality device capable of both still and video recording and “front facing” cameras were added so that “selfies” became ubiquitous.
• The App Store enabled 3rd parties to build content for the iPhone extending its capabilities in every direction which created the environment that made Twitter, Facebook, WhatsApp, Yelp, FourSquare and dozens of other companies possible.
• Apple mastered the arcane arts of working with corporate networks so that iPhones could connect through VPNs and access corporate email and web resources giving workers seamless access anywhere to those resources.
• Apple localized the phone making it available essentially globally, extended its technology to use all the different kinds of cell networks at the fastest speeds, and kept speeding up the phone, making its screen higher resolution, and upgrading its storage.

This was the golden age of iPhone. It was the best phone you could buy. When you got your first iPhone you had a significant improvement in your life — you got rid of a bunch of devices, you gained access to lots of entertainment content, you felt more in touch with your friends and co-workers.

When a new iPhone was announced you ordered it as soon as you could afford it and when you got it you retired your old phone without regret.

The End of Skeuomorphism

“Skeuomorphic” is a word that means “the user interface is designed to look like something real, not abstract”. The iPhone’s apps were very skeuomorphic when they were first created — apps had design elements that looked like pieces of wood, notepad looked like yellow legal pages, the calendar app had a hint of a page of old dates that had been torn away, the game app looked like the felt on a pool table, etc.

Things that you were expected to interact with in the UI had a visual appearance that implied they were “real” buttons, sliders, and checkboxes as if there were some virtual 3D world that these controls existed in. Shading, reflection and shadows were used to imply depth and texture.

Jony Ive who is the lead designer at Apple, responsible for the visual appearance of the products, hates skeuomorphic design. As Steve Jobs became incapacitated with cancer and then died, Ive became more and more powerful within Apple and eventually gained control over the look of every aspect of the Apple products including the software. He decreed that skeuomorphism would end and that henceforth Apple’s UI would be abstract and “clean”.

The 7th version of the iPhone software, iOS 7 was released in September of 2013. It embodied Ive’s design aesthetic: no skeuomorphism, flat, simple, “clean” and free of “fake” 3D effects, reflections and shadows.

This change marked a clear departure from Apple’s previous User Interface guidelines which had always emphasized the need to provide visual clues to users about the function of UI elements. For the first time, Apple products became harder to use. Things you could interact with no longer had a design that made it obvious that you could press or slide them. In many cases icons were replaced with words of text. iPhone became less intuitive to use.

Phablets & Big Phones

The iPhone released after iOS 7 was the 6th generation iPhone. It’s primary selling feature was size.

The 4th/5th generation phones were larger than the 1st, 2nd and 3rd generation phones, but their size was increased in one dimension only: they were taller. The 6th generation phones expanded in width and height and a for the first time two different form factors were released, a “normal” sized phone and a “plus” sized phone.

Apple had already created a new product success with the iPad, bringing the multi-touch experience of iPhone to a tablet-sized device halfway between a phone and a laptop. At the same time there had been an explosion of interest in very small laptops, and in tablet computers about half the size of a the first iPad. The market anticipated there would be a demand for something larger than a phone, and smaller than a tablet, which gained the unwieldy name “phablet”.

The 6th generation iPhones were influenced by this expectation. The 6 was bigger than the 4th/5th generation iPhones and the 6 Plus was almost as big as a small tablet.

This evolution caused two related problems.

• These phones had larger screens which required more power
• The larger screens required more powerful hardware to drive them which also consumed more power

The batteries powering the devices did not scale up as much as the power demand. The result was that the battery life was less than previous generations, and for some people a charge would not be sufficient to last a whole day.

And the phones are physically hard to use. Most people don’t have digits long enough to manipulate them with one hand. People could hold an iPhone from the 1st generation to the 5th generation in one hand and type on the keypad with their thumb or easily scroll up or down, left or right, and access almost the whole surface of the phone. But the 6 and especially the 6s are just too large for one handed use.

These larger devices also didn’t fit well in pockets. People started to carry them from place to place rather than quickly pocket and retrieve them. And while carrying them they dropped them. An increasing percentage of 6 and 6 Plus phones got damaged from accidents as a result.

Customers were entranced with the large size and loved how the web and video content looked on them but found with extended use that they were uncomfortable to handle.

The 6th generation phones also gained a more powerful camera but to enable that improvement the camera had to protrude from the body of the phone, creating a “bump”. The phone could no longer lay flat.

Regression from the Best

The 6 series phones and the 7 series software combined to make a device that was simply not as good as previous iterations. People now started to regret spending the money to upgrade. Users were holding on to phones longer.

Apple responded in 2016 by releasing a new 5th generation phone; it got a slightly better camera, and a faster processor, but retained the 4th generation screen size. Improvements in battery technology also gave it a much longer time between charges. Apple has reported that the SE is outselling expectations.

iTunes, Stores & the Cloud

The functionality that made iPhone “the best MP3 player” has become increasingly encrusted with features that are not central to its purpose.

The system of discovering and buying content for the iPhone is atrociously bad. The iTunes Store, the App Store and the Newsstand for Books & Magazines are not good.

iPhone’s integration with “Cloud Services” — storage and utilities hosted on server farms is poor. Simple things like backups of the device often fail due to storage limits. It is impossible to easily discover the state of the device’s backups so people are not confident they’re going to be able to recover in the event of a failure. Access to content is irregular; when a picture is taken or a song purchased it is not always available on other devices.

Problems with other core apps are proliferating. It requires multiple interactions with the map app to engage to turn-by-turn directions. When an alarm is set it can be frustrating to activate the “snooze” feature due to the small area provided for the snooze control. Siri is not good enough at understanding spoken questions to make use of the feature routine. Folders in the email client cannot be closed to simplify a folder hierarchy. Two web pages cannot be loaded side-by-side.

Thus at the same time that the user interface of iPhone was regressing and the physical phones themselves became too large for comfort the day to day experience of using the phone also has become frustrating.

No matter what else Apple does it needs to refocus on making its core applications work better, more intuitively, and more seamlessly. If it does not, Android is going to become a more compelling user experience than iOS, and the whole iOS ecosystem will suffer.

Another Revolutionary Leap

Now Apple has a problem. Instead of an uninterrupted string of “upgrades are awesome!” they’ve gone through a generation when the upgrade was not awesome and at least some of their customers actually skipped the upgrade entirely. Apple also used to have a very substantial usability advantage over the competition but Android has caught (and possibly surpassed) iOS in some areas. Apple’s business is predicated on the idea that people using iPhones upgrade them every 2 years, and that the number of people using iPhones increases all the time so that each wave of upgrades drives sales higher and higher.

The smartphone as we know it has reached the end of its evolution. Updates now are likely to simply be refinements — faster processors, more storage, more capable screens and cameras, better cellular connections.

For most people most of the time those things are not going to be enough to drive the upgrade cycle. Phones are already so fast, hold so much content, have such great screens and cameras and get data almost as fast as a wifi connected laptop that improvements won’t meaningfully affect people’s lives.

Battery life can still be optimized. If you are a heavy user of video or cellular data you can drain a phone battery in less than a day. But battery technology is very mature and awaits its own revolutionary advancement. Remaining within the current envelope of lithium-ion batteries will not be sufficient to make substantial improvements in battery life. A revolution in battery technology is likely beyond Apple’s capabilities; they’re dependent on other companies to solve this problem and the solution will be available to every device maker not just Apple so it won’t be a clear point of differentiation.

It is likely that since the phone as a platform has reached the end of its development buyers will now see an increasing number of devices that are cheaper than the iPhone that offer essentially the same level of quality and functionality. That will put pressure on Apple to lower iPhone prices or sacrifice market share. This is the trap that ensnared Apple once before when the PC/Windows combination commoditized desktop computing.

Apple needs to do something as revolutionary as the original iPhone to ignite a new wave of upgrades and acquisition.

The Hub

One possible evolution of the phone is to become a “hub” of connectivity, processing power and storage.

The processing and graphics power in a phone, a tablet and a laptop are converging. Macintosh laptops have also reached an evolutionary dead end. They aren’t getting much more powerful. The chips that power mobile devices continue to become substantially better with each generation. In the not too distant future the processing power for mobile chips will be close enough to the processing power of laptops to make them equivalent for most users.

Apple is already using wireless mice and keyboards for its desktops. The only missing wireless technology is for display. The cutting edge Macintosh desktops are continuing to evolve with larger and more capable displays which require more powerful video processors and lots of bandwidth and cables to carry that bandwidth but laptop displays have reached a plateau. If Apple could implement a short-range wireless display standard that would enable a smartphone to drive a monitor with reasonable resolution and performance then the iPhone could replace many laptop and some desktop products.

The smartphone already provides wifi and cellular data and local storage. Essentially Apple would create a suite of peripherals designed to seamlessly access the iPhone so that users could have a desktop computer experience anywhere a display, keyboard and mouse were provided, without removing the phone from their pocket or bag. Any workstation becomes an “Apple Computer”.

Movies and television are displayed at resolutions lower than high-end desktops. The technology to enable a smartphone to drive a computer display should also work with televisions. The iPhone could replace the AppleTV product, and turn any television capable of wirelessly connecting to the device into an “Apple TV” with services and content provided by Apple.

In the car the smartphone could drive an in-dash display and handle all in-car content from telephone conversations to music to playing videos on seat-back displays. Wirelessly controlling the in-dash display would provide a better turn-by-turn navigation experience than using the phone display and it would mean that the driver’s experience would be portable; every car you entered would have your music, your videos, your contacts, etc. Siri is already available for hands-free access. Advanced features could include using the phone as a security system to enable access to the car, or to be able to start the car, or to unlock restricted driving modes (i.e. the car defaults to “valet mode” unless an iPhone with the proper credentials is present). The phone could interact with the car to set seat positions, seat heaters, and directional air (features already available on some high end cars which require their own custom hardware). Essentially every car could become an “Apple Car”.

Essentially the iPhone could evolve to provide useful services in your pocket or bag as it now does when you hold it in your hand.

The “iPhone Hub” could also explore other form factors, getting much smaller, or thicker (to have more battery and storage), as Apple searches for the “best” physical size for something that is as valuable in your pocket or bag as it is in your hand.

Augmented Reality

Perhaps it is time to evolve completely out of the smartphone entirely. The age of carrying around a rectangular block of glass and metal in your pocket may be ending.

Google tried to make this leap with Google Glass. Glass was a failure because it broke social taboos — people thought it was creepy. But some kind of head-mounted device is likely to become common in the not-to-distant future.

Putting a device close to your ears and eyes enables the device to interact with you in ways a handheld or laptop device cannot. This is called augmented reality. It is not the same as virtual reality — a technology that seeks to replace what you see and hear with a generated visual and audible world. Augmented reality is designed to add a layer of information and content to what you see and hear in “the real world”.

You are walking through a store. When you focus on an item, a display appears in your field of view that shows you the name, the price, and any special offers available for that item. Ratings and rankings might be provided to give you a sense of what others think of that item. And you might be alerted to a better offer on the same item at a different location or on-line. You could potentially even order that item on-line by just looking at the UPC bar code.

You are at a convention center and a seminar you want to watch is about to begin. A reminder appears in your field of view, and a line appears on the floor, guiding you to the correct location. A friend may be joining you and you see a place to wait and a display of how far away your friend is and their eta.

You are hiking and become lost. A display appears that shows you the direction of north. The locations of friends you might be trying to find are also made visible. If the situation is an emergency, a route to safety could be displayed, or if help is required you could be informed that responders are on the way, where they are, and what their ETA is. A display could tell you if those mushrooms on the nearby log are edible if you’re really hungry.

You are having a conference call with a co worker. You see a realistic 3D image of the person you are talking to sitting across the desk from you, but they’re in Tokyo and you are in London. They see you the same way. They speak in Japanese and you hear a realtime English translation and vice-versa.

A Twilight Struggle

In what must feel like a nightmare relived Apple is facing the exact same challenges with the iPhone that it confronted with personal computers. After creating a technical and user experience revolution and gaining a huge audience of devoted fans it is being undermined by competition using commodity hardware and software. They may not offer as good an experience as Apple does but with each new generation the gap closes and today that gap is essentially meaningless for most users.

The iPhone defines Apple. The iPhone’s revenue and profits are what power the rest of the company’s operations. If it surrenders too much of that business to the Android clones Apple will have another fiscal and identity crisis.

Apple will keep working on iPhone to generate the appearance of differentiation between its platform and the Android clones. But customers are smart and that can only succeed as a strategy for a limited time.

Apple needs to show the market that it can take another huge leap forward and deliver innovative solutions to a range of problems like the first generation iPhone did if it wants to continue to excel financially.