What Are We Waiting For?

I wasn’t going to write about the iPhone event. It felt like there had already been plenty of analysis, backlash to the analysis, and rebuttal to the backlash. I didn’t have anything to add, especially since my first take was the same as so many others: not much to see here.

But as the aftershocks kept rolling in, it seemed to me that there was something bigger at play beyond the details of the two hour keynote. People were disappointed, but the grumbling started well before September 7. The Ringer staff tried without much success to figure out what would make the event exciting, then followed that up with a podcast where host Molly McHugh went panning for iPhone gold with three different guests and came up empty. Several other outlets did similar things, doing their own part to rev up the hype machine and then reacting with varying degrees of dissatisfaction when there were no surprises.

This wasn’t just about the iPhone. Everyone wants to believe that something great is about to happen. The Ringer podcast spent time trying to figure out what “one more thing” might be (even though that phrase has been used just once since 2011, and only then to reveal the Apple Watch, which everyone already knew was coming). Basically, the entire tech industry has turned into the tricycle kid from The Incredibles:

Our expectations changed when we saw someone lift a car, and it’s hard to figure out what the new baseline is supposed to be.

So I decided to think a little bit more about the Apple event, which has now led to me writing about it. I thought about it from my own perspective; rather than trying to guess the announcement that might have excited the masses, I considered what I want out of technology these days.

Am I looking for big leaps forward in an existing product? Almost certainly not. A couple months ago, I realized that I personally wasn’t anxious for a phone upgrade. My first iPhone was the iPhone 4, so my first upgrade was iPhone 5, which brought 4G connectivity (major improvement) and a new form factor (felt like a major improvement). My second upgrade was iPhone 6, which had another new form factor. Again, this felt like a major improvement, but on further review, the core daily experience didn’t really change that much. (Looking backwards, if I had owned the iPhone 3, the iPhone 4 would have given me Retina display, which was another big deal.)

My lack of enthusiasm made sense to me — not only did iPhone 7 not have a major leap forward, but iPhone 6 didn’t really have one either. Apple is fond of showing a chart with an exponential curve displaying the growing processing power in their phones. I think there is a similar, less scientific chart curving the other way that shows how advances in user experience are growing smaller and smaller.

For the first time, I felt like my phone was good enough. Given the rumors that Apple’s design cycle is changing, waiting one more year seemed like the right thing to do. Farhad Manjoo said that “Apple has squandered its once-commanding lead in hardware and software design,” but I don’t quite agree with that. I think individual products have inherent limits. How many things in our life do we expect to delight us on a regular basis? This is true even for an amazing product like iPhone, which brings me to a second question…

Am I looking for a new product? This is the “one more thing” question. We know we’re getting a watch and a phone. Are we also getting a TV? Or a car? Or a VR headset? No? Well…I guess we’ll take Mario Run as a consolation prize.

But even when we got the watch, it wasn’t exactly magical. And we were disappointed, without knowing exactly why.

Asking what Apple (or anyone else) will do to follow up the iPhone ignores a basic fact: the iPhone is the best product ever. It is a singular achievement, not part of a progression. Apple gets extra attention because of the narrative thread that places iPhone in a progression with iPod and iPad, but that’s only true chronologically. iPhone sales far surpass sales of those other devices, and the amount of disruption is far greater. iPod comes closest, but the App Store has touched every industry (not just music), and the number of people relying on smartphones daily blows away the number of people who regularly carried MP3 players.

That scale is a major factor in our inflated expectations. It’s the reason most social networks seem inadequate when compared to Facebook, and it’s the reason that the Apple Watch disappoints even when it is clearly performing well in the world of watches. Desire for a new product is mostly desire for a product that will be world-changing. While I don’t discount the possibility that it might happen, I also don’t think it’s very likely to happen in the near future.

So then…What am I looking for?

If it’s not significant enhancements to current products and it’s not a new product, what is it? The watch gives a hint here. I don’t currently wear a watch, and that’s always been a big reason that I’m not interested in the Apple Watch. I’ve always said that if I wore a watch regularly, I would likely get an Apple Watch because it would enhance my everyday experience. It’s hard for me to imagine another device getting added to my daily routine, but it would be great if the parts of that daily routine had more intelligence and connectivity.

In other words, I’m looking for the Internet of Things. I’ve covered IoT quite a bit for CompTIA, and it’s definitely a topic that people struggle with. It looks like products, but it’s actually a platform. In a vacuum, a connected dishwasher or connected thermostat or connected toothbrush either look marginally useful or just plain silly. But when you put them all together, you have a system that can gather data, drive efficiency, and automate routine tasks (Dave Sobel described this very well in our own podcast).

IoT requires products, but it will be a slow spread rather than individual splashes. I might ultimately want a connected refrigerator, but there’s no new fridge that’s going to come on the market and make me toss out the old one immediately. I’ll replace things a little at a time and get everything connected through some sort of backend.

This is where Apple — and other companies — are in a tough spot. Apple specifically has built their brand around providing premiere computing devices. Though most people view the watch as part of that computing device portfolio, it’s actually a strong step in a new direction of providing standard consumer devices with some amount of computing built in. This direction has limits though. Even Apple can’t scale out to provide a whole array of these devices, from cars to door locks to furniture. No one else can either.

The focus then turns to the backend providing the connective glue. This backend will be heavily driven by artificial intelligence, and the leading contenders right now are Amazon’s Alexa, Microsoft’s Cortana, Apple’s Siri, and Google Assistant. That’s roughly the rank order as I see them, though I’m open to debate. Ben Thompson saw pieces in the Apple event that were laying the groundwork for this future. I agree, though I’m not quite as bullish on voice being the primary input. It seems like talking out loud won’t fit into every social situation, and I see devices and especially context being important.

It’s hard to say exactly how this connective layer will play out. There will be some affinity to computing devices, which helps Apple, Google, and Microsoft. But there will perhaps be greater affinity to breadth of devices, which probably helps Amazon in the long run. There’s room for more than one player, because this can’t be a monopolized layer. It has to be something new sitting between all the things and the established internet, and the standards driving those connections are still being sorted out.

As important as this layer is to the future, it’s not going to be revealed in a single event. Instead, it will build over time as the big players add functionality, everyday objects become digital, and society gains understanding of a new lifestyle.

Which brings us back to the Apple event. My expectations were that we would see some impressive engineering and get another dose of Apple hubris. And I think that’s what we got. The world is still going to change, but it will take some time and effort. We have to stop holding our breath waiting for a groundbreaking announcement from a stage in Silicon Valley.