Apple Needs an iPhone Pro

tl;dr — Dear Apple, make an iPhone Pro with f/1.0 lens, Liquidmetal back, matching gesture-controlled headset and a sapphire screen cover to continue capturing and keeping influencers and celebrities…

When I started my first company (back way in 1996) my mother bought me a Nokia phone. In her mind, I had become an important person and like all important people I had to have a mobile phone. This was the time when mobile phones still had a bit of status symbol left and you still associated rich and powerful people sitting in restaurants waving the waiters while making important conversation with someone else equally important on the other line.

Early in 2000, Blackberries became the new symbol of importance. This two-way pager was what everyone in first-class seats was hurryingly typing on before they were asked to fasten their seat belts.

I remember the day our CEO handed me that stubby black blob and told me with an air of exclusivity, “only executives and directors get one”! I wont get into how I became a “Crackberry” addict and how I was now expected to reply to CEO’s email within 10 minutes during the now new working hours of 6:00 am till midnight.

Fast-forward to the first iPhone, no keyboards, gesture-based interactions, browsing beautiful websites, and all those cute and shiny smoothly-rounded square icons. Not to mention queues of camping fanboys who had to get their new iPhones before everyone else. Yes! A new status symbol was born.

As time went by, the queuing fanboys became a mocking aspect of Samsung’s TV ads and that bad copy of iPhone, steadily began to match the user experience of its step brother. It also offered phone options for every type of market and price points. Somewhere, ironically, Samsung and Android were now marketed as the “Think Different” product.

With Android now firmly planted, not only iPhone was no longer the only status symbol, but also the other side had phones with screens big enough for the Hulk himself, any over-grown NBA player or just people with size envy. Above all, it was first to offer 4G and everyone knows 4G must be better than 3G.

Technology and feature alone do not make status symbols, but rather trends-makers do. These range from social media influencers to your popular or not even beloved celebrities.

In the age of the facebooks and Instagrams, where every celebrity has to hire just a personal assistant to write them witty and thoughtful tweets, their mobile phone of choice will have tremendous marketing impact. Think of it as a free product placement/endorsement on every TMZ paparazzi photo or any selfies, whether G-rated or NSFW.

If you don’t believe me, just think back at last Super Bowl commercial and the failed attempt of Samsung using Seth Rogen and Paul Rudd, http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ksbTkrvFfUI It’s clear Samsung values celebrities and influencers as an important marketing strategy and Apple needs to win that battle.

So how does Apple ensure continual adoption among influencers of all types? From A-level bling-bling rap icons, to 50-million-dollar pitchers? Simple. Offer a relatively exclusive iPhone. The iPhone Pro!

Here is how I’d make the iPhone Pro a pro iPhone:

1 — Use the Liquidmetal for the back. Apple owns an exclusive license for this awesome material. We understand it’s hard to scale manufacturing of Liquidmetal for millions and millions of devices. But a few hundred thousand is pretty doable.

2 — Offer a f/1.0 camera lens. Photos are the most commonly viewed and posted mobile content. While sensor technology is a commodity, Apple can innovate more on camera optics. We all know how horrible the night photos look. If the subject is too close there is an ugly flash spot, or if it’s too far the flash is useless. The f/1.0 lens would create images 8 times brighter (3-stops) than an f/2.8 lens and almost 6 times brighter than the current iPhone 5 cameras’ optics. Not to mention it would create some amount of bokeh (this is when the background has an attractive out of focus look making the subject stand out better, like photos from DSLRs).

3 — Offer a matching Bluetooth headset. Ideally, controlled by gestures like the trackpad surface. So users could increase or decrease the volume by just tracing their fingers forward or backwards on the surface of the headset. Or other gestures, like mute, etc. You can even get fancy and use the microphone on iPhone to capture the ambient sound and use that audio feed to cancel out the background audio for amazing headset sound quality.

4 — (optional) Cover the display screen with sapphire crystal. Sapphire is used in high-end watches to make the face scratch resistant. Apple uses it to cover iPhone’s camera lens in the back. So they already manufacture it in bulk, however the yields might be low for a glass as large as the display screen. But that’s why this is a Pro model.

5 — (optional) Offer double the maximum amount of storage as the basic iPhone. If iPhone 5S will max out at 64GB of flash ram, then set the iPhone Pro with 128GB.

6 — (optional, only needed if the Liquidmetal will not look that different from the silver/white aluminum casing) Exclusive Apple icon on the back. Obviously there has to be something that visually differentiates the Pro iPhone. We are not talking about anything gaudy. Just that bit of difference so when a Pro user places their phone on a restaurant table it immediately becomes the subject of the conversation.

7 — (debatable and controversial) iPhone Pro is sold by invitations only. I don’t have all the details on how this would work. Do users sign in with twitter or facebook account and they need minimum of X numbers of followers (real) before they can buy one? It could even backfire. As I said, this is debatable but I left it there hoping for a healthy discussion.

Capturing and keeping influencers will ensure Apple a longer brand loyalty in a dynamic market. Unlike PC vs. Mac, where work, commitment to application and learning curve increases the switching barrier, the mobile world is less prone to these forces. Most applications have low costs and are very similar in interactivity across platforms. Influencers are even more important among new and future customers where the “cool factor” will have more to do with purchasing decisions than anything else.

Apple is rumored to be releasing a cheaper alternative called the “5C”. This will position them better in emerging markets and enables them to better compete with Android’s cheaper alternatives. Obviously, this is a must-do approach. At the same time, they need to keep their status as the best product out there, the product everyone is aspiring to get someday. If they can’t afford the pro today, they can start with the “C” models now.

There are additional advantages of having a Pro version. It gives Apple the ability to test out new materials and new manufacturing approaches. Is sapphire glass a good idea? Rather than just limiting the testing to a few employees who end up leaving their prototype phones behind at local dive bars. It enables broad testing of some of these exotic approaches both on manufacturing and actual customer usage.

Apple is under tremendous pressure to innovate and I’m sure they will. But, the pro iPhone enables Apple to do what they are very good at: turning raw materials into sexy and beautiful objects and generating hefty margins from happy customers. I’ll be one of them.