Fun times

While we all obsessed about pricing, Apple made something new.

First published in MacUser Vol 29 No 11, October 2013

When Apple’s senior managers get up on stage at a ‘special event’ that millions of customers have been waiting for and present the new products their teams have been working on for a year or more, they must presumably have some intentions about how their audience will respond. Which points will get oohs and ahhs, where the laughs will be, when they’ll go quiet with anticipation.

Will there be whoops? Spontaneous applause? A low-key excited buzz? Or just a comfortable silence as they nod in approval of your choices?

I’ve never run one of these launch events myself, but I’m pretty sure ‘Er… really? What just happened?’ is not the reaction you should be going for. Yet it’s pretty much inevitable if you watch rumours mount of a cheap plastic version of your flagship product, and then you show a plastic version of your flagship product, and it’s not cheap.

So, while the neatly updated iPhone 5s — with its laudably functional camera upgrade (better pictures, not just more megapixels to write on a spec sheet) and frustration-alleviating fingerprint scanner — was generally very well received on 10 September, the 5c, which costs only £80 (around 15%) less, was met with some bemusement.

It wasn’t that it looked unappealing. In fact, had it been introduced as the iPhone 6, its polycarbonate case would surely have been accepted not as a cost-saving cop-out but as a return to the engineering-led minimalism we came to expect from Jony Ive before he discovered shiny bits and bevels. It’s a simpler, clearer design than the 5s, still beautifully made of course, and the warmer material responds more satisfyingly to your hand.

But inside the iPhone 5c is just an iPhone 5. The same hardware we iPhone users either already had, or had already decided we were going to skip. Nor is there an obvious reason for new buyers to bother with it when they can get an iPhone 5s for only a fraction more, with objectively superior specifications. To make sense of the pricing, the 5c should if anything have the better finish, to make up for the lower spec. It just doesn’t add up.

And meanwhile, the 4S remains on sale for people who actually want a cheap iPhone; so there’s no change of strategy at all.

There are plenty of possible conspiracy theories about why Apple would create this odd arrangement, and it certainly seems to be working the logic of the contract sales system, where knocking a large percentage off the nominal price paid up front masks a far smaller change in the total cost to the user. That might seem cynical for the company whose leader always wanted to sell direct to users, but it’s a fact of life that Apple doesn’t (yet) control how the mobile phone market works.

I think there’s a simpler point lurking here, though. It’s never looked as if Apple was in any hurry to make a cheaper iPhone. What they evidently did want was to make a different iPhone. It’s a chance for Ive to flex his muscles, stretch, get out of a rut. Let’s go. Let’s do this. Boom.