iPhone X, the supercar of the Smart Phone world — Price, performance, exclusivity and the future
Supercars are expensive, they are fast and inaccessible to the majority, all this while providing advanced technologies that have not been adopted yet by the mainstream. The iPhone X seems to work under the same premise.
Price
The first thing that separates the iPhone X from the rest, including its own predecessors is price. With a £999 ($999) starting point, Cupertino’s new ultra-premium phone definitely take things to the next level.
but the only reasonable strategy to elevate and/or preserve the status of the product.
- “Who is going to spend so much money on a phone?”
- “Does people is actually going to buy it?”
Yes, people is going to buy it. Every year, since the first iPhone, these are the type of comments that come after the launch, yet, with each iteration the results remain the same.
Apple is clearly not scared about the price.
Performance
Apple have been working hard over the years to develop its own chips, a strategy than have been paying off, and that now populates their entire ecosystem inside and beyond the iPhone. From processors, to GPUs, and even connectivity (among many others), immediately translating into outstanding performance and energy efficiency that is constantly benchmarked above the competition; and in the case of their latest A11 Bionic, even excelling their own line of Pro laptops.
Exclusivity
With high prices comes exclusivity and status, especially for the iPhone line, and historically premium family of products, even at the entry level.
This year they created a higher end “ultra-premium” category in order to separate the iPhone X from the rest, including their top of the line, the iPhone 8, an already premium device. Supercar manufacturers of the likes of Ferrari, which only offer luxury products on a regular basis, they then create even greater models with cutting edge technology, offered at a higher price tag than usual.
What Apple is doing here, seems to follow a very similar strategy, offering what they call (and market) as their most advanced phone to date. As iPhone annual updates have become less impressive (merely incremental), the only way to keep the product’s status is to elevate it even more, providing a sense of exclusivity, through high pricing, justified with new “wow” features, like “FaceID”.
Those that can afford it will just get it, and many that can’t, will get it as well, and you will know how much they paid.
The Future
Beyond the technical aspects, hype, criticism and scepticism the iPhone X is generating, there is something else that I think Apple is trying to tell us, at least in my opinion, and the price it’s part of the message.
Under the hood
Just as supercars inherit the latest technology from racing categories like Formula 1, making it available for the mere mortals, Apple is aiming for a similar approach, provide already existent advanced technologies that are not yet in the mainstream, making them available to the masses and pushing their adoption.
In the car world, many of the technologies they put in supercars eventually make it to the mass production vehicles; the same will happen with the iPhone X, where facial recognition and Super Retina Display will eventually become standard to all iPhones and maybe even MacBooks and iMacs, but ultimately when the increasing processing power of the ARM architecture goes beyond mobile, breeding the next generation of computers.
Getting used to the future
Apple have spent a lot of time and effort in developing their own chips, and they know the power they have to shift the future of the entire industry.
The top version of the iPhone X costs £1149, that is almost the price of a the ultra thin MacBook, a fully capable computer. This is exactly what Apple is telling us. The future of computing, not only from a mobile perspective, are the iPhone, the iPad and any other device powered by Apple chips.
With the A11 Bionic already proven to be more powerful than a MacBook Pro, and their consistent efforts in pushing the iPad as a laptop replacement, it is clear that the iPhone X is here to reinforce those foundations, while easing (probably unnoticed) that transition.
If we get used to an above £1000 price tag for these type of devices that we already use for almost everything, and they outperform the “traditional” computers we use today for “more demanding” activities; the transition to a mobile-only world will be inminent and almost invisible.
Moreover, there are already many households with only tablets and phones, and Apple knows this. With their chips closing the performance gap against laptops and desktops, it is a matter of time for this type of scenario to increase. As matter of fact, there have been more than one occasion where I had to perform demanding activities like video editing, where I ended doing it on my iPhone 7 instead of my MacBook Pro, due to ease and performance. It is already happening.
Finally, the ultimate frontier will be a smoother multitasking and file system, closer to the flexibility and ease we are used from laptops and desktops; that have been finally addressed with iOS11, and it will only keep improving through time.
However, despite Apple’s desires to replace our laptop with iPads, let’s not forget that many of us are comparing the way we work on these mobile devices to what we are used to in traditional operative systems, yet, the future users and working forces; those growing up with a phone in their hand or a tablet in their stroller, they are not used to them, they are mobile-native; that’s what they know, that’s what they like and that’s where they will push things forward, Apple also knows this, it’s probably part of their plan, and the iPhone X its part of it.
