The Yearly Smartphone Redesign No Longer Makes Sense
The yearly tweaks no longer feel necessary
Sometimes there can be too much of a good thing. In the United States, we enjoy the benefit of having a plethora of options. Go into a grocery store and there are 5 different options of the item you might be buying. But there are times when there is an overabundance of options that creates confusion, which is not good for anyone. This is the situation that we find ourselves in in the smartphone world. Every company has multiple phones that slightly iterate year after year, not offering much in the way of an improvement. Yet there are tweaks to the design made that are intended to entice phone buyers to buy the new shiny model. But this has many problems, and at this stage of smartphone maturity, it might be time to rethink this methodology.
The Realities of Maturity
When I was in college I learned about the product life cycle. The process of a product’s life has four stages: Introduction, Growth, Maturity, and Decline. In the context of the smartphone, we can safely say that the product is in the maturity stage. The Introduction stage of the…