Apple is avoiding its New Coke moment
Rather than having run out of ideas, Apple’s product marketing strategy for the iPhone 7 is deliberately designed to prepare customers for a harder reset in 2017.
It’s clear that 2017 will be a big year for Apple’s iPhone business, but only partly because it marks the device’s tenth anniversary. The significance of the 10 years is as reasonable an excuse as any to launch a complete reset of the iPhone’s design, and so it’s elegant timing but it’s also not actually the reason for the reset. You don’t make big business decisions on the basis of sentimentality.
Apple is running out of iterative improvements to make to what is in the eyes of millions the perfect form factor. And even when you sit them side by side, the contrast between the 2007 model and the newly launched 2016 edition is obviously huge, they still share the same basic design lineage. Making it incrementally harder every year for Apple to play the same game changing card they did in 2007, and harder for consumers to tell the difference between Apple’s smartphones and countless imitations.
The rather inert design changes introduced with the new iPhone 7 are a huge poker tell that says Apple will do something massive with the iPhone next year.
First, there’s so little fundamentally new in the iPhone 7 that it’s more or less an iPhone 6s II. Yes, there’s some new stuff going on with the camera, it’s water resistant — big deal — and the new quad processor setup makes it both more powerful and less power hungry, but that’s really about it.
That is, apart from the removal of the headphone socket, and mechanical Home button which is now a solid state design that simulates a physical click with an electronically generated, Taptic click.
Importantly, these two changes form an advance party for the 2017 iPhone reset to give customers time to get habituated to them before the big reset next year — which incidentally I’m guessing they’ll call the 2017 model the iPhone X; because it’s ten years, X sounds cool and it also effectively chops down the 2007 iPhone family tree before it reaches double figures.
Apple is smart and will have calculated that dropping all their radical ideas into next year’s iPhone in a single update is just too risky if the radical new iPhone is to be the big, game changing new direction they so need it to be.
Particularly with aspects like headphone socket removal which resonate personally for lots of people, especially audiophiles. Or, if they completely decided to remove the Home button altogether.
The smart move is to give people a year to get comfortable. And if they’re not comfortable then, that’s no big deal — just stick with the headphone socketed and mechanical Home buttoned iPhone 6s, since they’re more or less identical to the iPhone 7 anyway.
So, next year’s model reset is why there’s so little difference between the 6s and the 7. In large part because after nine incremental updates the 2007 family lineage is effectively complete from a design perspective, but mostly because the iPhone 7 has the job of preparing the ground for a couple of next year’s more challenging design decisions.
Apple knows that it needs to do something radical to the iPhone family but it also can’t afford for next year’s radical rethink to be their New Coke moment, and endure the disaster of having it rejected by customers as a dead duck because they moved too far and too quickly away from customer taste.
So, Apple’s product marketing strategy for this year’s iPhone 7 is actually really smart thinking.
