Making sense of the most confusing new iPhone lineup ever
The
days when choosing an iPhone was easy may be over–but not without reason.
Ever since Apple introduced the iPhone 4s in 2011, the company’s phone-naming terminology
has followed a predictable pattern. If the company gave a new phone the same
model number as the previous year’s, but with an “S” appended, you knew that
the industrial design wasn’t going to change, even if the technology
inside—like the processor and cameras—had progressed quite a bit. Sure, the
iPhone 4s, 5s, and 6s were fine phones; they were just about refinement rather
than shaking things up.
And then there’s this year. Apple’s three new
iPhones—the Xr, Xs, and Xs Max—all build upon 2017’s iPhone X and acknowledge that fact in their branding. But
despite their debt to the X, they add up to the most strikingly new lineup in
iPhone history. The iPhone X proposition—an edge-to-edge display, a notch, and
Face ID—was a novelty last year; now it’s standard across the line. And even
the smallest model, the Xs, has a larger display than any previous iPhone
except the X.
For all their similarities, the new phones
don’t line up into a digestible good/better/best matrix. The cheapest model,
the $749 Xr, is the midrange model in terms of size and has a nifty twist—six
different color options to choose from—which is unavailable on the Xs and Xs
Max. But if you covet a bright-red iPhone in an intermediate size, you’ll have
to decide whether the stuff the Xr doesn’t have is an issue. And while some of
what’s missing is obvious—the Xr has only one rear camera—other omissions are
somewhat arcane, like the fact it can withstand being submerged for 30 minutes
in only one meter of water vs. two meters for the Xs and Xs Max.
Even Apple’s specs comparison doesn’t
tell the whole story. The iPhone Xr’s “Liquid Retina” LCD display has a lower
pixels-per-inch count and less contrast than the Xs and Xs Max OLED screens.
But that isn’t necessarily a downgrade worth worrying about, in the way a
smaller storage capacity or less RAM might be.
Though Apple has offered iPhones in varying
screen sizes since 2014, this year’s differences in real estate aren’t as
distinct as with models of yore: At 5.8″ (Xs), 6.1″ (Xr), and 6.5″ (Xs Max),
the new phones aren’t small, medium, and large so much as large, very large,
and very, verylarge. As I came face to face with all three at
Apple’s hands-on area at its event this morning, I had to think for a moment
before I could tell which new iPhone was which.
The bottom line is that there may not be a
bottom line on the new iPhones, if what you seek is buying advice that can be
boiled down to a few sentences. For Apple, that’s something new.
NO QUADRANTS FOR YOU
Upon returning to Apple in 1997, Steve Jobs
famously interrupted a meeting in progress—involving the company’s
then-ballooning, overlapping lineup of Mac models—to draw four quadrants
on a whiteboard. It indicated that the company would henceforth offer one
consumer laptop, one consumer desktop, one pro laptop, and one pro desktop.
That set the stage for an era in which Apple offered a few products with mass
appeal rather than a Byzantine menu of offerings aimed at slightly different
kinds of users, as makers of Windows PCs continue to do.
A decade later, the original iPhone didn’t
even need a quadrant diagram. With apologies to Henry Ford, you could buy
an iPhone in any size you wanted—as long as it was 3.5″.
With its single rear camera and new color
options, the iPhone Xr is easier to identify from the back than the front.
[Photo: courtesy of Apple]As the iPhone lineup has expanded in recent years,
Apple has let go of that minimalist clarity. It seems less like an accident
than a willful decision, and—since nobody at the company is likely to
acknowledge the shift as a change in strategy with pros and cons—it’s up to us
to figure it out for ourselves. Why has Apple released three new iPhones that
are kinda similar and kinda different in ways that require explanation?
I have a few hunches:
Apple wanted to quickly standardize on the
iPhone X platform.
Last year’s lineup, with the traditional
iPhone 8 and 8 Plus and radically new iPhone X, was a blip on the way to 2018.
These new X phones are all a lotdifferent than an iPhone 8, 7, or
6s, which should help goose upgrades in a way that an iPhone 8s would not have.
But it also needed an entry-level model.
As successful as Apple has been at convincing people to pay $1,000
and beyond for an iPhone X, the new lineup required a phone
engineered to hit a lower price point. Enter the $749 iPhone Xr, which—though
$50 more than last year’s starting price for the iPhone 8–is still
significantly more accessible than the Xs or Xs Max. Apple kept costs under
control with this model in a variety of ways, but still aimed to make it feel
like an X-series iPhone rather than something different and lesser.
A mature upgrade market calls for more
models.
In most of the countries where Apple sells a
lot of iPhones, it’s making them for people who already own iPhones, and
therefore must give each prospective upgrader one or more tangible reasons to
spring for a new phone. By its very nature, that’s a trickier feat than getting
someone to buy an iPhone in the first place, and would tend to lead to model
creep as Apple tries to cover a variety of people—price-conscious shoppers, big
spenders, and those with various opinions about ideal screen size.
Apple is all-in on big screens.
After years of coming off as not being
entirely thrilled with the smartphone market’s display-size race–remember when
it made the iPhone 5 screen taller, but no wider?–it now shows no such
reservations. (Presumably the iPhone X form factor, which packs more screen in
a smaller device, helped allay its concerns.) If Apple thinks a big screen is
going to be a major selling point for almost everybody, it’s going to end up
with less visibly different devices than it did in the era when it hired Yao
Ming and Verne Troyer to promote a really big laptop and a really small one.
After Apple’s launch today, we discussed the
new iPhones in Fast Company’s Slack. Some of my colleagues who
aren’t Apple obsessives said that they were baffled by the differences between
the three models in ways that watching the keynote and scouring Apple’s online
info didn’t immediately resolve. I suspect that will be a common reaction. If
you want a new iPhone but aren’t instinctively sure which one speaks to you,
the best way to make the decision is going to involve going to the Apple Store
or another retailer and checking them all out in person—even if you ultimately
place your order online.
For consumers, choosing a new iPhone may have
just gotten more complicated. But as long as enough people do choose one rather
than sticking with what they’ve got, or buying an Android phone, Apple will
presumably be happy to let a hundred iPhones bloom—or at least several rather
similar ones.
BY HARRY MCCRACKEN
https://www.fastcompany.com/90236094/making-sense-of-the-most-confusing-new-iphone-lineup-ever?utm_source=postup&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=Fast%20Company%20Daily&position=1&partner=newsletter&campaign_date=09132018
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