Daring Fireball:
Let me add here a note about something that’s been bothering me for months: the notion that Apple is going to do something “special” next year to commemorate the iPhone’s 10th anniversary. I would wager heavily that they won’t. Apple under Tim Cook is a little bit more prone to retrospection than it was under Steve Jobs, who was almost obsessively forward-thinking, but only slightly. They made a 40-years-in-40-seconds video to commemorate the company’s 40th anniversary this year, for example, but it was only 40 seconds long. Blink and you missed it.
Apple is not going to make a special edition of any product — let alone the iPhone, their most important product — just to mark an anniversary. Don’t tell me about the 20th Anniversary Macintosh — that was a product from the old Apple that was heading toward bankruptcy, and a perfect example of why they shouldn’t do something special to mark something as arbitrary as an anniversary.
While I agree with Gruber’s sentiment that Apple won’t be doing anything “special” for the 10th anniversary of the iPhone, I disagree with this line:
No one — no one — is going to buy any new iPhone just because it’s the 10th anniversary edition.
I think thousands would.
He did seem to be projecting a bit, there.
Here’s the thing – If Apple doesn’t release a new design, whether it is representative of the 10th year anniversary or not, they’d be going with essential the same design for the 4th straight year.
The iPhone 7 models are the “10th Edition” of the primary iPhone model…
Did we see a special “10th Edition” sticker on the iPhone 7 boxes? No.
Did we see TV and print ads calling the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus, “10th Edition”? No.
Next year’s iPhone (even if it has a totally new body design) will be the “11th edition”. Nothing numerically “special” to see here folks, move along!
Thousands? That’s not exactly going to move the sales needle for a new iPhone.
He wasn’t saying that only thousands would purchase it. He was saying that at least thousands would purchase it “just because it’s the 10th anniversary edition.”
The only thing I miss from iPhones since the 4 is the curved back of the 3. The number of times I ran my fingers along the back and feeeling the curve sit perfectly in my hand. It was a pleasure to hold. And easy to pick up from a table.
I wish the modern iPhones were a bit more than a rectangular slab.
“I think thousands would.”
Correction: Hundreds of thousand.
I’m with Gruber, I think. Nobody’s going to buy the 10th anniversary iPhone just because it’s the 10th anniversary. If it’s a compelling product, lots of people will buy it… but not because it’s an anniversary product.
I think back to the Twentieth Anniversary Macintosh. I don’t know anyone who wanted one for the name, though lots of people wanted one for the features. Then again, I don’t know anyone who ultimately got one.
Only if you judge the device solely by how it looks.
I remember seeing the writeup of the TAM, and thinking of it as a pretty movie prop, but not much more. I wanted a G4 Cube (because it was brilliant), but I ended up getting a Power Mac G4 Sawtooth.
I’ve got a coworker who picks up not-working G4 Cubes to re-use the case with modern hardware inside. It’s still pretty. And for modern hardware it’s actually a pretty spacious case.
I think Apple might have reached the point where they’re happy with the current design, so why not keep it?
Car shapes no longer change radically each year. Until there’s a tech change big enough, I don’t think there’s any reason for phone shapes to change much.
Ayup.
The one thing I could see is a future iPhone release bringing the iPhone SE’s form factor into the mainstream. But I wouldn’t beat on it. Three sizes might be one too many.
I understand what he meant. It’s just a meaningless number in the grand scheme of things when you’re selling 15 million iPhones a month.
Doesn’t seem to me as though they’d “resurrect” a model type that had been relegated to its current status. Whatever that is.
I don’t think we have enough evidence to know what status the SE is in. After all, it’s the second newest release of iPhone. If they could put the SE’s guts and screen into an iPhone 6/6s/7 case, would they? More importantly, will they?
We don’t really have any evidence that it’s been abandoned at this point. March 2016 is just not that long ago. I think we have to wait until at least March 2018 to say anything definitively.
Fair point, but it seems to me a new case mandates new internals, no?
Yeah, though most of that is just movement. There’d also have to be a push to a smaller battery if you held height and width constant, which is what I think held the SE to a 5/5S-type case. If you’re going to hold the dimensions the same, there’s little point in changing the style.
(I’d love to see a change in battery technology, mind you. Maybe they’ve got something in the pipeline. I know there’s battery tech changes coming, but I don’t think any of them are near shipping…)
Understood. But even within an existing design that Apple can continue cranking out, I’d sort of expect them to keep tinkering with components that can improve.