With new iPhones being announced last week — again, like last year, and the year before, and… — I was thinking about why this should probably change.
Annual iPhone updates have gotten smaller and less dramatic each year. When the iPhone was young, it seemed to advance by leaps and bounds. But nowadays, changes are iterative.
The basic functionality of the iPhone has been more or less the same for the past several year-models. Incremental improvements are welcome, but they’re not enough to compel people to upgrade every single year, at least not like in the early years (things back then were driven more by the subsidized 2-year contract). The smartphone plateaued (thanks, spell-check; all those vowels stumped me).
Since the iPhone doesn’t really change all that much every twelve months, it seems like it’s time to slow down the release cadence to something more like every eighteen months or two years instead. Why? Because then the improvements would be bigger and releases would be more impactful. The new phones would be a bit more “magical.” Or you could say the “newness” would seem more new.
Every single year, Apple creates a big splashy event for launching new iPhones, which have been basically the same for several years now. It uses marketing speak or hyperbole to help sell the new iPhone as if the year-old iPhone is suddenly lame or outdated. But this year’s iPhone 16 isn’t much more magical, and last year’s iPhone 15 isn’t much less magical.
That said, Apple does continue selling older models for a few years at lower prices; they’re still great phones, just no longer the absolute best. It’s pretty plain to see that most people’s older phones have been good enough for a while, especially iPhones, which tend to work well and get software updates for many years. I think the average phone upgrade cycle these days is once every three years. So it seems Apple could slow down the annual release cycle. At least then consumers wouldn’t feel as pressured to need or want a new iPhone.
There's an upside to annual releases though: thrift.
New phones suddenly make all previous phones "old.” And the more frequent new ones are released, the more old ones are available. That’s great for the refurbished market, which is where I prefer to shop. I like fancy, but I also like frugal. It’s cool if you have the means and want the new hotness. But there's really no need to spend $1,000 on a new iPhone when you can buy a great one for much less, despite it being a few years old. It’s like buying a used certified pre-owned car instead of a brand new one.
For example, now on Amazon you can buy an iPhone 13 Pro, which debuted at $1,000, for around $500. Yeah, it’s three years old, but it’s still excellent and costs half as much as the new iPhone 16 Pro — and they do basically the same things. And in about three years, that new iPhone 16 Pro price tag will be about 50% less. If you just need a great phone that gets you into the Apple ecosystem, a refurbished iPhone SE 3, which has the same A15 chip as the iPhone 13 and Apple still sells new for $429, costs less than $200 on Amazon.
Overall, I think it’d be good if Apple slowed the upgrade cycle, releasing new iPhones and Apple Watches around 18 months apart, similar to its Mac devices and iPads. We’d still get frequent-enough releases, keeping the refurbished market fresh. And each release would be a little nicer with more or better advances. As a bonus, this would also give more time for new iOS updates to be finalized. That way, more new software features would actually be ready to go when the new iPhones are up for sale.
At any rate, it’s good to see the steady march of progress. Speaking of which, March 2025, less than a year away, is when the next iPhone (SE 4) is rumored to be released.
No comments:
Post a Comment