Will Apple's Aesthetic Keep It from Succeeding in Phones?

Random speculation time!

The week between Christmas and New Years is a dead zone when people are out doing things they like rather than reading newsletters to avoid paying attention to their terrible jobs, so I thought a touch of useless, random, ill-formed speculation would be appropriate.

The astute and meaner readers likely saw this headline and thought, “Apple has already succeeded in phones, you idiot! They are the most profitable, iconic phone manufacture in the world!”. And you are right on all counts — Apple is the most profitable phone manufacturer, they are the most iconic, and I am probably an idiot. Not nice to point that out, though. Didn’t your parents teach you manners?

But that is today. Apple is riding what’s left of the first mover wave. They invented the modern cell phone (I think that is a defensible position. The change from mobile devices that worked only within the parameters of the mobile-specific web and where the apps were all controlled by the manufacturer to a phone that worked with the web as people knew it and eventually allowed apps to be added like you could on your home computer was not a difference of degree. It was a difference of kind. The iPhone created the computer in your pocket device — a different beast than the cell phones that came before.), and positioned themselves, through design, marketing, and a compliant tech press, as a premium product. But those days are probably over.

Phones are pretty much commodity devices now. They all have processors, generally, more powerful than are needed to work the apps on the phone. They all have excellent cameras with likely little room to improve, and they all function largely the same. You can see this in Apple’s latest announcements: the big thing coming to the next phone is Apple Intelligence — an imitative AI product meant to do things like edit your photos, make Siri more functional, and summarize your texts. Because reading texts is too taxing, I guess? Even if Apple Intelligence does all they claim it can — and some of the features are not yet rolled out and imitative AI does not have a history of delivering foolproof products — it is not a huge improvement. Likely not enough of one to get people to buy a new phone next year.

iPhone sales are already dropping, most likely because they are competing in a commodity market. There are cheaper phones that perform more than well enough for people’s current expectations. And at the high end, there are much more interesting design choices than Apple is making today. Foldable phones are still niche, but they have survived at least two product cycles and represent something that Apple, I think, is likely going to have a hard time doing — experimentation.

Apple has been extremely successful with their minimal aesthetic (except in their iPhone OS. That is still a hot mess compared to the simplicity of Google’s Android operating system). One could argue that such minimalism is in their design blood. You cannot image Apple doing a flip phone or a foldable phone because it does not align with Apple’s design rules. Those phones have a sense of fun and experimentation that Apple hasn’t really had in their phones since the first or second generation. And that I think is going to be the problem.

Since phones are commodities, the only reason to buy a new one is, for lack of a better term, fashion. I haven’t bought a foldable phone, because I am a cheap bastard who still has a five-year-old phone that works perfectly well, thank you very much, but they are clearly more interesting than the next slab phone. Other companies may try to go back to phones with slide-out keyboards (oh please oh please oh please) or focus on making their phones prettier than the competitions, with bright colors and variations on the basic slab. They can give, in other words, people a reason to want to get the next pretty thing that comes out. I am not sure that Apple can.

It is possible that Apple, who is primarily a refiner these days, not an inventor, can move away from their rigid aesthetic and into different designs. They have had multi-colored options in the past, for example. But changing a large company’ culture is difficult. There will be a lot of people who fear change for its effect on their employment or power. And there will be a lot of people who make the reasonable sounding argument that its worked, we still make money, so why change? Well, it only works until it doesn’t as tons of companies have found out a bit too late.

The counter to this is the Mac line of computers. They have been extremely successful in what is largely a commodity market. However, computers are a little bit different in my mind. First, computers are more workhorses than phones or tablets. The computer’s design makes it much easier and more comfortable to do any work for a long period of time and most kinds of work at all as compared to a phone. Changes to computing power, such as Apple’s new chips, are more relevant and visible in a computer compared to a phone. And I think the MacOS is a different enough experience from Windows as to be a real differentiator in a way that phone OS differences are largely not.

But the Mac computers may prove how hard it is for Apple to make changes. Apple stuck with the butterfly keyboard, despite its problems and the pure hatred many if not most Mac users expressed towards it, long after most other companies would have admitted a mistake. A large part of why is that it allowed Apple to lean into its aesthetic and make extremely thin laptops. Apple also has completely missed the boat on touch screen computers, as another example.

There were probably good sounding reasons for those decisions. A touchscreen laptop might cannibalize the iPad sales. Thin has always sold for them. But it may also indicate a certain lack of flexibility that would keep them from adapting to the new market realities.

All of this may be fine. I am hardly suggesting that iPhones are going to go the way of the dodo suddenly become unprofitable. Apple may still cling to the high-end niche, selling its products at a premium to phone users who see their aesthetic as a social marker. But that is likely to be a smaller and smaller market as time goes by. iPhones may remain profitable, but clinging to the way they have always done things may make them irrelevant culturally. And that, in turn, could be what eventually pushes them into the same cultural and technical irrelevancy they suffered through in the eighties and nineties.

The world changes. The question for Apple is can they change with it? So far, I don’t see a lot of evidence they can.