Apple SVP Eddy Cue yesterday suggested that we might not need an iPhone ten years from now. It echoes a report back in 2019, where the company’s execs were cited saying the same thing – also with a decade-ish time-frame.
Apple is absolutely right to take this possibility seriously. It’s the job of the company’s leadership to think long and hard about future scenarios, and there are four very good reasons why this possibility cannot be ignored …
Four reasons Apple must take this idea seriously
There are four reasons Apple must seriously consider this possibility.
It’s too big a threat to ignore
First, and most obviously, the iPhone is Apple’s single most profitable product. Any potential threat to that revenue stream must be taken seriously, however unlikely it might seem today.
Sure, each of Apple’s other products is big enough to be a major global business on its own. The iPad, the Mac, the Apple Watch, Services – each of those are sizeable enterprises. But the iPhone is the linchpin to all of it. The iPhone is what brings most people into the ecosystem.
Owning an iPhone, and seeing the benefits of that tightly-integrated approach, is the reason most people go on to buy an iPad, a Mac, an Apple Watch. It’s absolutely responsible for the bulk of Apple’s Services revenue. Without the iPhone, Apple’s business could unravel very quickly indeed.
Learning the lessons of history
You think that’s an unlikely claim? If so, you’re probably not old enough to remember Nokia.
Nokia owned the mobile phone market. The iPhone’s 28% global market share is nothing compared to the 50% share the Finnish mobile phone company enjoyed. From 1998 to 2007, it had the most advanced and most stylish devices, and was the coolest brand to own. It would have sounded utterly insane to predict that just eight years later its market share would be zero.
But while Nokia was an early innovator in the smartphone market, it completely failed to spot the danger posed by the iPhone. Its execs didn’t see that keyboardless smartphones were the future, and that its once stylish designs were now obsolete. There were nine people in Nokia who did see the future, but the board didn’t listen to them.
No company is too big to fail, no product too ubiquitous to vanish without trace, no brand too popular to be replaced by the next cool kid on the block.
New device types
Third, new device types. Sure, those ridiculous AI badge things were never going to take off. But smart glasses? That possibility can’t be dismissed.
Today, they are pretty crude, but that will change, and change fast. The sole reason Apple created Vision Pro was as a stepping-stone toward Apple Glasses.
I know, I know: it seems nonsensical to think that ten years from now everyone will be wearing glasses. But I promise you, back in 2007 it seemed equally absurd to think that ten years from then everyone would carry a pocket computer everywhere they went, and spend half their lives with their eyes glued to it.
My own view remains that Apple Glasses will replace the Apple Watch, not the iPhone, but if I were Tim Cook, I wouldn’t bet the future of the company on my belief.
The impact of AI
Again, I know. Every tech company is trying to squeeze AI into everything in sight, and it’s mostly very silly. I wouldn’t be surprised to see an AI-powered fruit bowl at this rate.
But again, that will change, and change quickly. It’s entirely credible that a decade from now AI will be smart enough to be trusted. That I can simply ask my smart glasses for any info I need, or to carry out any task for me, and trust the result. At that point, how much benefit is there to pulling a slab from my pocket and interacting with a screen to do it? Perhaps that will seem as ridiculous as a smartphone with a physical keyboard does today.
But one big reason it likely won’t happen
I acknowledge the possibility that interacting with a pocketable screen might become quaintly old-fashioned within a decade, but … I don’t actually think so.
Exhibit A: The laptop. The clamshell form factor was first seen back in 1984. Four decades later, we’re still using it today. Here’s the laptop I owned in 1984, the Tandy TRS-80 Model 200:
An awesome 240×128 resolution monochrome screen and an incredible 32k storage in my (upgraded!) model, but the basic design is unchanged today. There’s a very good reason for that: the form-factor works, and nobody has yet come up with a better one, despite 41 years of trying.
I suspect the smartphone is much the same. Sure, it’ll hit Apple’s goal of that single slab of glass, and yes, some people will opt for folding models, but the basic idea of a flat, pocket-sized device with a touchscreen as the primary means of interaction has so far survived for 18 years, and I think there’s a solid chance it will still be the case 23 years from now. The design works.
So yes, Apple is right to consider the possibility, and would be dangerously negligent if it failed to do so, but my bet is I’ll be using an iPhone 27 a decade from now.
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