The Apple Beat: Pressure mounts on Apple to make iPhone 7 truly great

By Gadjo Cardenas Sevilla

“Skate to where the puck is going to be, not to where it has been,” that’s a quote by the Great One, Wayne Gretzky, which Steve Jobs referenced during the momentous launch of the original iPhone in 2007.

Jobs continued by saying, “we try to understand as we develop our product road map, what’s going to be exciting in the future. And that’s one of the advantages we have over our competitors. Our competitors tend to put the cross hairs on where we are now, and by the time they come up with a product that tries to match where we are now, we’re beyond them. We’re one or two generations beyond, moving faster than they are.”

That was the spirit of innovation that powered the Apple engine and that’s what made the iPhone such an audacious, brave and, in hindsight, timely invention. But the world has changed and while Apple is still the most valuable company, the pressure is on to see if it is still the most innovative.

When the original iPhone was being pitched to a crowd of Apple fans, it was ‘an iPod, a Phone, an internet communicator,’ which also had a sleek multi-touch display and compact design. Above Jobs at the keynote were photos of a Palm Treo a BlackBerry and a Nokia smartphone. Look what happened to BlackBerry, Palm and Nokia are mere memories in the smartphone industry.

A very different landscape

Fast forward to 2016 and the names of the players competing with Apple have changed. Samsung is the dominant smartphone maker, the likes of LG, HTC, Huawei, ZTE, Oppo, OnePlus and Motorola don’t just have multiple smartphone models aimed at every price point, these are extremely competitive devices that offer value for money as well as innovation in a number of key areas.

The iPhone 7 is actually the ninth iteration of their most successful product. Apple has had a tremendous run with the iPhone, each successive version was a vast improvement over the previous model although maybe not as physically different.

The iPhone has pushed Apple to heights it could have never imagined. It created an app ecosystem, it built the most supportive and loyal group of developers and spawned myriad ecosystems ranging from the App Store, Apple Music, Health, Car Play, Apple Pay, Home Kit and watch OS by extension.

These would all not have been successful or even possible if Apple didn’t carefully iterate and innovate the iPhone at every possible turn. But it has been nine years and the landscape has truly changed.

The iPhone’s rivals today

I’ve never been as impressed by the iPhone’s competition as I have in 2016, and what makes this so remarkable is that many competitors seem to be dancing to their own tune, pushing out features that are fresh and daring and very few seem to be doing so as a reaction to the iPhone. 

Sure, we still see competitors copy some of the look and feel of the iPhone, the HTC A9 is a classic example of that, but I doubt that phone sold much on the merit that it was an Android knockoff of an iPhone 6.

Samsung has gone full-on luxury and has shipped the fanciest looking Galaxy flagships we’ve ever seen. These are powerful devices, with arguably the best camera features right now but they are also notoriously fragile. 

LG and Motorola seem to be going the modular route. They’re hinged on solid smartphone flagships with the best specs and processor, removable storage and quad-HD display but can also shape-shift into point-and-shot prosumer cameras, high-resolution audio players or hubs for VR experiences.

Even Microsoft, whose Lumia 950 and Lumia 950 XL run on Windows 10, have innovated by showing how Continuum can turn a phone into a simulacrum of a desktop. Windows Hello on the Lumia 950 uses the user’s retina to unlock the device, just like high-end PCs do.

HTC has matched Apple’s focus on premium materials and build and even adds stereo speakers, Optical Image Stabilization for both front and rear cameras plus plays high resolution audio right out of the box.

Many of these flagships sport Quick Charge capabilities, they feature the faster USB Type-C standard, they have expandable storage options, some have dual-SIM capabilities and some even have water and dust resistance features out of the box. These are features that matter to users and ones that the current batch of iPhones has no answer for.

A turning point for iPhone and iOS

Apple has done a commendable job of upgrading the iPhone year in and year out. The way iOS has evolved is quite astounding considering it was never originally designed to even run applications other than the ones Apple shipped it with.

iPhone 7 and iOS 10, which should surface next month at WWDC, need to really be impressive releases and many are wondering if Apple still has what it takes to push out something truly remarkable.

Many of us who have followed Apple for years know to expect great things, and by this I mean more than the requisite increases, in graphics, performance camera capability and the usual lynchpins of an iPhone refresh.

We’re at a point now where smartphone specs are surpassing those of entry level notebooks. Octa-core processors, 3-4GB of RAM, storage up to 128GB, these are all expected from flagship devices demanding high price. 

iPhone 7 needs to deliver more than an update to 3D Touch or Live Photos. We’re at a point in time where Amazon and even Siri’s own creators now shipping the Viv AI are showing off personal assistants that seems smarter and more proactive than Siri.

The iPhone has one of the best cameras period. But I’ve seen what LG, HTC and even Sony, maker of the iPhone’s sensor, have in store this year and the amount of innovation in the smartphone camera space is insane right now. Not just for taking still photos but even for shooting cinematic 4K video right from your device.

As an iPod, the iPhone has done a great job being an all-in-one music player and streaming device but it has done so with a single speaker in a very thin body. Imagine if the company could inject some of the Beats mojo and make the iPhone line a truly compelling playback device.

There really are so many areas where Apple could choose to go to make iPhone 7 a remarkable and momentous device and more than adding new colours or showing a catalogue of cool accessories, I hope they can get back to the basics of making a powerful device that feels like the future rather than a remake of the past.