After a long wait, Apple finally unveiled the iPhone 7 and iPhone 7 Plus yesterday in San Francisco. Though the phone comes with a number of upgrades including water resistance nature, better battery life, new camera, stereo speakers, faster processor and more storage, but the question is, would they be a game changer for Apple. Hotwire PR’s Digital Designer, Matt Noble has shed some light on this topic.
When Apple first appeared on the scene, it took the world by storm and brought revolutionary changes in the smartphone industry. When the company introduced iPhone 4’s retina screen, people were inspired, but since then things have been changed. Nothing revolutionary is coming out of the Apple’s factories these days. All we get new iPhone versions with marginal changes.
With every new launch of iPhone and iPhone S, consumers and analysts are left disheartened. It forces them to think over switching to Android devices, which are equally spec’d and most of the time cheaper than the iPhone. However, all this is basic. iPhone users have been a part of ‘buy one, skip one’ cycle for years. As an iPhone contract reaches its limit, users find themselves in a difficult situation; should they buy a new iPhone or switch to Android?
This is where Apple has been extremely prudent to retain its customers. Whenever consumers mull over switching from iOS to Android, Apple throws in a lot of blanks which are hard to fill by any other smartphone. Apple has created an ecosystem where people actually invest in iPhone experience beyond iPhone.
Apple has developed some nifty services and secondary devices which require a consumer to connect their iPhone to enable them. For example, life is incomplete without a cloud service these days, and Apple’s iCloud allows users to securely save their photos, videos, documents, music, apps, and more. Most importantly, it keeps them updated across all your devices. Furthermore, consumers have invested a lot on App Store and they find it extremely hard to move away from the network. We also have to give credit to Apple here. They worked hard on this ecosystem and perfected it to the point that when consumers reconsider switching to another smartphone, they find it impossible to have all they are enjoying with another system.
Interestingly, the future success of Apple is not the iPhone. Apple’s secondary devices and integrated services are enough to secure the future of iPhone. They just have to invest more energy into this ecosystem to attract single device consumers and develop support gadgets which could oblige these users to become a part of the system. Apple does not need to build expensive and dicey product designs to achieve this task. They only need more effectual and safer products and marketing.
The iPhone 7 might not be a game changer for the tech giant, but it does not need to be with Apple introducing some ingenious products along the way.