Episode 109 - Surprise, there's a new iPhone! Kind of...

We’ve talked many (many) times on this show about the cycle of things… and what I find very interesting at this particular moment is the relatively subtle but sudden departure from those cycles…

Take the iPhone for example… like the Tim Cook branded clockwork that it is every Fall we have an event, a new lineup of phones are announced as the next biggest thing ever to happen in tech in perpetuity throughout the universe… a week later we can pre-order them… and a week after that they’re living in our pocket for 2-3 years (or… you know, 11.5 months for some of us……)

This week however, the cycle broke. Yes, I know, we’ve had offshoot iPhone announcements in the past in the form of the “SE” line of phones. But, as I was aluding to earlier… this is different. The naming convention is ever so slightly but ever so importantly different… the parts bin this mid-cycle monster was crafted from was full of THIS years parts… and while the price has definitely gone up compared to 2022’s most recent entry, this one is actually spec’ed at a level a normal human being can use it successfully for more then 2-3 months rather than years… 

So, zooming out, where is all this going and more importantly… what does it mean? This isn’t just a microcosm of Apple wanting to “change things up”, the industry as a whole see’s something at play and is racing to meet it head-on rather than be washed beneath its waves. The Smartphone-driven growth of the last decade-plus is rapidly subsiding, we’ve talked time and time again about the advanced maturity of that market, and as quote-unquote “upgrades” are getting more and more iterative the fight for every purchase is becoming almost cut throat. 

Was simply slapping AI on the box going to ignite a fresh decade of consumer frenzy? Well, ask Humane…

Was making a phone magically fold in half going to convince droves of users to part with $2,000 for an impossibly fragile device? Samsung remains unsure…

All we can say is something is afoot, and when a player at the scale of Apple starts adjusting its stance to brace for impact, its past time to pay attention…