Thoughts on the iPhone Event From a Former Apple Retail Manager.
It’s been many years since I worked for Apple but I still get excited when it’s event time. Especially the September iPhone event. I typically watch the entire show but this year I had a very hard time getting through it.
The Updates
I started at Apple when the current iPhone was the 3GS. The iPad and Apple Watch didn’t exist and headphones all had wires. The current marketing campaign was about getting people to try an Apple product for the first time. Remember the “Get a Mac” commercials starring John Hodgeman and Justin Long?
Apple events were all live and hosted by Steve Jobs. The new, pre-recorded events are slick but I feel we’ve lost something compared to the live events. Like when Steve had to ask all the press attendees to turn off their wifi as he was demoing Safari and FaceTime on the iPhone. unscripted moments like this were part of the appeal. Steve had a gift for going off-script and still making it feel natural.
Yearly iPhone release events made more sense in the early years of the device as the updates were pretty large. You had the first front-facing camera on the iPhone 4. Then Siri just a year later on the 4s. I remember seeing portrait mode for the first time on the iPhone 7. Or the complete redesign of iOS 7 in 2013. I was working the day it was finally released (no public betas back then) and I couldn’t wait for my lunch break so I could install it.
Upgrade Cadence
The iPhone is still Apple’s cash cow but it’s a mature product. The updates are smaller and more incremental in nature. That’s not a bad thing but it calls into question whether or not we still need big release events every year.
This year in particular felt unnecessarily long. You’re much better off watching the excellent edited versions that The Verge puts out every year.
AI
What makes this iPhone release different is Apple is shipping part of a new iPhone. Yes, it will have the new larger screen, the capture button, and a faster processor but the biggest selling feature will be missing. The first taste of “Apple Intelligence” isn’t arriving until sometime in October. Even when it’s released it will be labelled as a “Beta” feature and only be available if you have your phone set to US English as your language.
Admittedly I use AI almost every day. I find Chat GPT more useful these days compared to a Google search if I have a question about something. However, just because a new technology is useful doesn’t mean it needs to be shoehorned into every platform imaginable.
It's hard to pass judgment on Apple Intelligence since none of the features have been released yet. I'm holding out hope that these features will be useful.