Ben Guttmann
The other day, after missing the UPS driver twice, a tiny, expensive package finally arrived at my apartment. Inside was the most technologically advanced product I’ve ever laid my hands on: an iPhone 15 Pro.
Billionaires can have lots of things that you and I can’t. They can fly in gilded private jets, stay in palatial hotels, decorate their homes with Picassos, and wear clothing made from some endangered species we haven’t even heard of. But they can’t have a nicer phone.
By all accounts, this little titanium brick is a beautiful piece of work. The screen shines more real than reality, the camera makes everybody look like a supermodel, and the processor zips along at a pace unthinkable to the owners of supercomputers just a few years ago. All that is very nice, but if you ask me about the upgrade from my previous iPhone 12 Pro, I would hem and haw about it being worth it.
The iPhone, and smartphones in general, are reaching a plateau. The jump from the iPhone 3G to the iPhone 4 saw the addition of a front-facing camera, a display so crisp you couldn’t make out the pixels, and a completely new sci-fi design. It was a revelation. It was a piece of technology that changed how we used technology as a whole.
But the jumps from the 12 to the 13 to the 14 to the 15, even taken altogether, didn’t introduce anything as transformative as a single one of those new features. Largely, these recent updates just hit the same beats over and over: the camera is better, the processor is faster, and the screen is nicer.
iPhones have become TVs.
Most of us have a TV, but we don’t update that often. It’s just there, sitting in a living room, doing its job day in and day out. We replace it when it breaks or when something really big comes along to get our attention, like 4K or flat screens.
We don’t feel that we need to replace our TVs every year, and now, many people feel that they don’t need to replace their phones every year. The lifespan of our phones has gone from one or two years, to three or four – and may keep climbing.
Also like TVs, there are some really nice ones. You can go ahead and buy the biggest, beefiest iPhone out there and drop nearly two grand in one go. Or, you can get a cheap one basically anywhere, and it will still be pretty good – the iPhone SE starts at about $400, and it will do the job the same way that a $200 TV from Walmart will still play Netflix. Billionaires can certainly get a nicer TV, but not that much nicer.
iPads became TVs a long time ago. For many of my peers who spend most of their computing time at work instead of home, their laptops are TVs – only used to update resumes to find another job with a work laptop. Before they went extinct, MP3 players and Walkmen became TVs. There are lots of new bells and whistles in the latest electric cars, but below that threshold, modern cars are pretty much TVs.
It’s a little sad to see arenas of innovation turn into asymptotes of optimization, inching ever closer but never reaching the ideal – but this is a net good. iPhones have lots of nasty stuff in them, and we’re better off without the yearly mountains of e-waste. Less tangibly, we’re also better off without this ceaseless, consumerist pressure for the latest and greatest.
I’m not worried. Throughout history, as we perfect one technology, we always find another place to invest our efforts. And that exploration’s breakthroughs often circle back around to breathe new life into the dormant markets. But for now, I’ll probably enjoy this new phone for a few years before another upgrade.
