When Steve Jobs took to a stage at the Macworld trade show in California 16 years ago this week it changed the world.
“An iPod, a phone and internet communicator. An iPod, a phone ... are you getting it?” he said, whipping up his audience — mainly tech media and Apple enthusiasts — into a frenzy. After months of intense speculation and growing industry and consumer hype, Jobs unveiled the first iPhone.
Six months later, the device went on sale. It supported only 2G mobile (even though 3G was already launched), its battery life was terrible, it was pitifully slow and there were no apps available other than those shipped with the device by Apple. (The App Store, which was also revolutionary, followed a year later.)
Despite the drawbacks, the first iPhone captured the world’s imagination. It was far ahead of the competition, which in those days was Finland’s Nokia and Canada’s BlackBerry (then called Research in Motion). The iPhone made other devices look prehistoric overnight. Neither Nokia nor BlackBerry is directly involved in the phone hardware business today, having been caught flat-footed by Apple.
The only platform that emerged to give the iPhone a run for its money was Google’s Android, unveiled just months after the iPhone went on sale. Jobs described Android as a “stolen product”, and said he was “willing to go to thermonuclear war” to “right this wrong”.
Jobs was right to worry. Though Apple is the most profitable smartphone brand — and has been for many years — Android today dominates global market share. Having placed a big bet on Android early on, Korea’s Samsung Electronics built global leadership in smartphones and with Chinese, Japanese and Taiwanese rivals turned Android into a powerhouse not even latecomer Microsoft could topple.
The pace of innovation in smartphone hardware and software in the 10 years since the iPhone’s debut was incredible to witness. Even yearly upgrades gave iPhone and Android users significant and meaningful enhancements — faster and less power-hungry processors, bigger and brighter displays, fingerprint scanners, GPS and mapping support, tap to pay, and vastly improved camera systems.
Elon Musk’s Neuralink is already developing implantable brain-computer interfaces
But in recent years, the pace of innovation has slowed markedly. Today, the iPhone 14 Pro is barely distinguishable from the previous model. To see significant changes between upgrades today, consumers must wait three or four years — and many people, realising yearly or biennial upgrades are no longer satisfying or necessary, are doing just that.
And where innovation is happening in mobile today, it’s not being led by Apple. Rather, it’s happening in the Android world. Folding phones, a segment pioneered by Samsung, is one example. Even then, the pace of innovation is not what it once was. In short, smartphones, while a vital component of everyday life, are now a mature product.
The question industry players have been trying to answer is, what comes next? What category-defining device, such as the iPhone, will upend the tech industry once again?
The answer to that question is, no-one really knows — yet. But some big companies are making expensive bets about what it might be.
Mark Zuckerberg has controversially staked Meta Platforms’ future on the metaverse. His reward? A collapsing share price and widespread scepticism about whether consumers will ever truly embrace virtual reality (VR). Meta’s metaverse is a fascinating concept, but it could be years ahead of its time.
One company biding its time on the metaverse is Apple, said to have been working on an augmented reality (AR) headset for some years now. Unlike VR, which cocoons users from the world around them, AR headsets provide an augmented experience of the real world. Speculation is growing that Apple will finally launch its headset this year. If it does, it’s unlikely it will be as world-shaking as the iPhone, but it could still spur great interest in the technology.
Another area for excitement involves advances in artificial intelligence and machine learning. ChatGPT, the celebrated but flawed AI that answers questions in natural language rather than the stilted interactions one tends to have with Google Assistant or Apple’s Siri, is a thrilling development to watch. By the end of this decade, complex, voice-based conversations with machines will have become routine.
Smartphones may become less relevant in this future. Any device will do — be it a smart speaker, your car, your TV, your personal robot or even a piece of tech you’ve chosen, willingly, to implant in your body.
Don’t believe that will happen? It’s still early days, but Elon Musk’s Neuralink is already developing implantable brain-computer interfaces. (By the way, Musk is also an investor in OpenAI, the research laboratory behind ChatGPT, and the two organisations share office space in San Francisco.)
While smartphone innovation has slowed in recent years, the category certainly helped catalyse plenty of other innovations. Something in tech as significant as the iPhone is coming this decade. We can’t say for certain what it is yet, but the clues about where to look are already there.
McLeod is editor of TechCentral
Would you like to comment on this article?
Sign up (it's quick and free) or sign in now.
Please read our Comment Policy before commenting.