I read the aforementioned article and it actually reads as quite intelligent and thoughtful.
The fact that Apple has painted the iPhone into premium price corner when the general trend is downwards on average selling price, is where they could most probably tumble.
I spend a lot of time out with people on all sorts, whether its the Uber driver, or my children’s friends, or professionals, I tend to walk and bike and use trains so I’m usually with people using their smartphones. What seems to be happening right now is there is an “enough” plateau of “I don’t need any more” features in smartphones. My entree into smartphones in '90s was access to email, then it improved with GPS mapping navigation.
This is my first PDA:
What this replaced was:
- diary, carrying a small book of my to-do, appointments, phone numbers, addresses.
- calculator
- pen and paper (note taker)
To get onto the Internet (it was most commonly called Usenet at the time), I needed a GSM phone
and a PCMCIA card which created a modem capability which I put in a PCMCIA adapter for the PDA.
What the Internet replaced initially was the FAX machine, via email.
These then later merged and I was quite happy for a period with:
At this stage speeds were usually of the order 2400bps - 9600bps so a modern smartphone with LTE with benchmarks of say 10Mbit is at least 10000 times faster.
Then:
Then the innovation stalled but it was once the inclusion of mapping with GSM came in it then jumped with this:
So then a 5 year battle between battery life, features, size has occurred but this seems somewhat now settled with a 5.5" slim phone to which most trouser pockets have gotten bigger.
For every added feature there is a size and battery life cost so we’re now somewhat stalled at compromising the most useful features in a fixed size device and small incremental battery worsening/improvements.
For me a good example of “good enough” was this:
Which I got for $89
This goes to the core of the problem with Apple currently, phones which are perfectly adequate are 1/10th to 1/2th the price of a new iPhone.
Correct, there is one born every minute
Their phones will usually last 2 years so there is a plateau of how many gullible will buy an overpriced phone like the iPhone.
Currently I have a OnePlus3T with two SIMs from ATT and T-Mobile and a smartwatch with an ATT MVNO SIM in, so I sometimes go out with no phone at all, getting email etc off my watch, because phones at 5.5" size are still a trouser tugger.