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Apple has made a luxury iPhone that punctuates its technological swagger with a high-priced exclamation point. And that exclamation point appears to be a sign of things to come.
The long-anticipated iPhone X unveiled last week will sell for $999 (approximately BD377), double what the original iPhone cost a decade ago and more than any other competing device on the market. That’s very much in line with Apple’s long-term positioning of itself as a purveyor of pricey aspirational gadgets.
But it’s also a clear sign that Apple is ramping up that strategy by continuing to push its prices higher, even though improvements it’s bringing to its products are often incremental or derivative. Among other things, that runs contrary to decades in which high-tech device prices have fallen over time, often dramatically, even as the gadgets themselves ran faster and acquired new powers.
Apple is also raising the price of its runner-up phones, the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, which will respectively cost $50 (BD19) and $30 (BD11) more than their immediate predecessors, the iPhone 7 and 7 Plus.
The premium pricing strategy reflects Apple’s long-held belief that consumers will pay more for products that are so well designed they can’t fathom living without them.
Apple CEO Tim Cook left little doubt in the company’s confidence in the iPhone X (pronounced ‘ten’), whose name references the decade that’s passed since company co-founder Steve Jobs first pulled out an iPhone.
Cook attempted to frame the iPhone X as a similar breakthrough, hailing it as ‘the biggest leap forward’ since the original iPhone. But the original iPhone revolutionised society by putting connected hand-held computers and apps into the hands of millions of ordinary people. The iPhone X mostly promises to do what earlier smartphones have done, only better.
The technological wizardry in the iPhone X is unquestionably impressive. It includes a bright new edge-to-edge screen, a special artificial-intelligence-enabled chip, new sensors for facial recognition and a grab-bag of fun items like animated emojis that mimic your expressions, portrait-mode selfies that blur the background, an augmented reality game platform and wireless charging. Apple said the phone’s battery will last two hours longer than that of the iPhone 7.
But rival phones already offer similar displays, facial recognition, augmented reality and wireless charging, if often in cruder forms that mostly haven’t won over large numbers of phone users.
No one can say with certainty what sort of ‘killer app’ will make augmented reality a hit. On Tuesday, Apple demonstrate a simple use for sophisticated camera technology on the iPhone X with animoji, which lets people animate emoji characters with their voices and facial expressions — and then send them to their friends.
Showing off a new technology with something that everyday people can use and understand is ‘what Apple does best’, said Gartner analyst Brian Blau.
Meanwhile, archrivals Samsung aim to launch a foldable smartphone next year under its Galaxy Note brand.
