IT IS that time of the year when the big tech companies launch new toys to tempt consumers to spend and upgrade ahead of the festive season.
Apple’s fancy new iPhone 7 was the most keenly awaited of the new toys and the launch this week received a bit of an unexpected boost from the woes of rival Samsung, which is recalling more than 2.5-million of its new Galaxy Note 7 phones after a battery fault caused hundreds of them to catch fire and explode.
Apple didn’t invent smartphones. But it has certainly been a leader in advancing the aesthetics and the technology of the smartphone since the first Apple phone was launched more than a decade ago. It continues to stretch the boundaries and has done so again with the iPhone 7, which will ship in the US next week and in SA probably only in October.
The new model reportedly looks much like the iPhone 6 but has some new and covetable features, such as a dual-lens camera, which promises to take even better pictures, improved battery life and water resistance.
The big difference is that Apple has scrapped the headphone jack. The decision has already generated huge controversy in the market, prompting outrage and puzzlement on social media.
But the headphone jack issue is a more profound one that goes to the heart of how Apple operates — and that is either a fatal flaw or a huge competitive advantage, depending on one’s perspective.
Older phones have a jack into which users plug headphones to listen to their music or calls without sharing the experience. iPhone 7 users will have to use wireless devices instead. Innovative no doubt, but they are designed to work with Apple’s own $159 AirPods.
This is typical of Apple, with its fixation on making sure its devices rely on its own software and its own Apple-branded accessories. This supposedly guarantees the quality of the experience and the reliability of the products. It also guarantees that they are costly and that the barriers to entry are high.
Investors, of course, will like the headphone thing, because selling accessories generates lots of revenue, and Apple needs the revenue boost. Sales of its Apple watch have fallen and so have those of its mobile phones lately.
But it is more controversial with consumers. And the barriers to entry that Apple erects are particularly unpopular with developers everywhere.
That raises interesting questions about the Apple model, particularly in developing countries. Smartphones are playing an ever more important role in expanding access to billions of poor people in developing countries, connecting them to job opportunities and to a wider world of information and knowledge, not just to their friends and relations (although that is important, too).
In SA, with its estimated 23-million smartphones, more than 80% of those who access the internet use smartphones to do so. There are similar trends elsewhere in Africa, with smartphones driving the expansion of mobile financial services and other services.
Smartphones are being used by health-care workers in deep rural areas in developing countries to access medical records and connect to diagnostic information so they can provide services that poor people would otherwise not be able to access. And that’s just in healthcare.
Developers are finding innovative social applications for the devices, with their ability to take and send photos or capture and check fingerprints or access the web. Costly devices would not be the first choice, surely, for providing services to the poor. And the developers are likely to prefer open-source software, rather than having to customise programs for Apple devices.
That surely limits Apple’s role in development. But its toys are as innovative, and as covetable, as ever.
Apple CEO Tim Cook speaks during an event in San Francisco, California, the US, on Wednesday. Picture: BLOOMBERG/DAVID PAUL MORRIS
IT IS that time of the year when the big tech companies launch new toys to tempt consumers to spend and upgrade ahead of the festive season.
Apple’s fancy new iPhone 7 was the most keenly awaited of the new toys and the launch this week received a bit of an unexpected boost from the woes of rival Samsung, which is recalling more than 2.5-million of its new Galaxy Note 7 phones after a battery fault caused hundreds of them to catch fire and explode.
Apple didn’t invent smartphones. But it has certainly been a leader in advancing the aesthetics and the technology of the smartphone since the first Apple phone was launched more than a decade ago. It continues to stretch the boundaries and has done so again with the iPhone 7, which will ship in the US next week and in SA probably only in October.
The new model reportedly looks much like the iPhone 6 but has some new and covetable features, such as a dual-lens camera, which promises to take even better pictures, improved battery life and water resistance.
The big difference is that Apple has scrapped the headphone jack. The decision has already generated huge controversy in the market, prompting outrage and puzzlement on social media.
But the headphone jack issue is a more profound one that goes to the heart of how Apple operates — and that is either a fatal flaw or a huge competitive advantage, depending on one’s perspective.
Older phones have a jack into which users plug headphones to listen to their music or calls without sharing the experience. iPhone 7 users will have to use wireless devices instead. Innovative no doubt, but they are designed to work with Apple’s own $159 AirPods.
This is typical of Apple, with its fixation on making sure its devices rely on its own software and its own Apple-branded accessories. This supposedly guarantees the quality of the experience and the reliability of the products. It also guarantees that they are costly and that the barriers to entry are high.
Investors, of course, will like the headphone thing, because selling accessories generates lots of revenue, and Apple needs the revenue boost. Sales of its Apple watch have fallen and so have those of its mobile phones lately.
But it is more controversial with consumers. And the barriers to entry that Apple erects are particularly unpopular with developers everywhere.
That raises interesting questions about the Apple model, particularly in developing countries. Smartphones are playing an ever more important role in expanding access to billions of poor people in developing countries, connecting them to job opportunities and to a wider world of information and knowledge, not just to their friends and relations (although that is important, too).
In SA, with its estimated 23-million smartphones, more than 80% of those who access the internet use smartphones to do so. There are similar trends elsewhere in Africa, with smartphones driving the expansion of mobile financial services and other services.
Smartphones are being used by health-care workers in deep rural areas in developing countries to access medical records and connect to diagnostic information so they can provide services that poor people would otherwise not be able to access. And that’s just in healthcare.
Developers are finding innovative social applications for the devices, with their ability to take and send photos or capture and check fingerprints or access the web. Costly devices would not be the first choice, surely, for providing services to the poor. And the developers are likely to prefer open-source software, rather than having to customise programs for Apple devices.
That surely limits Apple’s role in development. But its toys are as innovative, and as covetable, as ever.
