I upgraded my phone again this week, the fourth upgrade I’ve ever done and the fifth iPhone I’ve had. I’ve had them all.
In Autumn of this year the iPhone will celebrate its 10th birthday and I believe, despite which ever gimmicks and patches are applied, it will signify the start of the end for the iPhone and smartphones in general.
In May 2008 I held an iPhone in my hand for the first time outside my daughter’s primary school and fell in love with the most extraordinary piece of technology I’d ever seen. What actually sold it for me was the app with the light sabre and the fact that when you turned the calculator from portrait to landscape it became scientific. But what those gimmicks did was allow me to hold it in my hand from my friend at school who had one and realise that I coveted it more than any piece of technology I’ve ever known. In the new developing business I had at that time we set up with Apple laptops and iPhones to set us apart and to state our intentions to everyone else.
I immediately upgraded the iPhone at the next opportunity (18 months later) for the 4 and I believe that is when they were at their best. It was so easy to use the iPhone to do such incredible things, so intuitive, so simple. The last upgrade was not the same.
To upgrade my phone now has become a chore. An expensive chore where the price increases again, the length of contract generally increases again and the upfront cost of the phone increases again. As soon as I upgrade there are 1000 passwords to re-enter, most of which I have forgotten. There is iCloud and Dropbox, all the apps that I think I’ll probably use that I need to password again, there is the time it takes to set the phone up. Perhaps I have just become a cantankerous old b@£$%^d, an ungrateful who feels entitled to have something handed to him which immediately works, but to me the joy of the smartphone has disappeared entirely. I never take the phone upstairs in the evening. It goes to ‘do not disturb’ and goes into the drawer. It comes out again when I take the dog for a walk so that I can listen to my book (I don’t need a phone for that)
I don’t have an email account on my phone, I don’t have Whatsapp on my phone. I have BBC Sport, Audible and Strava, all of which could be on my laptop .
It’s no surprise that Nokia have re-visted simpler less ‘smart’ phones as people look for simpler, less smart lives. We have reached the law of diminishing returns with smart phones.
The company’s remit is to get you on the phone as much as possible and more and more people’s remit is to get off the phone as much as possible – there is the crux of the matter. How do you design a phone that allows you not to be on it?
Make no mistake, the Apple watch is just an extension of the phone, it’s just a phone with a strap so this will go the same way and, if it hasn’t already, will become an object of ridicule.
If you believe in the law of diffusion of innovation or ‘Tipping Point’ by Malcolm Gladwell it needs to get to 18% of the market before everybody goes the same way.
At the start of our Year Long Implant Course module this week we had an informal chat with the guys and I asked them about Facebook - 25% are off it. In the past few weeks several of my friends who were big users of Facebook have reported to me that they’ve stopped it and removed it from their phones.
It seems to me that it won’t take long to reach that 25%.
The clever people understand that using your phone is a Dopamine addiction. They might not put it into those words but they get it. They know that if you wake up in the morning and the first thing you do is check your phone before you talk to your partner then you’re addicted and addiction in any form is never good.
I am ten days into a two-year contract on an iPhone 7. I will be retaining that phone for as long as is humanly possible until it absolutely doesn’t work, lowering the value of my contract all the time.
Just one thing on this subject though that I’ve been chatting to people about recently and just something to think about.
Each generation reels against the generation before. I’m from the Facebook generation, the first people to use it, the first people to conquer it, the first people to be conquered by it.
I use Facebook for communication and websites for information. My fifteen year old daughter is from the last dregs of the Instagram generation (15 – 25) they use Instagram for communication and Facebook for information (pages of the groups that they like) they rarely use websites.
My twelve year old daughter is in the vanguard of the Snapchat generation. They use Instagram for information and Snapchat for communication.
My son will be in the vanguard of the no phone generation.
Teenagers don’t like their parents knowing where they are, they don’t like to be contactable, it’s always been the way. What they did is changed apps – Facebook to Instagram, Instagram to Snapchat so that their parents or their older siblings couldn’t see them. The last part of that step is to get rid of the phone.
I really believe that very soon teenagers won’t want a phone, they’ll want the freedom of not having a phone.
This conversation was confirmed when I went through the upgrade process for the 7. The girl who served me in Carphone Warehouse in West Bridgford in Nottingham was a beautiful, intelligent, engaging and alive 24 year old who is about to graduate from Loughborough University, It took an hour to go through this whole process for one reason or another and the conversation we had was exceptional. I mentioned a couple of books that I have been listening to and she instantly wrote them down so that she could get them. She talked about the business of getting a phone that will last the longest possible time and not worrying about functionality… and she works in a phone shop!
Finally she asked me if I wanted a case. She said “don’t get a cool case, get one like i’ve got” and showed me her case which was a black leather with a flip over the front ‘your screen will never crack’ case. She said “if you don’t get one of these you’ll end up changing your phone because the screen will break and once it’s broken they’re always dead”
This is a 24 year old who ten years ago would have been clamouring for the latest piece of technology. A light at the end of the tunnel and faith in humanity restored again.
Blog Post Number: 1235
Leave a comment