The title says it all. I believe Apple doesn’t need to release a brand new iPhone every single year, and here’s why I think that
Nothing Destroys Innovation More than Rapidly Upgrading a Product, the iPhone is Suffering the Same Fate
The internet is a bit of a cliché at this point. A new iPhone comes out, and we hear the same old ‘it’s like the one before it.’ I get why people say that, because the changes are so minor, you can just skip buying the new one and hold on to the old model for a year or two extra. Trust me, you’re not going to miss anything at all.
I can ramble about this for so long, you’d probably get bored. But I will keep this nice and short.
The thing is, having your favorite company release a product every year is great, it’s what keeps you going, but do we really need a new iPhone every year given how small the changes are?
I believe, no one does.
I think a new iPhone should be released every two years rather than one. This way, every single buyer gets to witness a bigger upgrade than the current one and it will give Apple more time to focus on improving the thing that matters the most in something like an iPhone – the software.
As someone who upgrades his iPhone every single year, even I’m starting to think a new iPhone every year is starting to lose its charm. I would prefer bigger leaps in hardware every two years than minor, incremental upgrades.
Nothing kills innovation faster than a company working day and night trying to add excessive new features to a software or hardware platform just to stay competitive.
The same is happening with iPhone hardware.
iPhone hardware is so, so good at this point, I dare you to do a blind test and tell me if there’s any performance upgrade in the iPhone 15 Pro compared to the previous model. Sure, you can find improvements in a fake workload like a benchmark, but that’s not how phones are used.
In the real world, people are texting, uploading videos to Instagram, using Safari and so on. For that, any iPhone would do. And in order to keep the experience consistent and great, the software needs to be constantly polished.
Basically, Apple can skip a year and everything would be just fine.
Moving away from the iPhone for a second and going to the iPad Pro, we keep on hearing the same thing – overkill hardware marred by iPadOS. That hardware can easily last several years and software updates can actually make it better. In fact, I’m still holding on to my M1 iPad Pro and it’s so good to this day, I skipped the M2 one and have no plans to get the M4 model. Same goes for the iPhone, not just for me, but for a lot of people.
What do you think? Will a two year release cycle make the iPhone exciting again?
