Apple iPhone X Launch – Yawn

Its ten years since Apple launched the iPhone, and to celebrate, on Tuesday it launched the latest iteration, the iPhone X. The phone has a number of new features, including facial recognition, which embarrassingly, for Tim Cook, failed to work at the public launch. But, this latest iteration of the phone is a bit like Ford launching models of the Model T in colours other than black, or the makers of Persil, adding a few different scents, and a newly designed box, in order to try to sell the same soap powder to additional customers, or to get existing customers to pay more.

When mobile phones were introduced, back in the 1980's, they represented a new technological commodity. Even, the early iterations of mobile phones that took them from being limited, brick-like products to effective, convenient commodities represented a real development. Then, the further developments, making them ever smaller – and so for many of us unusable – were merely window dressing, changes for the sake of changes, as a means of trying to get existing owners of phones to buy the latest model, in the same way that clothes producers convinced customers they had to throw away perfectly good clothes, simply to have this season's fashions. That changed with the introduction of the smart phone.

The smart phone not only replaced the mobile phone, and all those consumable products that went with it, such as the calculator, but it also did away with the need for a camera, it provided access to the Internet, and so on. It was a real technological change. But, for the last ten years, we have been back in the same rut, as happened with the mobile phone. There have been this or that different apps developed for the smart phone, that really just utilise its existing technology, there has been the ability to use it to replace satellite navigation devices, and so on, but, in reality, these all amount to the equivalent of car producers, including a radio, or a cassette player, or a CD player in the car, as opposed to the car producers going from a petrol driven car, to an electric car.

Yes, Apple introduced the iWatch, but it illustrated the problem. What was the point of it? It was way too small and fiddly to be used effectively, for anything actually useful, and in any case, to use it, you still had to be carrying an iPhone! If Apple, or some other technology company wanted to introduce something really novel, here is an idea. How about a graphene flexible armband, that provides all of the functionality of an iPhone, and also monitors your biometrics, and the security of which is guaranteed by it being tied to your unique pattern of veins, and capillaries, in your arm.

After all, its one thing to lose a burn phone bought for a fiver from Tesco, its quite another if you lose, or have stolen an iPhone X, costing nearly $1,000. Of course, the latter point is largely tied to the fact that Apple is a bit like the story of the Emperor's new clothes. What Apple should really be congratulated on is its ability to use hype, and effective marketing and advertising to convince so many millions of people that there was something unique and special about its products, going back to the Apple Mac, which justifies them charging such outlandish prices for those products.

A recent item on CNBC discussed the potential that with the cost of these iPhones now being so high, it was possible that a similar thing as seen with new cars would be introduced. That is instead of actually buying the car/iPhone, consumer are encouraged instead to lease it, and thereby to be tied in to upgrading every two or three years. The technologies developed over the last thirty years, and the development of new materials such as graphene, means that there is still considerable scope for introducing new technologically based commodities, in the next period of economic expansion, but that will require innovation in developing those new products, not simply offering up reheated versions of what already exists. In the meantime, the largest area of expansion is probably not in the realm of actual products, but of new services, of which the development of new apps is simply one part.

The development of Babylon, as a means of people being able to get almost immediate appointments to see a GP, illustrates the way the concepts of flexible specialisation, and neo-fordism, introduced in production from the 1980's onwards, are being applied now to service provision. The cost of DNA sequencing is becoming so cheap, probably falling to around £100 within the next five years, that everyone will have their individual gene sequenced, so as to identify potential health risks, and to provide flexible and specialised treatments for their particular needs, as well as monitoring their biometric, via implants other equipment.

The future holds great prospects.