Update: Apple has now announced the new iPhone X and iPhone 8 range. Read our comparison of the iPhone X vs the iPhone 8 and iPhone 7 for more info.
While I’m looking forward to the upcoming announcement of the iPhone 8 (or iPhone X... or just iPhone), as a potential customer I’ve become more and more dissatisfied with the iPhone’s lack of real character or differentiation, despite its engineering excellence and technological prowess. Though there’s promise of technological advancements, like bezel-less screen and augmented reality integration, I fear we’re on an inevitable race to what I call the ‘zero product’: an undifferentiated (in any meaningful sense) ‘all screen’ solution that’s been predicted in sci-fi movies for more than 20 years. There’s no denying that these blocks of technology bring amazing power and utility into our lives. But as they’ve moved rapidly from early-adopter tech hero to essential everyday tool there’s an argument for something that can deliver beyond the technological utility and uniform desirability. Something more personal, differentiated and meaningful to each of us. People are increasingly seeking individualised products and the current solution of snapping on a new smartphone case just doesn’t seem like the right answer anymore. We’ve seen this pattern happen before. If you look at other products that were once seen as technologically advanced in the last century – toasters, radios, personal cassette players and TVs – they went through a cycle of development to a point where the optimal paradigm was reached and variety and personalisation took over as the pace of any fundamental change in the product architype slowed.
The journey to the zero product is driven by technological advances that began with the arrival of semiconductors in the 1950s. They enabled the miniaturisation of products by allowing components that where once made from multiple parts, like the valve/vacuum tube, to be replaced by more elemental components built entirely from a single material, like the solid-state transistor. Memory is a good example of this process. Over the last five years hard drives in consumer laptops have transitioned from multiple-part drives with spinning discs and read/write head to single component solid state drives. As the components that we build into products evolve, they continue to deliver miniaturisation that drives us to zero products and also means some disappear altogether. Once discreet and separate products like cameras and MP3 players get absorbed into smartphones or speakers, differentiation becomes more and more difficult. This shift to more elemental singular products is also driven from a design philosophy promoted by Dieter Rams in the 1960s and driven in no small part by the Apple design team’s push to eliminate split lines and visible fastenings. Just compare its titanium PowerBook from 2001 with the MacBook Pros of today to see the progression to a seamless product. This approach is optimised in the current iPhone 7 design, particularly the gloss black version where glass, aluminium and plastic are blended almost seamlessly in terms of form, colour and finish.
Read more: This is one of the most complex wristwatches ever made
The same is happening with TVs, the other great screen-dominant product, which is moving from LCD (with its separate polarising filters and liquid crystal display, back lighting) to OLED, which is fabricated from a single layer of light-emitting material. As display technology changes, thickness has reduced along with bezel size to drive them to the zero product. The biggest challenge of a TV designer used to be how to visually reduce the bulk of a CRT based TV. Now it’s about how to find space to fit the company logo on something with no bezel.
When the display comes close to a zero product, companies have to look beyond the screen to differentiate themselves from the competition. It’s perhaps a reason why so much of the differentiation of today's TV designs is driven by stands rather than screens. Case in point, Samsung recently ran a public competition to design a new stand for one of its TVs. So how can the smartphone avoid getting stuck in the race to zero product uniformity? Well, we could try to engineer a better phone than Apple. Good luck with that. Or wait for a new technology that’s exclusive to a single company. Again, good luck with that (although Samsung’s doing a good job with its infinity displays). Perhaps we could take a look at how niche brands with a stronger, more focused purpose are able to differentiate. UK-based amplifier brand Marshall has built on its rich heritage in music to differentiate its smartphone, while the Hydrogen Red has a focus on high-end filming and a holographic lens. But then again, they’re not in the zero product race where differentiation is incredibly difficult to achieve. Just designers at Apple, Samsung or Huawei how they’re struggling to create anything unique or individual when they are on the same zero product track and have the same ingredients to play with and share the same build methodologies/manufacturing techniques. Apple established the rules and now most brand accept them.
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I think the answer lies in taking inspiration from other mature industries that excel at delivering differentiation and personalisation in a single product category, like the watch. Apple has already had some success with its own take on the watch. In one product, it managed to deliver a sense of individualism and personalisation through exceptional design and a selection of materials, colours, finishes, accessories and collaborations with other brands. But it’s even more interesting when you look at the watch industry as a whole. The watch market functions with a few dominant watch movement makers such as ETA, Ronda, Miyota and Seiko. They either supply exclusively to multiple watch brands within their group or direct to any brand that wants to create its own watch. These receiving brands then case-up the movements within their own watch designs, enabling a proliferation of styles that suit their target customers and their brand’s own personality without the incredibly high R&D costs and engineering expertise needed to create the functioning heart of the watch: the movement. The car industry is another that leverages a core platform – the chassis, drive train, et cetera – to deliver more product variation to suit different customer needs and desires. At the very beginnings of the car industry, Henry Ford delivered a mass product in the form of a single model T; it only came in one colour, but had a sufficient product-market fit. He progressed to use the model T as a platform to deliver multiple body styles from two-door, four-door, pick-ups and roasters to suit different customers tastes and needs. And that’s something the car industry continues to do today. I’d argue there is an opportunity for the flagship smartphone brands to open up their hardware. Under this model, the phone is considered rather like a watch movement or car platform, a key piece of enabling technology that delivers the functionality, but where select partner brands can case-up these phone movements to help deliver more differentiation and personalisation. Apple has collaborated with brands such as Leica, Burberry, Hermes and Nike in the past, so perhaps now is the time to start thinking about collaborating on a more fundamental level. Rather than Made for iPhone maybe it’s time for a Made with iPhone program to deliver the diversity and individuality we will increasingly crave in a fast approaching zero product world.
Matthew Cockerill is creative director at London-based product design firm Seymourpowell
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
