When Apple Inc launches its much-anticipated 10th-anniversary iPhone this autumn, it is to offer an unwitting lesson in how much the smartphone industry it pioneered has matured.
The new iPhone is expected to include new features such as high-resolution displays, wireless charging and 3D sensors.
However, rather than representing major breakthroughs most of the innovations have been available in competing phones for several years.
Apple’s relatively slow adoption of new features both reflects and reinforces the fact that smartphone customers are holding onto their phones longer.
Upward of 40 percent of iPhones on the market are more than two years old, a historic high, Cowen & Co analyst Timothy Arcuri said.
Still, the development and rollout of the anniversary iPhone suggest that Apple’s product strategy is driven less by technological innovation than by consumer upgrade cycles, and Apple’s own business and marketing needs.
“When a market gets saturated, the growth is all about refresh,” Technalysis Research’s Bob O’Donnell said. “This is exactly what happened to PCs. It’s exactly what happened to tablets. It’s starting to happen to smartphones.”
Apple is close-mouthed about upcoming product features, but analysts and reports from Asian component suppliers and others indicate that high-resolution displays based on OLED technology — possibly with curved edges — are likely to be part of the anniversary phone.
A radical new design is not expected, analysts said.
Some of the anticipated new technologies, notably wireless charging, remain messy.
Samsung Electronics Co smartphones, for example, feature wireless charging, but support two different sets of standards, one called Qi and the other AirFuel.
Apple recently joined the group backing Qi, but there are still at least five different groups working on wireless charging technology within Apple, a person with knowledge of the matter said.
As to 3D sensors, there is already one hiding in the iPhone 7.
The front camera features what is known as a time-of-flight sensor, which helps it autofocus and is used in numerous smartphones, including the BlackBerry, according to TechInsights, a firm that examines the chips inside tech devices.
That sensor could be upgraded to a higher-resolution version that could handle 3D mapping for facial recognition, TechInsights vice president Jim Morrison said.
Some analysts also say that Apple could remove the phone’s home button, placing it and a fingerprint sensor beneath the front display glass, based on patents the company has filed.
Global smartphone sales were up only 2.3 percent to 1.47 billion units last year, according to IDC.
Many carriers in the US have stopped subsidizing phones, causing phone buyers to think harder about their next purchase.
Apple will likely make a heavy marketing push at the time of the phone’s 10th anniversary.
“iPhone set the standard for mobile computing in its first decade and we are just getting started. The best is yet to come,” Apple chief executive officer Tim Cook said in a statement on Jan. 8, the date the iPhone was announced by then-chief executive officer Steve Jobs in 2007.
The company continues to excel at selling higher-priced smartphones.
Apple chief financial officer Luca Maestri attributed the most recent quarter’s record-setting 78.3 million iPhones sold to the iPhone 7 Plus, which for the first time included a new dual camera feature not found in other models.
The iPhone 7 Plus tops out at US$969 with memory upgrades and a jet black finish.
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