The new iPhones look like the old iPhones. They sound like the old iPhones. They do the same things as the old iPhones. Just slightly better, more colorfully, and less expensively than the old iPhones. This might seem disappointing: even Apple’s phones are boring now. But this is an ideal state of affairs.
The original iPhone, released in June, 2007, gave birth to the modern smartphone era: browsing restaurant menus on a sidewalk, watching a movie on a bus, tweeting from the subway and posting photos of a newborn to Facebook the second it opens its eyes. What we can do now, six years later, has not fundamentally changed since then. It’s easier or faster—forty times faster, according to Apple—or higher resolution, or all of the above. To wit, the iPhone 5S has few genuinely new features, and those that it does have are nearly invisible. In order of importance, they are: a built-in fingerprint scanner to replace passwords, faster chips, a higher-quality camera, and a gold body. The iPhone 5C is essentially the exact same as the current iPhone 5, but shoved into a brightly colored plastic, rather than aluminum, shell and sold for a hundred dollars less than before.
Fundamental technology, like manufacturing processes for processors and imaging sensors and displays, have evolved to the point that the basic shape and sense of a phone—a thin rectangle with a four-to-five-inch high-resolution touch screen stuffed with a variety of sensors—is determined now largely based on its merits rather than its outright technical limitations, much the same way that the basic shape of a knife is defined by its function rather than our ability to produce it. (The biggest technical limitation for mobile devices now is battery technology, which has not seen a true breakthrough in decades.)
The result is twofold: phones have matured to the point that, until a truly radical breakthrough in computing technology occurs, there is not much left to improve on, and even the baseline phones are relatively high quality now. The iPhone 5, the writer Ben Thompson points out, is the “first iPhone that Apple believes is ‘good enough,’ ” which is why Apple was finally comfortable using it as the basis of a brand-new, lower-cost phone. (This same process has occurred with laptops as well: the MacBook Air, arguably the gold standard in laptops, has not fundamentally changed in years, while even lower-cost machines from P.C. manufacturers are generally good now.)
The march of progress here is not as plodding as it might seem, however: technology companies have, in the span of just a half dozen years for the smartphone, and just a couple of years for tablets, refined radical reductions of computing as we knew it into experiences that both increasingly approach common appliances in their simplicity and traditional computers in their full-blown utility. Despite being hopelessly complex to manufacture, for users, smartphones are closer to a toaster than they are to a room-sized mainframe computer of yore in nearly every conceivable way; this is the basis of Apple’s initially bewildering ad campaign that essentially highlighted how delightfully mundane using an iPhone is.
And, for the next few years, advances in smartphones and tablets will continue to be subtle and iterative, driven by the twin processes of simplification and connection. The advanced Touch ID fingerprint sensor built into the 5S’s home button, while a seemingly basic technology (it replaces your password with your thumbprint in a handful of very specific applications) is a perfectly representative feature. Today, it’s merely a convenience, since putting your thumb where it goes a hundred times a day anyway is less annoying than typing in a password. But it’s also a step closer to the day when we no longer have to remember or store dozens of passwords—a fundamental reinvention of the way we approach identity and computer security on a daily, even hourly, basis. It breaks down one of the barriers between humans and our machines.
The general completion of the grander project of transforming phones into fully functional, easy-to-use computers has a more remarkable upside, in that technology companies can focus on inventing something else. One obvious future for computers is toward something like Google Glass or that’s wrapped around our wrists. Oddly, even before it’s arrived, the notion of an era of wearable computers already seems a little boring—remarkably like tiny iPhones bolted to our heads and fastened to our wrists. But there may be no better sign of progress than when the future feels mundane: it grants you the license to invent a new one.
Saturday, September 14, 2013 at 4:41PM 
