A few weeks ago, Apple introduced two new phones, the iPhones 7 and 7 Plus. On its own, this news isn't something I'd normally write about, with my once-a-week, few thousand words posting format. That said, it has created some interesting questions about the smartphone market and about people who don't just have or use an iPhone, but rely on it as their primary or only form of communication, or even their only form of computing.
This is intriguing to me, because a lot of people talk about this market as though low income buyers are using Android devices. In fact, it's generally a point of pride to promoters of the Android ecosystem (themselves using high end Samsung Galaxy and Google-branded Nexus devices) that Android has a large market share because low income and young people choose it, for its low cost. I suspect that there's shades of truth to this, but that it's not, as many claim, the whole story. A lot of the least expensive devices get saddled with Android because there's no other viable operating system. A Windows Phone won't sell, and so only Nokia or Microsoft itself is going to bother with that, feature phones don't sell these days, and of course, Apple won't license iOS to makers of other handsets.
But, I think that all of this presumes something pretty big: that low income people will definitely gravitate toward less expensive phones, or perhaps more dangerously, that low income people should, for some reason, only be allowed to have and use inexpensive phones. Ignoring the inherent potential for a whole lot of classism in that idea, it's intriguing to hear that this market might not be staying away from iPhone in the numbers that Android people think they should be, or are. Someone is, but I don't believe that it's exclusively confined to "low income" people.
Since the iPhones 7 were announced, and even a little bit before, The Verge has been taking it upon itself to act as the team to tell everybody how bad an idea this has been on Apple's part. Nilay Patel's review of the device mentions the lack of the headphone jacks, and related issues, several times. More recently, The Verge published this, an overview of the social problems the iPhone 7 could be creating for customers that don't just happen to randomly have $39-49 laying around for an adapter. This, a market already hurt by Apple's inability or refusal to build good Lightning cords to begin with. This is all amid other reporting The Verge has done with shows the publication's clear stance against Apple in this particular matter. A hilarious situation, especially given Verge's typical agreement with everything Apple does.
The core of this discussion is that it's going to cost too much, and look too ridiculous, and there'll be too many parts that can fail or get lost, for Apple to continue on this particular courageous path. In particular, the ability to use the phone and run it on power or charge it at the same time. This is particularly applicable, say, in a car, but there are plenty of situations where normal people would want to do this. I've been playing Pokémon Go this way, but I also listen to music with my phone plugged in at night, and I use the headset to make phone calls and do audio/video conferencing while I'm at home all the time. I run my own iPhone on power at work, but this isn't an opportunity everybody has, and many of these people's use usage is more critical or demanding of an iPhone's battery life. For example, people using it to keep in contact with family, or people using it to apply for jobs and coordinate for care of their children, would want to have as much of the battery available when they got out of the car or left their home. And this is a market that definitely can't solve the problem by running out and replacing the $4 headset they bought at the grocery store with a pair of AirPods, or another wireless headset.
I often talk about computers that, themselves, cost under $300 or so, which frequently gets bandied about as a solution for "low income" people, but I think what's actually happening with $300-and-less laptops is people who already have computers and who already have a wireline connection and a Wi-Fi router at home are buying these things as second or third computers. That market is a little more likely to just be able to buy a $600 laptop, if the need was there.
So, when you talk about the smartphone-reliant crowd, you're really talking about people who have a smartphone, and don't have Wi-Fi at home, sometimes there are several people sharing the same smartphone, or several smartphones on a family plan, and so data caps are hit often. Plans are suspended and additional fees are charged. This is probably the group Verizon is talking to when it asks, rhetorically, why "unlimited" matters when it's on a cut-rate network.
As far as I know, The Verge hasn't gone so far as to call into question the value of the things Apple was able, courageously, to gain with the removal of the headphone jack. For the most part, it appears that the Taptic Engine has grown, the battery has grown slightly, and there was one less (apparently not too concerning) place to seal off for the iPhone's water resistance.
To me, the whole thing wasn't too concerning until I read The Verge's take on it in $40 too far. It was at that point I remembered all the times I use my iPhone like that, and that while I'm not normally smartphone reliant, there are important and often big times when a smartphone is the only device I have. In a lot of these cases, it doesn't even make sense to unplug the phone, because I'm not going anywhere, and it'll be the only device I'll use for a long time.
Among technically oriented people, there's a lot of backlash against the idea of smartphone-dependent people. Gruber's posts about the iPhone 7 have ranged from ambivalent to outright derisive of The Verge and their stance on the issue, and he hasn't posted about $40 too far at all.
I think Gruber, and many, think it's a non-issue. If people find themselves in need of a headphone jack, many appear to just think they'll buy a different phone. This is a noble and possible idea, but it ignores the massive cost involved in switching platforms. Core services make it easy to hop phones, even most of Microsoft and Google's own. It's things like for-pay games, or games and apps that exist only on the iPhone. In addition, many people who have been using iPhones for a while, or perhaps also have an iPad, may have a fair amount invested in things like Lightning FM transmitters, extra Apple or Belkin Lightning cables, and so on. Moving to a new type of phone, even without the Apple software ecosystem, could be a costly proposal in terms of building up a new hardware ecosystem.
I think there's probably a lot of good to be said about the iPhone 7. Unfortunately, I don't think the headphone jack is one of them. Even if one of the silver-linings is that Apple's now cheapest piece of hardware is the new Lightning to 3.5mm jack adapter.