TOBY SHAPSHAK: Has smartphone innovation peaked?
Has smartphone innovation — along with our interest in these digital heroin dispensers — peaked?
As expected ... I began writing about this month’s iPhone Xs launch and realised that phrase summed up the past few years of Apple product launches. The Steve Jobs years were marked not only by his showmanship but by his iron-clad insistence on secrecy. No supplier would dare leak details about upcoming product launches. When an iPhone was mistakenly left in a bar one year, it was thought to be a guerrilla marketing ploy because there was no way Jobs would ever have tolerated such an indiscretion. By the time the 2018 models were unveiled almost all the specs, colours, screen sizes and other pertinent information was known to Apple rumour-mongers. What does it mean? Has Apple peaked? Has smartphone innovation peaked, or are we over it? Perhaps, for some, those years of the "hype cycle", as analysts Gartner call the trajectory of new technology and its uptake by society, have made people weary. The rate of innovation has slowed, not least because the early years were so frenetic and ...
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