When Apple revealed its latest iPhone lineup during their annual September event, I was forced to reckon with an uncomfortable yet inevitable realization: new technology just isn’t all that exciting anymore. This is especially disappointing because only a couple decades ago, technological innovation was one of the most exciting points of discussion and speculation as we watched it consistently evolve and change our lives in mind-blowing ways.
Apple is no stranger to changing the world. Consider what is almost certainly the most influential piece of hardware created across the last two decades: the original iPhone.
When Steve Jobs introduced the world to the iPhone back in 2007, it was immediately clear that something was different about this piece of tech. Even the way that Jobs built up to the special moment, in which he stated that the company would reveal three revolutionary products — a widescreen iPod with touch controls, a unique mobile phone and a breakthrough Internet communications device — before revealing that these three concepts were one unified product called the iPhone, signalled something stood out about this announcement. The crowd realized this too, bursting into genuinely excited applause that tech reveals just don’t seem to create anymore.
Indeed, the iPhone was more than a gimmick or a fad. It solved problems that consumers didn’t realize they had — it made it unfathomably easy to send a text message on the fly, conduct Internet searches while on a taxi to work and have a constant source of entertainment without needing to carry a dedicated gaming device. These are all things that may seem like no-brainers today, but I’d argue that this evergreen simplicity is exactly what makes a concept stand the test of time.
Compare this to the reveal of the iPhone 17. Arguably, its biggest improvement over the iPhone 16 is that it now brings ProMotion (a 120Hz screen rather than 60Hz, meaning movement on the screen is smoother) to the base model iPhones for the first time — a feature that’s already been available on the more expensive iPhone “Pro” lineup for years.
In a reductionist view, this isn’t a huge problem. Technically, it’s true that this feature makes the iPhone 17 objectively superior to its direct predecessor. The problem is that this isn’t remotely exciting to anyone who isn’t already a tech enthusiast; it’s not going to capture the attention of anyone who’s on the search for the next piece of technology that will change their life. Even those who see a 120Hz screen as a necessity acknowledge that the everyday Apple consumer just doesn’t care.
This is a sign that, barring those inevitable incremental upgrades that continue to be made year after year, the evolution of the iPhone has reached a plateau. The era of the iPhone being a product that genuinely changes the world is behind us; now, all the “ooh”s and “ahh”s are reserved for quality-of-life changes like Center Stage, which allows you to take horizontal selfies while comfortably holding your phone in an upright position.
Despite the assurance from the hardcore tech community that this is actually a big deal, I’m not convinced that these sorts of features are legitimately worth getting excited over. Like the 120Hz refresh rate, it’s tough to deny that Center Stage is a nice inclusion, but that’s about all it is. I’m not going to shell out $1,129 CAD for the ability to be slightly more comfortable when taking landscape selfies.
To be fair, it’s not like tech companies have given up entirely on trying to change the world. Even so often, we see a major company try their hand at legitimate innovation and we get a glimmer of hope for the future of technology. Unfortunately, many of these new pieces of tech seem to be innovating for the sake of innovation rather than actually changing the world.
Take Samsung’s somewhat recent foray into folding phones, which began in 2019 with the disastrous launch of the original Galaxy Fold. This article isn’t meant to discuss product failures or controversies — in fact, I commend Samsung for daring to attempt something so fresh that it opened themselves up to technical problems unheard of within the tried-and-true formula of the smartphone industry. To their credit, those problems have been mostly remedied now that they’ve had significant experience with folding phones.
The issue I have with the Galaxy Fold lineup (and folding phones in general) is that unlike the original iPhone, they attempt to solve a problem that doesn’t exist. The idea of unfolding your phone to unlock a double-wide screen is certainly leagues more exciting than incremental improvements like the vapour cooling chamber recently announced for the iPhone 17 Pro, but it still fails to innovate in a way that is going to make a lasting impression on our social and cultural landscape. It’s no secret that average smartphones have been getting bigger for some time. With each passing year, less and less everyday consumers are encountering problems associated with having a small display on their smartphone.
Of course, the 8.0” screen size reached with an unfolded Galaxy Z Fold 7 would be quite difficult to muster in a traditional non-folding smartphone, but I wonder why people need that amount of space on the go anyway. The increasing size of traditional smartphones seems to be enough for average consumers, many of whom already have tablets, laptops or even larger displays prepared for home or office work anyway.
Going back to Apple, another example of “change for the sake of change” can be seen in the Apple Vision Pro, another admirable attempt at technological innovation that falls flat when attempting to justify the hardware’s existence in any practical sense. I won’t deny that the tech behind the Vision Pro is pretty amazing, but as a finished product on store shelves, it offers nearly no features that appeal to average consumers that can’t already be accomplished more easily by the technology they already own.
For example, the Vision Pro can send text messages and conduct Internet searches in an augmented-reality space using a fully virtual keyboard. That’s pretty cool from a technical perspective, but I see no reason to ever pull out a clunky headset to do so when I could complete the same tasks more comfortably using my iPhone — not to mention the virtual keyboard on the Vision Pro struggles in terms of speed and accuracy.
The same can be said for getting work done. Sure, I could write this article wearing a heavy headset with two hours of battery life, but I’m much more comfortable doing so on my laptop, which is reliable for much more heavy usage. Once again, the Vision Pro proves itself as an option to get things done, but it’s certainly not the only way to complete those tasks, nor is it even the definitive way to get them done.
Again, the defining theme of prudent hardware innovation is that genuine innovation should solve problems that we as consumers don’t even know we have. Products like the Galaxy Fold and Apple Vision Pro attempt to justify themselves simply by being something new rather than solving problems that become obvious in hindsight.
The unfortunate reality of technical innovation is that hardware has reached a point that seemed unfathomable only 10 years ago: it’s become stagnant. It’s possible that tech manufacturers like Apple and Samsung have decided that genuine innovation isn’t profitable when they could instead deliver incremental updates on tried-and-true product categories year after year, but I fear an even more unnerving thought: we might have reached a point where leading technology companies have simply run out of ideas.
Sadly, the days of tech visionaries like Steve Jobs appear to be behind us. Maybe the tech leaders of today simply aren’t as creative as their predecessors, or maybe hardware has simply reached an inevitable point where it’s difficult to make any meaningful improvements — either way, I think it’ll be a long time before there’s a new hardware reveal that gets the world jumping off their couches in excitement.