Looking Beyond the iPhone

Today is the day. The first iPhone went on sale today, and the world would never be the same.

Over the past few weeks, many journalists have reached out to me for comments, and perspective on the iPhone’s last ten years. Not surprisingly, many of them asked the same question about what’s next? Where do we go that takes us beyond the iPhone? And can anything have the same impact? All fascinating questions, so I figured I’d add some perspective for the next ten years rooted in one of the more important observations I’ve made in recent years.

Connecting the Planet
Many of you have heard me tell this narrative before, but it is worth repeating and reminding, about what is still happening in the world around us.

The recurring debate about iPad vs. laptop continually reminds us of something so many people do not understand. The PC and Mac–for the greater part of the combined ~1.2 billion people who own one–is a work device. For the vast majority of those ~1.2 billion people, their smartphone is their primary computing device. In fact, this number gets even smaller if we just focus on the consumer installed base of PCs and Macs which is about ~700 million. We sometimes gloss over the fact that there are ~2.5 billion people on the planet for whom their smartphone is not just their primary computing device but it is their only computing device. We have successfully connected half the planet thanks to pocket computers, and we still have another 5-7 years to go to connect the other half.

The PC/Mac was a barrier to the Internet for most humans on the planet. The smartphone changed the game and Apple led that change. More interestingly for Apple, the Mac itself was a barrier to their success. The iPhone is the product that changed Apple’s fortunes and will continue down that road for some time. Think about this point in light of the Mac/PC vs. iPad debate. Apple will have ~100m Mac users, maybe ~200-300m iPad users, but in the not too distant future they will have one billion iPhone users. Whether we like it or not, we are still in the iPhone/smartphone epoch.

Consumer Adoption Cycles
The growing disconnect between the Technorati and regular humans who don’t live and breath tech all day understands how technology gets adopted. I appreciate all the industry discussion, and the desire to think about and predict what’s next but where I think there is a grave misunderstanding is the timeline for new technology.

This is where I want to share an important observation related to adoption cycles. Consumers adopt solutions to pain points very quickly. Consumers adopt new experiences very slowly. Any time a consumer is faced with something foreign, or unknown, or viewed as somewhat risky because they don’t know how they will use it, they adopt it very slowly. This is why things like smart watches, future wearables, VR, drones, AR glasses, etc., will have very long adoption cycles. From the viewpoint of how humans behave and adopt technology, the next big thing is still a long way away.

Price, naturally, plays a role in understanding these cycles as well. We have to factor in a humans willingness to adopt something brand new with the timetable to make that technology affordable. An excellent example of this, from recent history, is HDTV. There are few technologies, from the standpoint of objective value, that presented such apparent desire to own to the mainstream market than HDTV. Once you saw HDTV content for yourself, you were sold. Hdtv took ten years to go mainstream in the US, and longer in other markets. This was a combination of price, content, and a few other factors, but the point remains, one of the most compelling visual experiences took ten years to saturate the US market is telling of how slow consumers indeed move.

The Next Big Thing
I’ve said this before, and I believe it is true. The smartphone is still the next big thing. This single device is still poised to disrupt some other markets, and there is still some innovation breakthroughs (in battery tech, material science, silicon, engineering) that need to happen on the smartphone before we can start seriously considering when, and what the next personal computer for the masses will be.

Published by

Ben Bajarin

Ben Bajarin is a Principal Analyst and the head of primary research at Creative Strategies, Inc - An industry analysis, market intelligence and research firm located in Silicon Valley. His primary focus is consumer technology and market trend research and he is responsible for studying over 30 countries. Full Bio

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *