Apple’s …Best Small Smartphone but Battery Life 'Leaves Much to Be Desired' reveals its iPhone strategy
Design has always been Apple’s leading distinction. Its all-glass cellphone design is what got Apple into the mobile game. Cellphone sales account for 66% of Apple’s share of worldwide mobile profits. Will it be what keeps them in it?
You are reading this to find out if its really battery and Apple’s use of battery life in its mobile strategy that trumps design. Battery for Apple was mere design constraint at the beginning. Apple users bought into Apple meager battery life as its slim design paradigm. Its iPhones have higher performance, lighter weight and featured as more slim every year. AND its battery life is what kills the thrill when all that performance dies. Performance and slimmer design sells iPhones. Apple’s #1 revenue is iPhone sales!
But its poor battery life enables more iPhone sales. Users trade battery life with iCloud. iCloud is Apple’s unofficial promise of synch-as-backup. Backup it is not nor does Apple advertise it as such. Synch means customers other Apple products can stay up-to-date - current. Apple idevice’s use iCloud synch to keep them all magically current; current as in when you switch devices or you die. SO, backup. See what Apple did there?
Better than improved battery life, Apple has a backup strategy for users to just buy a second idevice. It relies on battery life to ensuring charging drives purchase of that second device to use while the other is charging. Charging built an entire service to users that they can pay to support a backup idevice. Thus charging driven iCloud streams into Apple’s coffers while secondary iDevice sales pad its profit.
iCloud is the subscription that keeps on charging. And iCloud does go down. Synch sucks as a backup strategy, since Apple is very proprietary about what iCloud will synch, er backup. What’s wrong with better battery life? IF you didn’t need to buy a second idevice and pay monthly subscription fee, why would you? Owning that second idevice(s) then makes synch real as an essential service.
Welcome to Apple’s sandbox. AND frustration sells iDevice upgrades when it reaches its peak in the Apple sandbox world when your best camera is charging and your backup idevice pales in comparison or misses a “shot” entirely. Users backup device(s) must either be carefully thought out to support critical usage or pay to upgrade. From the user’s perspective Apple prey on its customer anxiety and frustration with charging. Its strategy is obstacle as ordinary, normal expectation to its idevice upgrade performance roadmap.
Were Apple strategy focused on a twinning of performance and battery life as handmaiden to design, Apple customers could benefit from its R&D innovation. Innovation Apple could use to lead it to new synergies. Synergy could pave the way as its NeXT innovation led it into a new market.
After ten years Apple needs to find its next new product.