The iPhone X is the Beginning of the End for Phones
Another year, another phone announcement. On September 12 Apple unveiled its tenth-anniversary iPhone fittingly named the ‘iPhone X’ and showed off what it calls the “future of phones” featuring a fancy edge-to-edge screen and futuristic augmented reality cameras.

But while I was watching the event, all I could think about was that this phone might be the last smartphone to matter at all. That it marks the beginning of the end of phones as we know it, and we’re at the precipice of them just becoming tools.

What triggered this response wasn’t so much that the iPhone X was amazing — it’s that Apple figured out how to put cellular into a Watch.

Smartphones, as a category, are racing to the bottom. Each other year a trend sets the stage for what phone makers will try to cram in to help market yet another phone in various different ways.

The big trend a few years ago was high-end fingerprint unlocking (started by Touch ID), followed by focusing on camera performance, and now, cramming as much screen onto the front of the device as possible. Bezel-less phones are here, and they’re a thing.

Essential, Samsung and LG have all released phones with ‘edge-to-edge’ displays that look so similar to each other it’s hard to even make an informed decision anymore.

Do you want a black rectangle or a white one? A slightly bigger rectangle or a thinner rectangle? The rectangle with a camera bump or without it?

We’ve seen this before. In around 2004, suddenly computers became boring after being a hot-ticket item you’d need to replace every year or two. Intel’s dual-core processors hit the market and suddenly meant that upgrading your computer didn’t really mean much anymore because your old one was ‘good enough’ and continued to work for many more years.

As a result, the PC market collapsed almost entirely over the following years.

HP, one of the world’s biggest laptop makers, imploded.

Sony pulled out of the industry.

Toshiba continues to be in chaos to this day.
['Owen Williams']
['Future', 'Apple', 'Tech', 'Technology', 'Startup']