Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Why the iPhone isn’t good anymore”.
What we’re going to do is get rid of all these buttons and just make a giant screen, and today we’re introducing the iPhone 3G. The iPhone 3GS iPhone 4 iPhone 4S iPhone 5.. It’S the best iPhone that we have ever created the iPhone 14 pro we’re a few months now from the iPhone 15 coming out. The rumors are going nuts, we’ve got new buttons, USB type c and some camera changes and for the first time in a lot of years, I’m not that excited for new hardware, but I’m excited for the phone and what the phones can do and I think that’s Something that I wanted to talk to you guys about, but phones are boring and that’s okay and it’s time to embrace the boringness of them and appreciate the incredible wonder that these things can do so.
I was talking to a friend who is being pressured by his family to switch to an iPhone. According to him, they were sick of the green bubbles um. His first smartphone was a Samsung and he just like stuck with Samsung all the way through not of any allegiance to Samsung or Android. Just it was what he knew, so he kept going and buying new ones uh. So he called me – and he asked me about the iPhone and kind of explained to him what was going on with the iPhone 14 and his reply was sounded boring and I thought about that.
One for a while we talked about it here in the studio for a while and kind of these videos are a chance to talk to you like. I would talk to a friend and I guess it was right. It is kind of boring the more I thought about it. It’S also kind of the point now the hardware on its own might be boring, but the iPhone experience is anything but I mean I remember how hyped I was for. Like early generation iPhones, I mean camping out for almost a full day to get the iPhone 3G. The iPhone 3GS iPhone 4.. How excited I was when that happened, and then, when they couldn’t activate the device in store, how devastated uh, I felt being so pumped for the first pixel phone that came out the first Galaxy full. I was salivating that excitement and that feeling doesn’t exist anymore.
It just been changed to something different. I think that is still totally okay. I have been guilty and you probably said the same said like X, phone is boring and it is insane to say that when these rectangles bring us the world’s information at our fingertips – and I’m not just talking like iPhones here at all but like most phones – are Boring now the iPhone is boring, and I’m just talking about the iPhone generally in this article. Why are they still selling millions of devices um? This is kind of what kind of brought all this together.
So, on my podcast I host with Andrew Edwards, we had Sam Cohen as a guest. They were talking about iPhone 15 Pro rumors, and these two got pumped up about buttons on the side like hyped about buttons, a switch is gon na go away. It’S gon na become a button. It looks like what do you think about this? I’M kind of excited.
What do you think of this yeah? I mean it looks great, I’m very, very excited it’s the biggest change to buttons on the iPhone since 2007.. John is already smiling at my uh, my my take on it. I can tell both you said how excited you are for buttons on an iPhone. I didn’t say I was excited we’re talking about excited here, we’re talking about buttons on an iPhone that change the volume and the mute switch that you’ll probably put in mute and never touch again made me laugh. I called him out on a little bit but like come on. If this is what excites us now about phones, things have gotten so mundane phones have become so powerful and so competent they’ve just become tools for other things.
The fact that we even call them phones now uh seems borderline silly right. Making phone calls is probably one of the lowest things on your priority list for your phone. So I can see the comments like.
What’S the point John um, I’m gon na get there, but let me ask you this: what are like the three most common things that you do on your phone? I’M gon na just assume it’s some combo of like messaging social media, browsing camera, video watching or some other third-party app. That is exactly the point. Phones have done so well and gotten so good at their function.
Their main job now is to be a portal for third parties to flex and bring the excitement to them. We’Ve come so far along. The phones are like a Gateway now, not necessarily like the main tool anymore, and that alone is wild to me. But like think about it, could you imagine your phone without Tick Tock without Instagram that YouTube Spotify? I think it’s hard to imagine these devices without those third-party apps that can bring the excitement and, if you’ve been around, to see the smartphone Evolution.
This is wild. I’M not just talking iPhone in 2007, but, like smartphones, existed before then Blackberry, Symbian operating system Windows, mobile uh, even Palm. These are devices that relied on their maker dictate most their functionality uh, and they set the stage for where things sort of ultimately became did have some third-party apps in there. But it was the App Store on the iPhone 3G that kind of changed everything in 2008.. Before that, we got excited by these new devices themselves because they were brand new accessing real Internet on the Go was like a incredibly novel feature like I remember getting hyped when I finally got MMS on the iPhone uh, and then we got video recording.
It was like record-breaking things that were happening like let’s freaking go but now excited about buttons. The fact that we’re getting USBC on an iPhone which, in the grand scheme of capacity decade and a half seems silly but just a device like itself right now. It’S the apps that are fueling.
This excitement just been switched over. You can edit movies on the iPad. That’S dope! Thanks lumafusion. We can edit photos like a desktop PC, Adobe, appreciate it um.
I can get sucked into three hour time vacuum. Yes, thanks Tick Tock, and I think that use case is amazing, even on the lowest cost phones out there, the processors are so capable they have eight gigabytes of RAM almost at a minimum. Right now the screens are at minimum 720p. The cameras are still pretty usable. Any phone that you can get is going to be some version of good and that’s a really cool place to be and sort of to illustrate how much we are using these phones.
Over 3.8 trillion hours were spent using mobile apps during 2021. That was actually a study done by uh app Annie and the average person spent 4.8 hours a day on their mobile phone last year. That was up about 30 from the previous year.
Social photo and video apps like Facebook, Tick, Tock and YouTube uh were by far obviously the most popular mobile apps. That’S nuts, the whole point here and something I’m going to try to do more of remember what your phones can do it shouldn’t matter to my friend or his family, whether he’s using an Android or an iPhone. That’S not the exciting part generation to generation changes. I don’t think matter anymore, what’s exciting, with these phones can do now, it’s like getting into a sports car and being excited about the car itself, but never driving it. It’S the drive, that’s kind of gotten me excited and kind of realization that it almost doesn’t matter anymore. What phone you have your experience on that device? Yeah you’ve got iMessage and all that kind of stuff people use, but it’s the apps that are making these phones matter they’re.
Making these phones exciting. That sort of get me excited to see. What’S going to come next, you don’t have to wait, usually a full 12 months for a new phone to come out. These apps are getting updated, weekly monthly uh every other month. There’S always new things coming, and that is awesome. I think that phones become commoditized.
It’S often referred to as a negative thing, but the more I thought about and talked to my friend, like I’m, trying to talk to you guys as a friend the more exciting I got. So I’m gon na try to be less guilty of calling phones, boring and more acknowledge the awesomeness that you can do on these devices. Whether you spend 200 bucks or two thousand dollars you’re going to have an experience that you could not have back in 2007 and earlier, and I think that alone is really awesome.
So this kind of led into the thought of like. Where do we go from here? If phones are getting boring, phones themselves are becoming monotonous. Like where’s. The next thing that’s going to drive this excitement and it depends on who you ask. Is it is it AR? Is it VR? Is it a headset, we’re going to wear? Is it glasses, or is it something entirely new and different? Looking at the scope of Technology where it’s heading and where it’s going there’s a lot of reasons to be excited just because the phone is boring doesn’t mean your experience on that device has to be boring.
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