By John Gruber
WorkOS: APIs to ship SSO, SCIM, FGA, and User Management in minutes. Check out their launch week.
On Today’s Curious Wall Street Journal Report Claiming the Next iPhone Will Replace Lightning Port With USB-C
Tuesday, 28 February 2017
Takashi Mochizuki, reporting for The Wall Street Journal:
People familiar with Apple’s plans said the iPhone releases this year would include two models with the traditional LCD and a third one with an OLED screen.
Exactly in line with Ming Chi Kuo’s report from a few weeks ago:
- A single new high-end (and higher-priced) iPhone with a physical width similar to that of an iPhone 7, but with an edge-to-edge design that allows for a display closer in size to a 7 Plus. (I’m guessing “iPhone Pro”.)
Two new models similar to the current iPhone 7 and 7 Plus (presumably the “7S” and “7S Plus”).
They said Apple would introduce other updates including a USB-C port for the power cord and other peripheral devices, instead of the company’s original Lightning connector. The models would also do away with a physical home button, they said. Those updates would give the iPhone features already available on other smartphones.
This is a terribly-written paragraph. The iPhone 7 and 7 Plus already have no physical home button. Is he saying the Touch ID sensor is going away? Which new iPhones is Mochizuki claiming will have USB-C ports instead of Lightning? Only the high-end OLED model with the edge-to-edge display, or all three? It doesn’t make much sense to me that Apple would switch any iPhone to USB-C, but if they’re going to switch one, they should switch all of them.
If Apple had any plans to switch from Lightning to USB-C, why wouldn’t they have switched last year with the iPhone 7, when they started making tens of millions of pairs of Lightning ear buds? Why did they put a Lightning port on the AirPods case? My expectation has been that iPhones will never switch to USB-C — that Apple would stick with Lightning until they can do away with external ports entirely.
I have no inside dope on this, but it rings false to my ears. If there’s any truth to it, I’d bet that this year’s iPhones will ship with USB-C chargers, that use a USB-C to Lightning cable to connect to the phones. That makes sense, given that Apple has dropped USB-A ports from the newest MacBook models.
Using OLED displays would allow Apple to introduce a phone with a new look to fuel sales. Apple’s last major design overhaul came with the iPhone 6, a slimmer phone with larger displays that helped reignite sales growth and propel the company to record profit. The iPhone 7, introduced in September 2016, came with a similar design to its predecessor, contributing to slower sales in China. Analysts say Chinese consumers feel more motivated to buy a new phone when it has a different look that gives it appeal as a status symbol.
I get it. All things considered, a new iPhone that looks new is going to be more exciting than one that re-uses an existing design. I also get that, for cultural reasons, this is particularly true in China. (Ben Thompson has been emphasizing this for years.)
But this idea that anything short of a radically new design is bad for Apple just isn’t true. Based on the above passage, a reader would logically conclude that iPhones sales are down because the industrial design is too similar to its predecessor. But Apple just reported the highest iPhone sales in a quarter ever. Again, if they can meet demand, an exciting new hardware design should drive sales even higher — but it’s completely wrong to suggest that the similar-to-the-6/6S design of the iPhone 7 has led to a slump.