Apple announced the iPhone 7 on Wednesday and if you didn’t get your feature demands in during the last few days before the event, well… well, you probably know that it takes a lot longer to get features into a smartphone.
Writing for ZDNet two days prior to the iPhone 7 unveiling, Adrian Kingsley-Hughes told us “What the iPhone 7 needs to stay ahead of Android.”
LAZER MONKEYS. ON ROLLERSKATES.
Rather than endlessly debate whether Apple will or won’t remove the headphone jack, let’s look at where Apple is lagging behind flagship Android handset maker Samsung…
Pyrotechnics is a feature.
…and what features it needs to add in order to keep up.
Yes, let’s meet the features! Which, by the way, come from an a few different Android manufacturers, not just Samsung. See, because some of Android’s 9 billion different smartphones have these features, Apple must include all of them. Or it will… uh, well, it’s not really clear what. “Fall behind”, presumably, but Kingsley-Hughes doesn’t say what the ramifications of that are.
Wireless charging
Sure, why not? Clearly everyone loves it when Apple changes power connectivity on their devices.
A new and unique gimmick
Could you be less specific, please? This sort of highly detailed techno-babble is exactly what turns lay people off tech coverage. Let’s stay grounded. Just wave vaguely at the iPhone.
The iPhone, on the other hand, while unique in being an iOS device, is pretty generic. … It’s been copied and cloned so much that it now feels awfully generic.
Now Apple’s being derided for having been copied. Meanwhile, it must keep up with Android OEMs who are copying it. We’ll be lucky if the universe doesn’t fall into this paradox and pop out of existence.
Waterproofing
It seems to come as a bit of a surprise to Apple that people want to take their iPhones into the outdoors, where it sometimes rains.
Really? Because Apple had already quietly made the iPhone 6s more water-resistant than previous generations before it went even further with the iPhone 7. Give them a little credit.
…it seems unlikely that we’ll see an IP68 rated device such as Samsung’s Galaxy S7.
Just missed it by one IP! IP67 ain’t bad, though. (Also, tip o’ the antlers to Joel Teitelbaum who points out that, despite the rating, the S7 failed Consumer Reports’ test of the same conditions.)
Shatterproof screen
…
A sapphire display would be awesome, but a tough display such as that fitted to the Motorola Droid Turbo 2 would do fine.
No, thanks! As the Macalope’s previously noted, non-sapphire shatter-resistant screens are either plastic or thicker. Does plastic and thicker sound like Apple to you? No, it does not.
It’s fine to want these things, but they’re not why people buy iPhones.
They did apparently just quietly make it cheaper to replace a damaged screen, though.
Drop the 16-gigabyte storage option
That happened, except for the iPhone SE which will probably get bumped up when it’s next updated.
Somehow despite not fulfilling everything on Kingsley-Hughes’s list, the Macalope suspects the iPhone 7 will still sell pretty well. Which leads one to wonder why it supposedly should chase the myriad of features Android OEMs slap haphazardly into devices in the first place. When Apple adds a feature, it usually does so with thought. That’s a differentiator its Android competitors have had trouble copying.