The full-screen iPhone is getting closer to you, but Steve Jobs' Apple is getting farther and farther away from you

The decline of Apple’s mobile phone business shown by the sluggish market performance of iPhone 8 may really be just an illusion, because the upcoming iPhone X with a full-screen design will be the real protagonist.

From iPhone 6 to iPhone 8, after four years of seeing Apple phones with nesting doll-like designs, the iPhone X, which carries the significance of the tenth anniversary, can be considered a qualified product no matter how you look at it.

However, does the 10th anniversary iPhone that Tim Cook considers satisfactory also qualify in the eyes of Steve Jobs?

The 10th anniversary of the iPhone: From innovator to follower

The iPhone is still the best smartphone in the world, but today's Apple no longer has the courage to make great products.

During the Steve Jobs era, “A Phone, an iPod, an Internet Communicator” redefined the form of mobile phones. The subsequent App Store opened up a new way to use smartphones. Innovative measures such as retina displays and the use of a variety of body materials have directly influenced the development of the technology industry to this day.

Coincidentally, when Apple removed the halo of Steve Jobs, its most representative product, the iPhone, also reached a turning point in its development, which was particularly evident when Tim Cook released the iPhone 6.

By increasing the screen size and adding the Plus model, Apple chose to catch up with the large-screen mobile phone craze that has swept the Android camp. The all-metal integrated body and the subsequent addition of dual cameras to the iPhone 7 Plus cannot be regarded as epoch-making innovations. In fact, Apple has not been able to make the best large-screen design mobile phone or dual-camera mobile phone.

The iPhone X is certainly more photogenic than Cook's previous creations, but the full screen, or more precisely, the full screen with a notch, is still not perfect, because essentially, the idea of ​​a full screen is already common in today's Android world.

What is more terrible than lack of innovation is willingness to compromise

Every emerging thing will encounter innovation bottlenecks in its development, and smartphones are no exception.

Of course, you can think that Apple in the Steve Jobs era caught up with the golden years of the rise of smartphones, making every innovation of the iPhone shocking, and the old iPhone 4S is not considered outdated today.

In the eyes of ordinary people, Apple in the post-Jobs era undoubtedly needs to face the bottleneck of smartphone innovation, a barrier of the times that even Apple finds difficult to break. But what really makes people wonder is that Apple no longer seems willing to pursue the ultimate product as it once did.

There are countless examples of Apple's willingness to compromise in recent generations of iPhones, including the protruding camera that started with the iPhone 6; the aesthetically pleasing white antenna band that ended with the iPhone 7; the thickened body and shrunken battery of the iPhone 6s to accommodate the 3D Touch screen; and the iPhone 8, which repeated the same trick by returning to a glass back cover and reducing the battery capacity again.

The unsightly bangs on the iPhone X's forehead also seem to be unable to escape the vicious circle of compromise. This idea, which affects the system's interactive experience, damages the overall visual appearance, and drives UI designers crazy, is definitely not a decision that Apple would make during the Steve Jobs era.

There is also Face ID, which replaced Touch ID. It is undoubtedly the industry's most advanced facial recognition solution brought by Apple, but the premise of its birth may be similar to those rear cameras that cannot be flattened. Today's Apple is really unable to find a way to accommodate fingerprint recognition on the full-screen iPhone X.

Should Apple worry about the future?

Some people say that Apple has not collapsed because the foundation laid by Jobs was too solid and Cook has enough foundation to rely on his parents, but even so, Apple still seems to have more chances of winning in the future than other similar manufacturers.

We all know that although the iPhone in recent years has always caused aesthetic fatigue, the performance of Apple's own A-series mobile chips can always surpass the mobile processors of the Android camp at the same time. The strength of Apple's self-developed mobile processors is by no means comparable to the proprietary chips of some domestic manufacturers with ARM architecture CPUs.

Recently, after Apple's A11 chip was revealed to have a built-in self-developed GPU, rumors have emerged that Apple is also developing its own mobile phone baseband and Mac computer processors.

Imagine an Apple product with an Apple logo on the shell, most of the core components inside are developed by Apple, and the software services still cannot escape Apple.

This comprehensive product's inherent strength, together with the strong market user base that Apple has accumulated over the years, is enough to continue to maintain the brand's arrogance for a long time.

As a winner of Toutiao's Qingyun Plan and Baijiahao's Bai+ Plan, the 2019 Baidu Digital Author of the Year, the Baijiahao's Most Popular Author in the Technology Field, the 2019 Sogou Technology and Culture Author, and the 2021 Baijiahao Quarterly Influential Creator, he has won many awards, including the 2013 Sohu Best Industry Media Person, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Beijing Third Place, the 2015 Guangmang Experience Award, the 2015 China New Media Entrepreneurship Competition Finals Third Place, and the 2018 Baidu Dynamic Annual Powerful Celebrity.