I’m a big fan of Jean-Louis Gassée. So I was pleased to see a new post from him today
It’s called iPhone Nonsensus: Apple’s Debt To Bloggers.
Gassee goes after bloggers, specifically Steve Kovach of Tech Insider, for their criticism of the iPhone 7. He believes the bloggers failed to see that the 7 has an market shifting advantage after all, the new dual camera.
How did the pundits miss the obvious advantages of a dual camera? The improvement is indisputable and easy to demonstrate: The second “telephoto” lens is more appropriate for many pictures; faces, for instance, aren’t seen at their best advantage by the usual wide-angle lens.
Gassee contends that bloggers have failed to see that picture-taking is where the iPhone creates extraordinary value.
We now reach the absurdity: One of the most popular picture-taking devices on earth (the iPhone is either the world’s number one digital camera, or very close) is heavily rumored to be gaining a significant improvement — a second camera — but no, the blogosphere reached a “nonsensus” and steadfastly stuck to it. Nothing to see here…move on to the sure-to-be-groundbreaking 2017 iPhone 8…
Gassee is right to say that cameras matter. A couple of years ago I wrote a post called ARE PHOTOS A SECRET INGREDIENT OF THE INTERNET ECONOMY?
Here’s my argument:
We tend to think that photos matter because they are a record of the world. But this is only the necessary condition of their significance. The reason they really matter is that they are the single, smallest, richest, cheapest, easiest token of value and meaning online. We mint them. We trade them. We accumulate them. We treasure them.
So I agree with Gassee in general terms. But I think he is wrong in the particular.
Yes, photos matter. But the real question here is: do telephoto photos matter? And the answer is, probably, not really.
The reason photos matter is that they have social significance.
Individually, photos are content coursing through our personal “economies.” They are the single most efficient way to build and sustain our social networks. We gift people with photos. They reciprocate. Hey, presto, a social world emerges.
Collectively, photos create a currency exchange. They are a secret machine for seeing, sharing, stapling, opening, sustaining and making relationships. Want to know where networks are going? See who is giving what to whom, in the photo department. Photos are in constant flight. They are a kind of complex adaptive system out of which some of our social order comes.
The iPhone camera got better. But consumers won’t care about this particular improvement because the existing camera is already doing the social job that needs to be done. A telephoto photo will not improve the iPhone as a social instrument, as a means by which we see, share, staple, open, sustain and make our social relationships.
In sum, the iPhone 7 does not have a realistic hope of an extraordinary consumer response…at least not because it has an improved camera. From the essential social point of view, there is no improvement.
Bloggers 1, Gassee 0
Technological development / evolution is an increasing arc toward greater resolution in all forms. True for our computer screens, our data density, our chip fabrication, on and on. Telephoto is important not for its use as a photographer uses the term (exchanging a lens or zooming in) but for its capture of detail. In a world moving toward enveloping artificial and augmented realities, greater resolution is important, expected, the sine qua non of the arc.
Here in Japan, the killer feature is the integration of the JR Railways Suica/Subway PASMO Card with the Apple Pay system, allowing busy people who always have their phones in their hands to swipe wicket sensors with their phones instead of reaching for a separate wallet, cardholder or card.
Another feature to think about is the larger form factor of the 7 plus. If I am typical of an aging population, now 27.3% aged 65+, a bigger, easier to read and easier to type on screen seems like a big attraction.