HOLD THE PHONE

The tech giants can no longer rely on booming sales of new devices, writes Andrew Griffin. Could a new era of AI be enough to make us fall back in love with our phones again?

- Andrew Griffin

In retrospect, it feels like everyone rushed out to buy the first iPhone. But they didn't, of course: in its first year, 2007, Apple shipped just 1.4 million iPhones, compared to 231.8 million sold last year. Some reviews were scathing, complaining that it would break quickly and lacked key features.

Not everybody who was down on the new phone was wrong. It was then astonishingly expensive – the cheapest model cost $499, though today’s models cost about twice that. It didn’t have apps, video, or 3G, and its speed was incredibly limited.

But, very quickly, the world was convinced, not just about the iPhone, but about smartphones generally. And with that new belief in the product came a whole different way of living and spending money: a default assumption that people would spend large amounts on contracts every month, and get the latest versions every couple of years.

That rhythm lives on today. And as summer ends, we find ourselves right in the middle of the annual cycle’s high point: Samsung and Google have released their new devices, and Apple is due to in a couple of weeks. (Rumours point to a 10 September event in California.)

Each year, those companies take to their stages and reveal a whole load of new devices. But each year they have come to feel a little less unique: as smartphones have matured, they have become a little more predictable, and so have the annual upgrades.

It can at times feel like every company had been working towards a dream that’s now here: a smart, thin and robust slab, with cameras on one side and a display on the other, with people’s whole digital lives squished into it.

Customers seem to have come to the same conclusion. In recent years, iPhone sales growth has tapered off and occasionally gone in reverse, and its latest results earlier this month showed a decline of 1 per cent year-on-year.