the end of the singular iphone

For most of the twentieth century, you couldn't buy a Coca-Cola in the Soviet Union. It was one of the most American things in existence, and like Levi's and Michael Jackson, the Iron Curtain kept it out.

When the Iron Curtain finally came down and Coke started pouring in, the apocryphal accounts all say the same thing: what people couldn't get over wasn't the taste. It was that the bottle a factory worker in Moscow could finally buy was the exact same bottle the President of the United States drank. That was the whole magic of Coca-Cola. A Coke is a Coke, and no amount of money or power could buy you a better one.

For almost twenty years, the iPhone has been like Coke. There have been plenty of different iPhones, small ones and big ones, but when a new one came out, it was always the best iPhone you could buy. That might not be true anymore.

Bad, better, best

Yesterday I had drinks with a former colleague after work, and we got on the topic of Apple raising prices. Somewhere in that conversation it hit me: the era of the singular iPhone might be ending.

When you think about it, humanity doesn't have a good track record of "everyone can have the same good thing." The fact that the iPhone has been a relatively stable product for almost 20 years is a bit insane, especially because every other piece of technology ends up fracturing to cash in on every angle it can. The iPhone did that in small ways, but none that ever diluted what the iPhone was.

Right now, the differences between iPhone models are largely age based. Old iPhone isn't as good as new iPhone, sure, but what the device is capable of has been roughly the same thing across each generation.

If some rumors are true, we might have bad iPhone, good enough iPhone, and luxury iPhone. You might think we've always had these differentiations (e.g. iPhone 16e, non-pro base models, Pro Max models), but camera bumps and screen sizes are superficial changes. With some of the iOS 27 changes available only with Apple's most powerful chips, it's looking like this could be the year where how much you pay for your iPhone might mean you and I have genuinely different experiences of what an iPhone can do.

The illusion of choice

We've seen this playbook before in hardware like cameras and home audio, but the major consolidation of technology into our smartphones has mostly eliminated them. Services are really the next frontier of differentation by price. Netflix used to be one singular thing before it fractured into Netflix with ads and Netflix with 4K. It even gates which shows you can watch based on how much you pay. Once any product matures, the only way to grow is to break it into tiers and gouge everyone, the rich for the luxury version and the poor for the privilege of a working one. So how long until we have different Instagrams, different TikToks, different YouTubes, each one rationed by a payment gate?

You might even argue YouTube Premium and Instagram's paid tiers already do this. But, for now, those only exist to buy you fewer ads. Everyone's still able to watch the same things and follow the same people. But the looming threat that the internet could be turned into a giant cable bundle always looms.

The pitch is always choice. More tiers, more options, something for every budget. But you're not picking what's right for you. They're picking what people with your budget are allowed to have.

The end of exceptionalism

So if Apple does start to intentionally isolate useful features across various price points, the reason will be pretty simple: they think hardware growth is effectively over. The iPhone, the most successful tech product in history, might not be able to differentiate on hardware alone. Instead, they have to also tie software to that hardware. They need to stop selling more of the good enough phones at a reasonable price, and start selling different phones at higher prices to the same people who will pay. Apple Intelligence not running in Europe is the biggest hint I can imagine. Why should Apple put perfectly good, leading edge A-series chips into phones that might never run Apple Intelligence? Just food for thought.

Even with the big price raises this week, there's nothing uniquely cynical about Apple's approach. This is just what every product does when it stops growing. Analysts will tell us this is normal, that it was always going to be this way, that this is just how things work now in a post-Covid supply chain world. That the iPhone was just an exception for twenty years. Exceptions, even exceptional ones, can still end.

But, we don't have to believe this. It wasn't always this way. It was this way for almost twenty years, and they're the ones with the power to choose to end it. For almost twenty years, the best iPhone you could reasonably afford and the iPhone you wanted were the same phone. That was a key part of what made the iPhone so sticky. I don't think most people even noticed, but they might now.