The launch of iPhone 6
and iPhone 6 Plus - and the latter's massive 5.5-inch screen - appear to prove
Apple founder Steve Jobs was completely wrong when he said in 2010 "no
one" would want to buy a phone with a big screen.
Apple launched its new phone with 4.7- and
5.5-inch screens for a reason: Rival companies, particularly Samsung, have
spent the past two years building a market in a space that Apple ignored - the
market for people who want big, bright screens that are great for consuming
media and doing work.
To recap: Jobs launched iPhone and its
initial updates with a 3.5-inch screen. When the iPhone 4 ran into trouble
because it appeared to drop calls when users held it the "wrong" way,
Jobs held a news conference. He was asked, why not just make the phone bigger,
so that the antenna might have more space within the device and thus get better
reception?
He replied that he disliked the new crop of
bigger phones from Samsung et al. "You can't get your hand around
it," he said, "no one's going to buy that." He also derided big
phones as "Hummers."
By 2013, however, executives within Apple
began to rethink that. Internal documents from that time show that iPhone sales
growth was slowing, even though the market as a whole was growing. All the
growth was in the sub-$300 price range and among phones with screens bigger
than 4 inches. "Consumers want what we don't have," was the title of
one slide in the documents.
Another document showed that Apple's own
customers placed the small screen size of the iPhone 5, 5C, and 5S among their
top complaints about the devices. The iPhone's small screen size actually
seemed to be a liability for Apple, not - as Jobs argued three years earlier -
an advantage.
(The leading big-screen devices in this
market were, of course, Samsung's Galaxy S and Note phones, with their
5-inch-plus screens. The Note 4 now comes in a 5.7-inch size. It's an
interesting exercise to ask Note owners how they like their big screens and
whether they would ever consider going back to an iPhone-size 4-inch model. You
will find the answer is always "no" - consumers love big screens.)
So it is notable that both the new iPhone 6
models are big-screen phones, of 4.7 and 5.5 inches. There is no "iPhone 6
Mini," giving people the option of a Jobsian 3.5-inch screen. Samsung
poured scorn on Jobs in a piece of marketing fluff released to counter the
iPhone 6 launch. It produced this graphic, which actually misquotes Jobs as
saying "No one is going to buy a big phone."
The response underlines one of the strangest
things about Jobs' big-screen error. When the iPhone became a huge hit at its
launch in 2007, with a 3.5-inch screen, its screen at the time was itself one
of the biggest displays on the market.
Consumers were used to candy-bar phones from
Nokia, on which most of the device was given over to the keypad and the screen
had room for little more than a name and a number. BlackBerry was still huge at
the time, one of the reasons being that it had a screen that was a little
larger than a Nokia candy bar, and you could type emails onto it.
The original iPhone provided even more real
estate than that, letting people consume real media and apps. In hindsight,
it's not weird that Jobs might have been wrong about consumer preference for
screen sizes in the four years following his death. Rather, it's weird that he
didn't acknowledge that the iPhone's (relatively) big screen size was actually
driving its popularity while he was alive. The iPhone (at launch) was the
biggest screen on the market. Jobs didn't seem to see that as the key.
(Source: entrepreneur.com)