The one thing journalists need to stop doing when reviewing the new iPhone…
I’ve been reading and watching several reviews of Apple’s newly announced products over the last couple of days, and there’s one thing that almost every reviewer does that just annoys the heck out me: they point out that there’s not much reason to upgrade from last year’s iPhone 13 to this year’s iPhone 14. (See also reviews of the Apple Watch Series 8.) Now it doesn’t bother me at all that journalists point out that there aren’t many year-over-year changes between the 13 and the 14. That’s just objectively true and it would be good journalistic practice to acknowledge it.
There’s two reasons why it bugs me when reviewers punt to “there’s really no reason to upgrade from last year’s model.” For one thing, I hate unoriginality. I know there’s only so many ways to tell the story of the new iPhone, but reviewers often come across as if they’re talking to each other, and not to potential iPhone buyers. We’re all subject to groupthink and memetic ways of communicating, but it often feels as if journalists are especially prone to this phenomenon. Another one of these corporate press phrases that drives me up a wall is referring to the Apple ecosystem as a “walled garden.” It’s annoying first because it’s always framed as being sinister, but more importantly it’s just rhetorically lazy. Like, find a new metaphor. That horse has been beaten to death.
The second reason this phenomenon bugs me is that it’s not addressing remotely typical customer behavior. Would Apple like all of its customers to buy a new iPhone every year? You betcha! Toyota would also like their Camry buyers to upgrade to a new Camry every year. But that’s not how consumers behave. Are there some number of iPhone users who do annual upgrades? Of course. But this is a relatively small batch of customers that’s not representative of the whole. Just from talking to real, flesh-and-blood iPhone customers my sense is that most people upgrade every two to five years, and without doing any market research or even a basic Google search, I’d bet the average works out to something like every 3.3 years. When people ask me about new iPhones this time every year, I always ask what phone they have now. It’s very commonly a four or five year old device.
No, you almost certainly shouldn’t upgrade from an iPhone 13 to an iPhone 14. A year-to-year upgrade is inadvisable for almost everyone on any given year. But if you’re currently reading this on an iPhone XR, then the iPhone 14 is going to represent an enormous upgrade for you. Reviewers would be wise to take this into account.
Frankly, the best way to talk about each year’s new iPhone release is to look at the lineup holistically to better communicate what’s new across the line each year. That way customers can judge for themselves whether or not to upgrade, and if so to which model. I plan to do just that next week. Stay tuned!