Opinion | The ‘premium’ smartphone is here to stay
Luca Rohr, sophomore creative producing major
Last year, Apple unveiled the iPhone X to the world: a completely new phone in a series that had kept the same basic design since the first iteration in 2007. In doing so, Apple introduced the “premium” smartphone.
I mean premium in the higher-price sense of the word because, unlike previous models, the iPhone X was released with a hefty $1,000 price tag, nearly $300 more than the iPhone 8. With this release came a question: would consumers embrace a significantly more expensive iPhone? Was there a market for a high-end, more “premium” phone?
If there was, I didn’t think it would be very big – surely, not many people would be willing to spend so much money on a smartphone. And yet, against analyst and investor expectations, as well as my own, the iPhone X was Apple’s best-selling phone since its launch. What most predicted would be a niche product (because who would buy a $1,000 phone when there are many cheaper phones out there?) ended up selling better than the more traditional iPhone 8 and 8 Plus, which were released that same year, according to Tech Radar.
On Sept. 12, tech reviewers and journalists were invited into Apple’s Steve Jobs Theater in Cupertino, California, to confirm that, yes, there was such a market. With the reveal of the iPhone XS and iPhone XS Max, Apple demonstrated its commitment to the more expensive premium smartphone model.
Launching at $999 and $1,099 respectively, these two new phones take the original iPhone X and enhance it with the bells and whistles that are usually expected from an “S” line of iPhones, which is a model with few design changes to the phone, instead improving features like performance and battery life.
The difference this year is that these phones are being introduced as the headliners of the iPhone, nor as a special side product like the iPhone X, or even the iPhone 5C and SE in 2013 and 2016. Looking at Apple’s sales numbers in the last year, this decision makes sense: the company garnered $150 billion in revenue halfway into 2018, and 52.2 million iPhones were sold in the first financial quarter of the year, according to CNet.
While the iPhone X was described by the presenters as a high-end model in 2017, this year’s event made no such mention – Apple listened to consumers and has begun to adopt the premium smartphone as the new norm.
The iPhone XR, the third phone revealed at the event, is also Apple’s way of bringing over the unconvinced consumer to the premium model. By introducing buyers to a cheaper version of their main phone, Apple sets the expectation that when the next generation of iPhone arrives, consumers might be willing to make the more expensive upgrade.
The XR, which is a slightly stripped-down version of the iPhone XS, is powered by the same A12 Bionic chip, but it only has one rear camera instead of two. It has an edge-to-edge screen (meaning that the screen takes up the entire front of the device), but the screen is LCD rather than OLED (OLED displays have higher contrast, better viewing angles, and is generally considered a higher quality type of display). It’s also made out of aluminum rather than more expensive stainless steel models.
Tim Cook, Apple’s CEO, described the iPhone XR as a way to “deliver the future of the smartphone to even more people,” in his speech on Sept.12. Cook knows that the company’s future lies in the higher-end model the company first introduced a year ago – and they already have the sales data to prove it.
Now the company want to cement its future by convincing those who haven’t jumped on the premium bandwagon with products like the XR. If all goes according to plan, the premium smartphone will become the standard.