A Casual Take on the iPhone

As the world’s most popular smartphone, the iPhone has turned ten — and Apple itself has already hit (and since retreated from) the trillion-dollar market cap milestone. It’s hard to imagine a mass-market gadget dominating the world for an entire decade.

By contrast, while other phone makers flood the market with endless models and product lines, only 21 iPhones have been released over these ten years. Pick any one of them, and you can simply call it “the iPhone.”

Clearly, the iPhone has become the benchmark for what a “smartphone” is.

In the biography Steve Jobs, “The iPhone” is covered in Chapter 36. It was 2005 — the iPod was riding high, and Jobs was thinking about what new product could threaten Apple’s market position. He zeroed in on phones: communication is a universal need, music playback would be a huge advantage for a phone, and adding a camera would bring imaging into the mix. A convergence of multimedia, communication, and social interaction — this would be the ultimate mass-market opportunity.

The original iPhone project was launched under that kind of visionary foresight. Like many tech companies, it was also the result of internal competition: Apple had two project teams. The P1 team tried to turn the iPod into a phone using a click wheel, but couldn’t solve the text input problem. The P2 team adopted Multi-touch technology from tablet computers — and make no mistake, this was epoch-defining. Swiping, tapping, and pressing became the terminal interaction paradigm we still use today.

The skeuomorphic UI design was Jobs’s attempt to bring the physical world into a tiny screen. He succeeded. The flat design style that followed can be summarized as a philosophy elevated to the level of principle: less is more.

The second iPhone was named the iPhone 3G, signaling 3G network compatibility. Naturally, faster and more stable web browsing was the first problem to solve. But what truly made the iPhone 3G memorable was the addition of the App Store — the cornerstone of an entire app empire.

Secure and convenient data sync was also a priority for Jobs, so the iPhone 3G shipped with MobileMe, a product that synced email and contacts. This was the precursor to iCloud.

If the 3G was about finishing what the first generation started, then the 3GS roared “speed is everything.” CPU performance quadrupled, the camera broke past 3.2 megapixels, and for the first time, 32GB of storage appeared in the spec sheet. The 3GS also introduced “copy and paste” and “global search” — two features that have endured and become universal on all phones today.

Looking back across the decade, the iPhone’s iteration and iOS’s evolution intertwine like the double helix of DNA — and together with the App Store, the three are inextricably intertwined. Thank Jobs’s obsession: Apple ultimately forged an unbreakable, virtuous closed loop across software, hardware, and digital services.

The iPhone 4 was the world’s thinnest phone at the time, and its gorgeous “sandwich design” — front and back glass panels with a metal frame — pushed this symmetrical aesthetic to its absolute peak. To this day, you can still see the iPhone 4’s silhouette in countless devices. It was also the first phone to introduce the Retina display concept — a pixel-dense screen that was an absolute joy to look at.

As Jobs’s final legacy product, the iPhone 4S earned an avalanche of praise. The introduction of Siri and the official launch of iCloud were — in hindsight — both landmark moments. Commercially, the iPhone also surpassed the former mobile giant Nokia for the first time, becoming the most profitable phone brand on the planet.

Chinese consumers were less impressed with this generation, though at least Siri finally learned Chinese. The iPhone 5 adopted a Unibody design — a three-segment aluminum alloy unibody. The phone was reduced to two major components: the screen and the enclosure. The enclosure was further split into upper and lower ceramic glass sections with an aluminum mid-section. Precision high-gloss chamfers adorned every opening and seam. “Exquisite” is the perfect word for the iPhone 5.

But even so, the iPhone 5 couldn’t escape the 4S’s shadow. Consumers just saw a stretched and flattened 4S — most didn’t care about materials or CNC machining processes. For Chinese consumers especially, the iPhone 4S was iconic.

The 5S, with its bold “champagne gold” colorway, was inherently audacious. Touch ID became the most widely adopted fingerprint sensor of its time, and the 64-bit A7 processor split the industry into traditionalists and futurists. Meanwhile, the shift to a flat UI once again set the trend for phone icon design across the world.

Then there was the 5C — Apple’s attempt to lower the barrier to the iOS experience. Clearly, whether measured by sales or word of mouth, the colorful 5C fell short.

Starting with the iPhone 6 series, the regular and Plus models became Apple’s answer to the “big-screen trend” — and also popularized a certain Chinese buzzword: “prestige.” But none of that could compete with “the design got uglier.” Apple’s near-religious devotion to unibody construction persisted — this time as an all-metal unibody, with a 2.5D curved screen and arc-shaped edges produced through even more demanding CNC machining. Manufacturing difficulty jumped an entire level.

Of course, to keep the phone thin while maximizing camera performance, the protruding lens was inevitable. From that point through the iPhone 8 Plus, the camera bump became one of Apple’s signatures — and even influenced countless Android manufacturers’ camera designs. For better optics, consumers learned to live with it.

Then came the iPhone X, Apple’s 10th-anniversary milestone — a tall phone with a “notch” that polarized opinion. It was the first iPhone with an OLED display and the first with a TrueDepth camera system. Packed inside that not-so-narrow notch: an infrared camera, flood illuminator, proximity sensor, ambient light sensor, speaker, microphone, 7-megapixel front camera, and dot projector — making Face ID a natural new paradigm. I think, looking back from the future, the iPhone X at least realized this philosophical idea: “When you look at your iPhone, it can also look at you.”

The iPhone Xs and iPhone Xs Max can be seen as the iPhone’s post-makeover internal discipline. The day a phone’s performance surpasses a laptop is now foreseeable. The workplace and entertainment experiences of that future will surely be revolutionary. And speaking of performance, we have to talk about iOS.

At its core, Apple is a technology-driven service company. “A great software company builds the hardware best suited to its software.” While iOS, the App Store, and Apple Store power forward in parallel, we shouldn’t forget iOS’s fluidity and its closed nature. Compared to Google — the force behind the equally great Android — Apple is led by “designer thinking,” while Google is driven by “engineer thinking.”

These radically different corporate cultures have birthed two operating systems at opposite peaks: iOS, infused with humanistic spirit and concerned with everyone, and Android, hyper-customizable and beloved by geeks.

On iOS devices, only one app is ever truly running. All other opened apps are in a suspended state, consuming neither CPU nor memory. iOS saves these apps as image files to flash storage. When you launch them again, the image files are loaded back into memory, restoring the previous running state. This is the so-called “tombstone multitasking” model. This approach ensures that any foreground app can use the full hardware resources, which is why the experience feels effortlessly smooth.

On Android, app processes can freely run in the background — and even auto-launch and chain-launch each other. The more apps you have, the more complex the background processes become. The only real way to keep an Android phone from lagging? Install fewer apps.

Furthermore, iOS assigns each app its own isolated folder. An app can only read and write within that folder. If you uninstall the app, iOS deletes the folder along with it — truly leaving no data debris behind.

If we liken apps to dogs, then in the walled and disciplined iOS kennel, only one dog is barking at any time. Every dog has its own cage and its own restroom. If a dog is sold, its cage and restroom leave with it. Every dog entering the kennel has been uniformly vetted and certified. In the free and open Android kennel, by contrast, many dogs may bark at once, all dogs share one restroom, and they joyfully interact in a communal space. And as the kennel owner, you can redesign the furnishings to your heart’s content.

The iOS kennel’s hardware facilities aren’t the best, but it’s masterful at using land resources efficiently. The Android kennel chases maximum acreage (high RAM + ROM), or it can’t accommodate the dogs’ playful chaos.

This analogy isn’t the most precise, but at least: both apps and dogs are humanity’s good companions. And similarly, we shouldn’t forget how important music is to Apple. A love of music is, without question, part of Apple’s DNA.

From the iPod era onward, iPod + iTunes once disrupted the global digital music market. But with the rise of smart recommendation-driven music platforms, plus the full-blown assault of paid subscription models as a new form of music monetization, iTunes Music — as a pure online music store, more like an old-school record shop — has seen an inevitable decline in revenue. Still, don’t forget: music is in Apple’s DNA.

Now, the successor to iTunes Music, Apple Music streaming, has taken center stage. It is the future of Apple’s music services.

And speaking of the Apple Music experience, I have to give a shout-out to the taste of Apple’s music editors, especially in classical music. You can constantly feel that emotional tug — the authenticity of original digital album. For the purist Apple fan, the Apple Music listening experience is simply the best. There’s no splash-ad wait time, no red notification badges shouting at you, no sensationalist or bottom-feeding comments. Just album after album, neatly arranged, waiting for you to discover them.

Alright, I’ve said enough. It’s time to wrap this up. Talking about the future of smart hardware is always exciting. I think most of us still hold onto the hope of “changing the world again” — rooting for Apple, rooting for the iPhone. In the future, Apple will keep the bulk of its focus on the iPhone while continuing its long-haul cultivation of Mac and iPad, and further mining users through accessories and services.

This is the future we can see coming.