With its new iPhones, Apple shows slowness has become a strength

By playing the long game better than anyone else, Apple's new iPhones and the Apple Watch 4 have positioned the firm to both deal Samsung a body blow and boost popularity in China
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New iPhones and a new Watch. We all knew it was coming. We even knew the names in advance. In recent years, the Apple machine has struggled to keep its secrets under wraps. On stage, Tim Cook's frustration that the surprise had been blown was almost palpable. No preamble. No teasing quips about stuff that might come later in the address. No "one more thing". Just straight down to business.

Everyone seemed to be slightly out of sorts, in fact. Philip Schiller, senior vice president of worldwide marketing at Apple, made some uncharacteristic missteps introducing the phones themselves, while chief operating officer Jeff Williams even admitted that he'd "probably forgotten lots of things" in his roundup of the Apple Watch 4 features.

Presentation missteps aside, Apple is seemingly in rude health. The firm's stock price is up to a near record high and under Cook it has outperformed everyone else in a market awash with new phones and tablets with almost no difference between them. Despite not making any significant alterations to its iPhones for three consecutive years, Apple characteristically made its move just at the right time and released last year’s hugely successful iPhone X. It made Apple the first public company to be worth $1 trillion and soon after you couldn't move for copycat designs sporting a notch at the top of a bezel-free screen.

Now with the iPhone XS, XS Max and XR, Apple has a handset in every conceivable price bracket from $400 upwards. It's gearing up to take on all-comers - from upstarts like OnePlus and Huawei to arch rivals Samsung. Some still criticise the fact Apple produces $1,000 phones and even label them as luxury items. They are not. A $1,000 watch or TV is not a luxury item, so why should a phone be? Considering how much you use your phone it is still great value for money. Plus the difference between monthly payments on $800 and $1,000 is in reality a few dollars a month. Vertu tried to make phones "luxury". And that didn't go too well.

With Apple on the ascendancy and Samsung floundering, could this be the perfect time to deal a body blow to the South Korean company? The Galaxy S9 and S9 Plus had slow sales, with improved cameras and audio insufficient to lure the faithful to upgrade. In the second quarter of 2018 (after the S9’s March launch) Samsung lost more market share than any other major handset maker, posting its worst performance since the second quarter of 2013. Samsung's dominance in the Android sector is steadily being eroded from both ends of its market offerings. Apple's out on it's own - though the global split between users on iOS and Android is moving away from Apple right now with iOS down from 14.1 per cent to 11.9 per cent in global market share in the first quarter of this year.

This is why it has finally released dual SIM models. A feature common to many Android phones, particularly cheaper models, dual SIM phones are hugely popular in emerging markets where Apple needs to do better, especially India (71.3 per cent Android market share). OnePlus is very popular in India precisely because its phones support two SIMs. Dual SIM also helps Apple deal with another big problem: China. Dual SIM is a draw for the Chinese market. According to a new Prophet survey of the most popular brands in the country, in the last year Apple dropped from fifth to 11th. Android increased from third to second. In a country where there is now more than 1.1 billion 4G mobile users, using their phones for practically every facet of their lives, the importance for Apple to reverse this worrying trend is clear.

Carolina Milanesi, principal analyst at Creative Strategies, thinks that the XR might help with winning over some more mainstream Samsung users, while the Max might appeal to higher end users – though getting people to switch from a world of Samsung products to Apple could be tough. "I do wonder if the lower prices of the 7 and 8 will get mid-tier Samsung’s owners, though, if the promise [Samsung president and CEO of IT and mobile communications] DJ Koh made to deploy new tech in the mid-tier portfolio does not materialise," Milanesi adds.

Read more: iPhone XS vs iPhone XR and XS Max: the new iPhones compared

Although positive initial sales of the Note 9 have given some solace to the company, Samsung is betting big on its folding phone to be unveiled later this year. It needs to be good. It needs to be the stuff of sci-fi dreams. Apple is notoriously cautious of unproven tech. There is no way that it would join those early adopters placing fingerprint scanners under their mobile screens.

Apple's cautiousness has also led to possibly its greatest strength going forward - data privacy. Before the Cambridge Analytica scandal, when Steve Jobs was still at the helm of the company, Apple decided that its devices and software would place the importance of user privacy protection much higher than other tech companies. It was prescient, to say the least. The new ECG function of the Apple Watch 4 is just the latest example of this ethos. Your personal heart data, taken by a new sensor on the wearable, is yours and you choose who to share it with. Insurance companies, for instance, cannot access it unless you want them to. Apple collects data from its users, of course, but most of the information sent to Apple is obfuscated by "Differential Privacy", which adds random data before it reaches Apple so no one has any way of knowing it came from you.

Taking on the high-value-low-cost manufacturers at their own game, timely rollout of tech, calling the most important data issue of our time before anyone else and iPhones for markets where it needs to combat on Android dominance - it's all quite impressive. Despite being the world's first trillion dollar company, Tim Cook certainly isn't taking his foot off the gas. Apple means business.

This article was originally published by WIRED UK