Apple Needs an iPhone Classic (Premium)

Apple's corporate culture can be nicely summed up by the term parentalism, which is the (mistaken) belief, on Apple's part, that only it can decide what's best for its users. You see this control throughout Apple's products and services, in ways both big and small.

As is the case with so much at Apple, this stupidity can be traced back to Steve Jobs, the ultimate micro-manager.

"Some people say, ‘Give customers what they want'," Jobs infamously said during an interview. "But that’s not my approach. Our job is to figure out what they’re going to want before they do. I think Henry Ford once said, ‘If I’d asked customers what they wanted, they would have told me, 'A faster horse!' People don’t know what they want until you show it to them. That’s why I never rely on market research. Our task is to read things that are not yet on the page."

The problems with this quote are many. But looking past the obvious, I'll just raise two.

First, there is no one like Steve Jobs. His uncanny if temporary ability to correctly read the market and green-light successful products like the iPod, iPhone, and iPad back-to-back is a success we'll never see repeated. Not by Tim Cook, whose about as imaginative as a stack of bricks. And not by any self-styled Jobs-alike at any other company either.

Second, even Jobs's supposed approach to customers can only work when you're moving on to new markets. With Apple in empire maintenance mode now with the iPhone, which remains responsible for approximately 75 percent of Apple's revenues when you correctly factor in its services revenues, the stakes are quite a bit different. Apple very much needs to listen to its customers now. Its existing user base has peaked: From here on out, the goal is to monetize customers in new ways as their iPhone purchase timeframes lengthen.

But there's an additional issue. With customers rejecting the latest iPhone designs, Apple risks losing customers who just aren't interested in the larger new designs and their reliance on FaceID. And many of these customers are not going to be satisfied by buying a one- or two-year-old iPhone instead.

So let's use another Jobs quote to understand what Apple should be doing. Which is listening to its customers and delivering the iPhone that they want.

"What I love about the consumer market ... is that we come up with a product, we try to tell everybody about it, and every person votes for themselves," Jobs said in 2010. "They go 'yes' [gives a thumbs up] or 'no' [gives a thumbs down]. And if enough of them say yes, we get to come to work tomorrow. That's how it works. It's really simple."

He was right. It really is simple.

And yet since Jobs's death in 2011, Apple has twice delivered iPhones that its customers didn't want---the iPhone 5C in 2013 and the iPhone XR in 2018---and it has continued trying to make bigger and bigger phones despite very clear evidence that there is a healthy market for smaller handsets....