Just as the media get back from Mobile World Congress and start looking around to decide who the momentum belongs to, Apple steps up with a cunning name-change on its newest product to capture another news cycle.
Strictly speaking it's not a name-change because the new products have not been officially announced yet - there's not even a guarantee that these names are going to be the ones revealed on the stage in March - but Mark Gurman's report that the new four-inch iPhone will be the iPhone SE and the 9.7 inch tablet will be an iPad Pro makes a lot of sense.
So, in the grand tradition of assuming Taniyama-Shimura, the new names address one of the danger points in Apple's current approach to hardware, and hands each Apple product a specific market area to focus on. It's all about simplifying the offer and reducing the friction between the customer and the product.
The smaller iPad Pro is the easier category to draw these ideas out. While tablets have not proven to be as profitable in the long-term as smartphones (in part due to a lack of a subsidy model, and a longer replacement cycle of older hardware), the iPad range is still the leading tablet brand. With the iPad Mini, iPad Air, and iPad Pro, Apple has a neatly segmented market that is spread a little thin. The brand name of 'iPad' is shared between devices that can be picked up for $269, right up to $1347 for the top-end Pro device with Apple Pencil and Smart Keyboard.
That needs a shotgun marketing approach to push the brand name as well as the model. By reducing the top end into the 'Pro' name for both the 9.7 inch and 12.9 inch tablets there is an easier marketing story to tell. The inclusion of Apple Pencil support for both Pro devices will simplify this presentation even more. It wouldn't surprise me to see the next iPad Mini to be called 'iPad'
It also allows the two iPad Pros to take on the challenge from Microsoft's Surface and Surface Pro - while the unit sales of the Windows 10 powered devices may not yet be as high as the iPad range, it's strategically smart to try to defeat the Surface range before it grows in size and stature.
Next: The iPhone breaks the product cycle...
Moving away from the placeholder name of 5SE, the iPhone SE does something that no other iPhone (bar the original) has done. It removes the 'know the year' number from the title. The incremental approach to iPhone naming locks in devices to a yearly product cycle of number, number plus an s, next number, and so on. It's a mark that immediately dates the product.
The iPhone SE hardware is stepping outside of the annual product cycle. This typically sees a new Apple handset family revealed in early September to go on sale in late September in select markets, before building up sales over the fourth calendar quarter. The '5' designation harks back to the time of the iPhone 5 range while the internals are looking to be closer to the iPhone 6 or 6S. Perhaps there's an argument for naming it the iPhone 6SE, but dropping the number is a powerful statement that this handset is not part of the normal rat race in the iPhone market.
I also like the implicit nod to 'Special Edition' in the name. That's a much better emotional connection to something new and valuable, as opposed to the emotional baggage that going with a '5' would suggest. As Daring Fireball's Jon Gruber notes, "why would Apple give a new phone a name that makes it sound old?"
The iPhone SE is also going to remain a relevant name in September when the iPhone 7 arrives. It's important that the four-inch handset is not perceived as a 'budget' handset. Apple failed to get over that message with the iPhone 5C, so the popular handset was labelled as a 'problem handset' by the media that was expecting a cut-price plastic model of the pile-em-high and sell-em-cheap model to snatch marketshare from Android.
The iPhone SE will sit in the lowest run of Apple's smartphone portfolio, but it's not going to be 'budget'. It's going to be smaller, but that doesn't mean it should miss out on the same power and flexibility of the iPhone 6 and 6S range.
Which leaves an intriguing question for Apple's biggest product - the new flagship iPhone due for release in September. We're all expecting this to be called the iPhone 7. But the loss of the dating numbers in the iPhone SE, the naming convention employed on the iPad, and Tim Cooks apparent drive to simplify the portfolio and marketing could point to another name.
I would not be surprised to see the next iPhone get something just as simple, clean, and functional as the rest of the updated portfolio. Apple should hand its next smartphone a clean name that can stand alongside the iPad, the iPad Pro, and the iPhone SE.
iPhone Pro.
