The iPhone 16 Pro is Apple’s premier iPhone. It has several new features, like a dedicated camera multi-function button that cuts across the iPhone line, that are both useful and needed. But as I watched the launch presentation of the iPhone 16 Pro and they spoke about the camera features, the phone seemed to be trying to stretch beyond its form factor, like a motorcycle that was suddenly trying to be a pickup truck, or a “Jack of all trades, master of none.”
That phrase also applies to the Swiss Army Knife. It has a massive number of features but mostly sucks against more dedicated tools, and I think the iPhone 16 Pro’s camera feature exceeds the reasonable capability of the form factor. You might dispute this, but let’s jump ahead a decade and ask ourselves what’s left to add to the phone that makes sense?
The Problem with Over-Featuring a Product
I use the Swiss Army Knife as an example because I owned one as a kid, and it had something like 24 different functions. But using even the knife function wasn’t as comfortable or easy as a dedicated folding knife with a locking blade would have been, and I nearly cut my finger off messing with it. We’ve had flying cars and amphibious cars over time as well, but they tend to be poor cars, bad planes and lousy boats.
Recall boomboxes that could play tapes, CDs and memory cards. I remember one that even had a small TV screen. They were big and expensive, and the extra complexity didn’t make them particularly reliable. If you try to turn a tool like a smartphone that was designed to be a smartphone into a pro-level camera, there will be tradeoffs.
iPhone 16 Pro Camera
On paper, the iPhone 16 Pro has professional-level camera capabilities. iPhones in general have had the best cameras in the market for some time, and while Apple often shows professionals using the phone in ads, I’m around a lot of professional photographers, and most, even though they have iPhones, prefer a dedicated camera for their work.
This is largely because with the same level of technology, a dedicated camera is always going to be better than a smartphone. It can use larger lenses that capture more light and can be changed out for different effects and images. It is designed to be a camera, not a phone.
Yes, you can get lens attachments for a smartphone, but the result is hard to hold and carry, and the picture quality tends to degrade. Even in Apple’s launch video the professional that used the iPhone put it in a holder that would allow it to be attached to the mount which then allowed the phone to be used more like a camera, and it was around 3x larger than the phone was. And then what if someone calls or texts in the middle of a film or photoshoot?
Smartphones already have a ton of camera features that most of us don’t use, so adding even more professional features would seem unwarranted given most don’t use the features they have. So, I think the iPhone Pro 16 may be over-featured not just for most people but for all people. Even if you don’t agree, what about the iPhone 17 or 18? At what point does feature creep turn the phone into the Pontiac Aztec of cars where it tries to do too much? It simply no longer makes sense.
Wrapping Up: What Comes Next…
One of the things Apple could do is evolve the product. The iPhone is an evolved iPod after all, so Apple could refresh the line by creating something new and different. But they’ve only done the evolution thing once, and it took Steve Jobs to do it. Before the iPhone, recall how both Microsoft and Palm thought the entire idea of a consumer-oriented smartphone was stupid (Microsoft did the Zune instead and that didn’t end well, and Palm eventually went out of business). So, the evolution thing is very rare, and Tim Cook isn’t an innovator so much as an operations guy who isn’t known for vision.
But this isn’t just Apple’s problem. We tend to ignore the fact that the biggest restriction to a future sale is that the product the customer already has is good enough. Certainly, the iPhone is good enough. Yes, Apple has allegedly reduced the functionality of their phones to force upgrades, but the Federal Trade Commission and European Commission have little tolerance for that, and the European Commission is already taking Apple to task for past behavior.
With the possible exception of foldables that Apple doesn’t make yet (likely because it doesn’t want to cannibalize iPad sales), I think the current phones are running out of headroom at the high end. We just don’t seem to have any more need to have features they don’t already have, and the cameras are already better than most people need.
If this problem isn’t fixed, we are looking at a future market stall. Right now, it isn’t a matter of if so much as when that will occur. By the way, this happened before in telephony with PBXs. The products got good enough, companies stopped buying, and not only did a lot of companies fail, but there also aren’t many even in that business anymore.