iPhone product shots, 5 years on
Five years ago, Apple PR released high-quality photos of the newly-announced iPhone. These shots prominently featured the home screen. After five years of subtle improvements, it’s hard to say what’s more striking: the total change, or how much has stayed the same?
The more things change…
The sum of many small changes has a really big impact. The Retina change doesn’t really show in the product shots, but many design changes and post-production decisions do.
- Naturally, the 16:9 screen is the most dramatic change.
- Believe it or not, the original iPhone promo shots didn’t have the now-trademark reflective sheen on them.
- There are seven new icons: Videos, Passbook, Reminders, Newsstand, iTunes, App Store, and Game Center. In retrospect, the empty row for icons on an iPhone with no App Store should have been suspicious.
- The cellular provider is no longer shown in the promo shots, even though it shows full cellular signal. I’m not sure if this configuration is actually possible.
- Calculator goes away, although nothing else does.
- iPod has become Music, Text has become Messages. Next up: Phone becomes Voice?
Boring
Despite these changes, it’s really remarkable how much is the same, five iterations later. How positively boring.
- Every visible button is still in the same location: home, power, volume, mute.
- The first and last rows of icons are exactly the same! The same eight apps are in the same eight places in iOS 6 as in iPhone OS 1.
- The icons have kept their exact shape and spacing. What originally seemed distinctive is now an industry standard.
- It’s still 9:41, even though the Clock app has changed to a more traditional 10:15.
- The dock still remains four apps anchored to the bottom of the screen. It’s worth remembering that on the original iPhone the dock wasn’t really even a dock, since you only had one screen and couldn’t rearrange icons.
- The calendar’s day is the weekday and date of that device’s announcement. Thoughtful consistency though subtle change.
Boring or revolutionary?
Considering how far the functionality has come in these five years, it’s kind of bizarre how little the basic promo shots have changed. The hardware is a little taller, but it’s still fundamentally a refinement. The iPhone team has fed us a steady drip of pleasant refinements that add up to something not revolutionary, but a hell of a lot better than what we had in 2007. Even if it is still 9:41.
Sep 26 2012
11:05 am
Hi Allen,
Really enjoy your writing. I like the typography and minimalism of your site as well.
Regarding the ‘boring’ factor for the iPhone. I think the age of flash devices with bells and whistles to capture the attention of a potential customer will come to a close, or at least, be only a small sector of the industry.
Apple has spent decades building a digital ecosystem that will look past the need for any dramatic changes in the OS, and the dramatic changes will take place how iDevices are integrated across a single platform.
The steady amalgamation of features on the Mac OS and iOS are demonstrating that, in time, we won’t care so much about the look of the devices (I would still argue that the design is still the gold standard – but that’s a preference/opinion) and care more about the seamless way we move from one device to another.
E.g. On my Mac, then onto my iPad, then iPhone, with an Apple TV in the background with zero hiccups moving from one device to another.
Apple is more than capable of producing iPhones of different sizes and an iOS with a different look, but it would break from the ecosystem advantage that they have. It’s a bold move to stay the same, I would say.
Sep 26 2012
2:53 pm
Thanks Pannu! I agree for the most part. The age of flashy hardware is certainly over, now that devices have converged on, essentially, a giant screen.
That said, there’s little chance that a simple grid of icons in that size and shape is the best possible home screen available to science. Sooner or later, big changes will come to the home screen. Chances are they will happen in stages, just like most other changes the iOS team makes, but they’ll come.
Sep 27 2012
3:09 am
It’s interesting also that the headphones are included in the new product shot. They seemed to be an important part of this most recent release and are also an area that’s had constant small refinements.
Sep 28 2012
9:00 am
Thanks for the reply Allen!
Apple has a history of self-disruption. The iPod was disrupted by the iPhone, for example. There are several other examples, but I digress.
What do you think of Siri being the next leap in OS? In othe words, eventually abandoning the dependence on a touch screen input as much as we do today and utilizing Siri for most commands?
I know we’re a long way from that, but do you have any thoughts on that?
Sep 28 2012
9:15 am
Personally, I’m a voice command skeptic. For specific use cases, such as while driving, it’s very useful. However, even in a world where computers are arbitrarily good at interpreting voice input, speaking voice commands all day long is exhausting, slow, and noisy to those around you compared to typing. I’d be interested to be proven wrong though!