So Apple had a rough week. Tuesday they reported their first year-over-year revenue decline since 2003 (thirteen years), and by Wednesday the stock had dropped something like 6 percent and was sitting under $95 a share, a two-year low. iPhone unit sales were down around 16 percent compared to the same quarter last year. Every tech outlet ran some version of the same headline: the iPhone supercycle is over, Apple's growth story is done, etc.
I'm not going to rehash all of that here because you've probably already read six versions of it this week if you follow any of this stuff. What I keep thinking about instead is my phone drawer.
I have an iPhone 5s in there. Bought it in the fall of 2013 for something like $649 outright because I was between contracts and didn't want to deal with a two-year lock-in. It still works fine. The battery's not what it used to be, I charge it around 2pm most days now instead of just once in the morning, but it makes calls, it runs the apps I actually use, and the screen isn't cracked (yet, knock on wood). I looked at the 6s in the store back in September, held it, felt the size difference, and put it back down. Forty minutes of my life I won't get back trying to talk myself into $749.
Talk to basically anyone in my actual life, not people on tech Twitter, and it's the same story. My sister's still on a plain iPhone 5. A coworker two desks over has a phone with a shattered corner she just kind of lives with. Nobody's rushing out every September anymore for the new one. The two-year upgrade cycle that used to be gospel just quietly stopped being true for a lot of people around here, and I think Apple's earnings call just put a number on something that's been obvious if you actually pay attention to what real people carry in their pockets instead of what gets reviewed on launch day.
Part of it is that the phones got good enough. That's the boring, unsexy answer but it's the true one. A phone from 2013 does the things a phone needs to do: texts, camera, maps, whatever game you're currently pretending you'll delete next week. The jump from "good" to "slightly better camera and a home button that's technically a pressure sensor now" just isn't the same as the jump from "no smartphone" to "smartphone" was back in 2011 when I started this blog. There's a lot less room left to be amazed.
And now there's this rumor going around that the next iPhone is going to drop the headphone jack entirely. If that's true I genuinely don't know what I'm going to do. Not because I'm precious about ports, but because I own something like four pairs of headphones at this point, and the idea of needing a dongle for all of them, or replacing all of them, for a phone I wasn't planning on buying anyway, makes skipping a generation even easier. Apple's betting people will just adapt. Maybe they will. I'm not in a hurry to find out firsthand.
Twitter had its own bad week too, for what it's worth. Their earnings came out the same day as Apple's and the stock got hit even harder, something like 14 percent down, on slowing user growth that anyone could've seen coming just by watching how the timeline feels now compared to 2013. Different company, same underlying story though: the easy growth is gone, and now it's a slog of trying to convince people who already have the thing to want the next version of the thing, or to want it more badly than they currently do.
I don't think this is a crisis for Apple, to be clear. They still make more money in three months than a lot of countries' entire GDP, so let's not get carried away with the "Apple is doomed" takes that were already showing up by Thursday afternoon. But it's a decent reminder that the smartphone market quietly matured while a lot of us weren't watching the calendar too closely. My 5s isn't going anywhere this year. Ask me again in September when the new one actually ships and see if I've changed my mind. I honestly doubt I will.