BOOKS & ARTS
ARTS SPECIAL
iAddicts
Rory Sutherland doesn’t have an iPhone. But he knows why you do
F
or many years The Spectator employed
a television reviewer who did not own
a colour television. Now they have
decided to go one better and have asked
me to write a piece to mark the tenth anni-
versary of the iPhone. I have never owned
an iPhone. (In the metropolitan media
world I inhabit, this is tantamount to put-
ting on your CV that you ‘enjoy line danc-
ing, child pornography and collecting Nazi
memorabilia’).
But, even though I’m a diehard Android
fan, I still cannot help paying attention to
every single thing Apple does and says. I
don’t think this happens in reverse. I doubt
Apple owners pay any attention to the next
phone announcement from LG or Nokia
— any more than Anna Wintour lies awake
wondering what Primark’s autumn season
has in store.
How has it achieved this? Well, like De
Beers before it, Apple has exhibited a rare
marketing genius in creating something that
defies the usual rules of economics.
By stubbornly resisting the pressure to
chase volume sales by producing cheaper
variants of the iPhone, and through fanati-
cal attention to design, Apple has, ingen-
iously, become a technology company with
the characteristics (and the margins) of a
luxury-goods company or a high-fashion
brand.
On the one occasion that Apple
deferred to the bidding of financial analysts
and introduced a lower-cost alternative to
the flagship iPhone (the plastic-bodied 5C),
it failed. Just as there is very little demand
for the world’s second most expensive
champagne, or for private jets with densely
packed seating, there is very little demand
for the world’s second-best flagship phone.
As someone wisely once said to me, in
response to a business proposal, ‘Yes, there
may be a gap in the market, but is there a
market in the gap?’
Notice that, for the world’s most valuable
company, Apple sells remarkably few things.
Ring up Samsung, and they won’t just sell
you a phone, a vacuum cleaner and a televi-
sion, they can also build you an offshore oil
rig or a supertanker. By contrast, I can name
every current Apple product from memory.
But it isn’t only the range that is kept
tightly controlled: so, too, is the pace of
replacement.With Apple’s control over both hardware
and software, any new product or upgrade
is a media event worldwide (Android
upgrades take place piecemeal, depending
on your handset). Apple’s tempo of innova-
tion is hence kept at a humanly comprehen-
sible level.
Together these two things mean that,
once you decide you are an Apple person,
choosing an Apple phone is easy — as is
deciding when you will next upgrade and to
what. For an Android user, the ‘choice archi-
tecture’ is baffling: new phones are launch-
ing all the time at every different price-point
imaginable. Unless you want to spend weeks
reading reviews, you can lose the will to live.
It is often the case with super-dominant
brands that they possess a superpower thatis so strong that we accept it without think-
ing. It is, when you think about it, a remark-
able quality of Coca-Cola that, aside from
water, it is the only cold, non-alcoholic
drink you can order anywhere in the world
without having to think for a second wheth-
er or not it is available. You can be in the
bar of the Colombe d’Or, a McDonald’s
in Taipei, or a beach shack in Belize and,
if you ask for a Coke, you’ll get it. If they
don’t have it, that’s their fault, not yours.
Ask for a Dr Pepper or a ginger beer in
those places and you’ll get an ‘I’m sorry, no’
accompanied by an eye gesture that some-
how implies that you are a weird idiot just
for asking.
Like a fashion brand, Apple’s peculiar
magic lies in taste-making. Conventional
business logic suggests that you should find
out what people want and then provide it to
them in volume at as low a price as possible.
Apple’s approach is closer to that of an art-
ist, chef or couturier — it exists to inform
and improve your taste, rather than to
reflect it: ‘It’s not the customer’s job to fig-
ure out what they want,’ as Steve Jobs put it.
In some ways, Apple is more like a
French brand than a democratic American
one. In France, the more expensive the hotel,
the more likely it is to refuse to make you
a sandwich. There’s only one extortionate
prix-fixe menu, but the view from the ter-race is so good you’re happy to go along
with it.
In the same way, we accept a proprie-
tary charging cable and no headphone jack
because the Apple taste-sommelier tells us to.
Apple hence has the extraordinary
power to make people accept things they
didn’t previously want. No other tech brand
can seduce to the same extent. This gives it
exceptional power to innovate.
How can we not admire this? The only
reason to worry is scale.
Let’s be clear. Humans do almost every-
thing to generate feelings. We don’t have sex
predominantly to produce children — or buy
Prada sunglasses to protect our eyes from the
sun: we do it because of how it feels. Nobody
really goes to the bottle bank to recycle glass:
we do it for the fun of smashing bottles. Or
take those alcohol-based hand sanitisers you
get in public lavatories: if asked, you would
explain that you are using it to reduce the
risk of infection, but really it’s because of the
pervily enjoyable sensation you get when the
liquid evaporates on your hands.
We do things that feel good, then we
post-rationalise. And Apple’s greatest
insight is that a phone’s appeal lies less in
what we can instrumentally do with it than
in how it feels when we do it.
But there’s one important difference.
We don’t (well, I don’t) spend five hours a
day having sex, buying sunglasses or recy-
cling bottles. There aren’t one-and-a-half
billion people spending an hour a day sani-
tising their hands. Apart from anything else,
there’s a time and a place for all these things.
But for a smartphone the time and place is
‘all the time, any place’.
When something changes behaviour
to the extent the smartphone has done, do
we need to ask what the downside may be?
(Silicon Valley professes to be improving
the world, but is wilfully blind to unintended
consequences.) Are 40 billion working hours
being wasted every year because it feels bet-
ter to write on a lovely touchscreen rath-
er than an ugly but functional keyboard?
When it is a rainy day in Peckham, how
does it improve your life to see pictures of
your friends on holiday? When Apple creat-
ed the smartphone, did it unwittingly create
20 Marlboro in electronic form? Though at
least when people smoked they were paying
attention to the other people in the room...When Apple created the smartphone,
did it unwittingly create 20 Marlboro
in electronic form?