Has Apple Already Reached its Peak?

This September sees the release of the new iPhone 7. The iPhone is arguably Apple’s flagship product these days and the unveiling of a new model creates a buzz like no other. Yet with the competition catching up and in some cases over taking, is Apple still top of technology tree? This article will examine whether it is still the cultural phenomenon that it once was.

(photo credit to the owner.)

Since being formed in the seventies by Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak and Ronald Wayne Apple has grown to become one of the world’s most profitable companies. FXCM state that the company’s share price has increased 20,000% since it went public in 1980. It is well known that Steve Jobs was fired from the company and invited back in 1997. Ten years later Apple released its most famous product the iPhone, heralding in a new age of phone technology and a new category of phone: the smartphone. Steve Jobs died in 2011 from lung cancer and there was concern as to whether Apple could continue to innovate.

(photo credit to the owner.)

The year is now 2016 and the competition to Apple and the iPhone has caught up. The battle of Apple vs. Samsung was covered in an excellent article on Vanity Fair which detailed the billion dollar legal battle between the two companies. Apple believed that the Samsung Galaxy was a copy of the iPhone. Samsung responded by telling Apple how they had been making cell phones long before Apple. Each company claimed that patents had been stolen. The legal battle continues to this day but no matter what happens Samsung is an equal rival to Apple even outselling them with the Galaxy S7.

The release of the iPhone 7 due out this September has not been accompanied with the usual excitement. For the first time for a new generation of iPhone releases there has been equal amount of skepticism. The Internet is more concerned with what the phone won’t have rather than the new features. The focus of this concern has been the removal of the headphone jack, which has angered consumers who believe that Apple is taking advantage of them. In the future only headphones with the Apple Lightning Cable or Bluetooth headphones will be compatible resulting in a lot of consumers having to buy extra products to listen to their device. This is part of the problem Apple has been facing in recent years. The company was always supposed to be user friendly yet across their products the compatibility has decreased. The latest Mac Air came without the usual USB slots and instead customers had to use a special USB-C to Lightning Cable. There was only one slot for this cable, which is also the slot to charge the laptop. The only way to charge and transfer at the same time was to buy a special adapter.

Apple is known for refining its products but many believe that is getting to a point where the costumer is not put first. If the rumors are true then the iPhone 8 is going to revolutionize the smartphone industry in 2017. If that is the case where does that put Apple now with the iPhone 7?