Can Tim Cook sustain the iPhone launch phenomenon?

This article was written before the launch of the iPhone 6 and was published in the September issue of CRN.

I have written numerous times, in this space and others, about the changing paradigm of television. No more, I have pronounced, will people tune in to watch a program at the time the television networks deem appropriate. The power of choice has switched hands, I have proclaimed, and the watchers will decide when they watch.

At 4.50am AEST on 24 August, I and many hundreds of thousands of other Australians proved me wrong. Or did we?

We got up in the chilly pre-dawn to watch the season premiere of Doctor Who – the first full episode with Peter Capaldi as the latest incarnation of the Time Lord. The ABC broadcast the episode simultaneously with its premiere on the BBC, rather than making Australian fans wait 15 hours for a more humane timeslot, and ended up with a ratings winner. Many people will have recorded it while they slept, or indeed waited for the repeat that evening – but enough people actually sat and watched it in the wee smalls for the ABC to call it a success.

The national broadcaster has, in response, announced it will simulcast all episodes of this season in the same way, and at first blush that seems a grand plan. But I have my doubts.

Why? Because I’ve been to enough iPhone launches to know better. (You knew this would get around to technology eventually, didn’t you?)

Think back, if you will, to 2007 and the announcement of the first iPhone. It was, in its day, a radical departure from pretty much every aspect of telephone design up until then. For all its limitations, it was clearly superior to every other device in its category in most important respects. Naturally, everyone wanted one – and, of course, outside of the US you couldn’t get one.

When the iPhone 3G launched the following year, and became available internationally, the hype was unprecedented. Normally level-headed folks took to referring to it as the ‘Jesus phone’. This was a telephone – albeit a clever one – and for all its advanced technology it could do nothing about leprosy. But such was the level of anticipation.

Lengthy queues outside telco shops in the middle of the night were a natural result of such expectation – just as people had queued for the opening of the first Apple Stores, for the privilege of being the first one there. Or even for being among the first thousand or so.

And therein lies the rub. The queues and the excitement and the hype are there for the first. They are about the moment. That place and that time, never to be repeated.

Subsequent iPhone launches have still garnered queues, but smaller ones. Partly it’s because there’s more competition in smartphones – once you show everyone what a proper modern smartphone looks like, it doesn’t take long for them to catch up – and partly it’s because the differences between one model and its predecessor are more incremental now. But mostly it’s because there’s not nearly as much prestige in being the thousandth person to walk out of an Apple Store with an iPhone 6. Certainly not something you’d wait in the street until 1am for.

To use the Doctor’s terminology, events are wibbly-wobbly timey-wimey things. They exist for a moment, and you can’t hold on, or capture them again.

Which is a problem for Tim Cook. He has no end of pundits telling him he has to do this or that with screen sizes or pricing in order to match Android offerings, but they’re all wrong. The real question he faces is how to do something that is different – revolutionary, even. The crowds at iPhone launches are getting smaller even as the phones are getting better, and Cook will want to reverse that.Can he produce another iPhone Event? We'll find out in sometime September, I guess.

Meanwhile, I will be spending my Sunday mornings in front of the TV watching sci-fi nonsense as only the BBC can do it. I expect fewer people will be joining me with each passing week, and it will have nothing to do with the quality of the show.

Matthew JC Powell is a technology commentator, philosopher and father of two, in no particular order