The iPhone 7... Finally a Quantum Leap?

Every year, Apple (NASDAQ: AAPL) gets a chance to do something really spectacular.

More than a chance, actually. For the last decade or so, the world’s most iconic tech brand has been on the spot, expected to deliver the next greatest piece of consumer electronics wizardry.

In reality, over that decade, Apple has made good on that promise only twice: the moment it unveiled the very first iPhone in 2007, and when it released the first iPad in 2010.

In its entire history, in fact, Apple, the unmatched king of technical innovation, has had only had six truly world-changing products: the Apple II, the Macintosh, iTunes, the iPod, and the two already mentioned.

And even that’s a stretch. The Apple II’s significance is that it launched the company and kept it alive through years of turmoil and bad decision-making.

And the Macintosh, though world changing in its design and graphical user interface, was neither a commercial success when it initially launched nor the first of its kind to use the mouse-and-pointer system we’re all accustomed to today.

Which really leaves us with four products, three devices, and one service, all tied together and synchronized so that one person could own and use the entire product line as if it were a single, multi-screened device.

How Did the Richest Company Ever Really Do It?

Sounds underwhelming, but the amazing thing is that it’s these three devices, in all of their different sizes and versions, that account for a vast majority of Apple’s revenues over the last 10 years.

This family of devices, with their common design DNA, can take full credit for Apple’s rise to the top of the market capitalization ladder.

Today, the company is worth close to $600 billion, with about a third of that in cash or marketable security reserves, and though we may expect greatness from it every year at its fall product launch, the truth is that Apple has had to do it only a few times to get to where it is.

Few and far between as they may be, however, these quantum leaps absolutely must happen every so often.

A great illustration of what happens when they don’t is Apple’s close brush with bankruptcy in the 1990s — the result of a 10-year stretch devoid of any significant new products.

With the six-year mark on the introduction of the iPad just expired this past January, hundreds of millions of dedicated Apple users the world over are wondering when the next big thing will appear.

With Steve Jobs dead and Tim Cook still largely untested in the role of technological auteur, many of these users are starting to wonder if this quantum leap will ever come.

This coming fall, as it does every year, the collective hope of these Apple-philes will peak once again.

The iPhone 6S was last year’s offering, which means that this year, we’re due for an all-new version.

Is it going to be the world-changing moment we’ve all been anticipating?

The New iPhone is Coming… But Just How New is it?

Based on the most recent rumors, the new iPhone will indeed come with some impressive new technology.

More storage capacity, longer battery life, more processing power, and a higher resolution camera are all obvious improvements.

This next generation will purportedly also come with a dual lens that will allow for the scanning of 3D images and 2D resolution surpassing current DSLR standards — thanks in large part to Apple’s acquisition of LinX Computational Imaging LTD last year.

Wireless charging is another anticipated feature, though at this point, I view it not as an innovation but as a preemptive step to keep up with the competition.

A few years from now, it will be the standard, and we’ll quickly forget how we ever survived using those annoying power cables.

Wireless earbuds, along with the elimination of the earbud jack altogether, will make the iPhone 7 less cumbersome and even a millimeter or so thinner than the current model… maybe.

And finally, waterproofing. The bane of millions of cell phone users across the world — water in places where it doesn’t belong — will finally be crossed off the iPhone’s list of weaknesses.

Sounds interesting, for sure. Technically impressive, without a doubt.

Fitting a camera good enough for a professional photographer into a device the thickness of five credit cards is a marvel onto itself, to say nothing of the computing power necessary to process, store, and transmit the images and videos it produces… But does all of it amount to another world-changing Apple moment?

Doubtful.

All Champions Must Fall

These advancements are still akin to the advancements seen, for example, in the aircraft industry during the ’30s and early ’40s.

Planes got faster, sleeker, safer, more efficient, more capable… but they still used the same propeller drive technology.

It wasn’t until the advent of the jet that things really changed for aeronautical engineering.

And that’s exactly the sort of thing we’re looking for from Apple in the consumer tech space.

Sadly, however, these quantum leap moments can no more be planned than they can be predicted. At Apple, every product is conceptualized as the next great thing.

Its designers and marketers expect greatness the same way that its consumers do.

And the probability that this sense of greatness will persist is far stronger than the chances of it actually happening, for a multitude of reasons including but not limited to the aforementioned departure of the company’s main source of innovative inspiration.

It’s bad news for Apple, and it’s bad news for Apple fanatics, but it’s far from the end of the world.

What will happen is what always happens: Somebody else will step in and give the world that quantum leap moment, regardless of what’s going on at Apple’s headquarters in Cupertino.

This may not be what some want to hear, but the chances of somebody else, perhaps even a company you haven’t heard of yet, wrestling the next great innovation from the standing champion grow stronger with each day.

Fortune favors the bold,

Alex Koyfman

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