I was a bit taken aback by the prevailing cynicism surrounding yesterday’s iPhone announcement. It’s not that I expected people to have been excited, rather that any reaction to new iPhones would have been well tempered by this point.

Like many, the original iPhone was the single most exciting product announcement in my lifetime. It was truly revolutionary. Cellphones, even “smartphones”, were really just phones with some features (most of which were phone adjacent) tacked on. The iPhone was truly the first usable handheld computer. This excitement lasted and even grew over the immediate years thereafter for a few reasons. New people were still buying and experiencing their first iPhone. Ridiculous cellphone subsidies meant more people upgraded more frequently, and the fact that early “new” iPhones were so plainly better than previous generations gave even the least tech savvy buyers something to look forward to when upgrading. In the early years of the iPhone, the question was not “should I get a new iPhone”, but rather “when will I be able to get a new iPhone?”

We are no longer in the early years of the iPhone… and that’s okay.

That original iPhone was released just over 12 years ago. Smartphones have matured to the point where each year-over-year model is incrementally better. Few people need or can justify buying a new iPhone annually or even every other year, especially now that those ridiculous subsidies are long gone. Even Apple doesn’t expect most to upgrade their iPhones like they used to. They’ve kept prices high and offered higher end models in part because they expect people to use their iPhones longer.

iPhones were always computers, and now they’ve reached a maturity where people upgrade them more on a frequency they would with any other computer. When new iPhones are announced at the same time every year, the people who pay attention to the event already know if and why they might upgrade, the “why” is increasingly “because my phone is old.” Some already know they are going to buy whatever new iPhone. Some might be tempted given the right feature. Most are satisfied enough with the iPhone they already have. While there will always be reasons to be moderately excited or disappointed, I don’t see anything worth getting cynical over.