The iPhone and the Illusion of Incremental Progress

Apple’s iPhone 16 line has changed the world. We’re just numb to these shifts now

Photo by surasak_ch on Unsplash

Exponential growth is a hard concept to grasp. It’s difficult for many to conceive of the way that the possibilities for the first few moves in a game of chess quickly mount to billions and billions of distinct permutations. But to consider how exponential growth applies to our own lives broaches territory that few of us can process for what precisely it means. 

Our disconnected relationship to the idea of exponents explains much of our tepid reaction to the new technologies that release each year. To hear the names of each new iPhone, most would fairly assume that our growth is simply linear. iPhone 11s become 12s, and iPhone 13s become 14s, 15s, and 16 Pros. What next year’s new phones will be named isn’t exactly a mystery. 

As adamantly as Apple might attempt to sell the world on each new year’s line of phones, the general public remains obliviously mired in the notion that our changes are only incremental. There are some who buy new iPhones immediately upon their yearly pre-releases, but most consumers simply don’t see compelling reasons to upgrade annually. As smartphone prices have continued to mount, that reluctance is only natural.

At the same time that Apple has cultivated an air of futurism with its products and the all white stores in which they’re sold, they’ve also figured out a way of making the future that they’re selling feel approachable. The continuity between iPhone iterations makes it easy to forget that we’re living in an era of exponential progress. 

It’s a popular belief that the changes in design between iPhones throughout this past decade have been by and large insignificant. Maybe that’s Apple’s intention. Maybe if each new year came instead with an “iPhone Nexus,” “iPhone Horizon,” or “iPhone Quantum Leap,” they would elicit the feelings of caution that these new devices duly demand. Perhaps there’s a floodgate Apple is holding closed so that they can stagger their new technologies. But perhaps there’s a subtle generosity in their often-noticeable restraint. Maybe they’ve surmised that to change much more on a year-to-year basis is something the public might deem disorienting. 

Or maybe Apple has reasoned that the most judicious way to sell the ecosystem they’re crafting is to conceal their rapid innovations within metal shells that remain consistently recognizable. 

At the same time that Apple tries to sell us on a certain futurism with each passing year, they maintain a constant thread of familiarity between products. The leaps between generations are rarely so huge that they warrant any real period of adjustment for users. And yet, entire centuries have passed without the seismic technological jumps people have grown to expect of each new September’s array of iPhones.

Understanding the millennia that lapsed between the agricultural revolution and the birth of computers, we can get a clearer perspective on the exponential curve that a world of yearly new iPhones signifies. 

In this day and age, it’s easy to be deceived into believing that each revolution around the sun represents a long period of time. News cycles remain in flux, new products are released like clockwork, and yearly recaps tell a story of a species that never stops moving. But on a cosmic scale, a year is scarcely a blip. Even the eons between fire circles and cellphones begin to look infinitesimal in the face of this universe that stretches 100 billion light years across. 

The smartphones in our pockets today contain over one million times more memory than the computer that launched the Apollo mission. They have 100,000 times the processing power that it required to put men on the moon — in my own parents’ lifetime. That’s our rate of progress.

To live in the age when we can reasonably expect new smart phones to release on this spastic basis is a remarkable thing. We’ve effectively tricked ourselves into believing that the outrageous is normal. We forget the centuries between the birth of the printing press and the discovery that the same force that paints erratic streaks of light across the sky during storms could be harnessed and used to power homes. We turn our backs on the crawl at which our species has moved throughout the vast majority of our existence. It required leaps and bounds of innovation to put the internet in our pockets. 

We’re so desensitized to our frenetic pace of progress that we earnestly commiserate that each years’ new models aren’t doing a little more for us. 

On one hand, it’s hard to assuage the feeling that I’m just a typical consumer when I buy an iPhone every other time that a new line is released. But on the other, buying new phones with this profligate regularity is also my strange way of paying homage to just how far we’ve come. It’s an acknowledgement that improving on what Apple released only last year is a feat that pushes humanity to the very limits of innovation. It’s a nod to the fact that stuffing a billion more transistors into these titanium encased supercomputers illustrates an achievement I can barely begin to make sense of. 

Apple’s latest AirPods can measure the auditory information within our environments 48,000 times per second. The new generation of phones they’ll wirelessly connect to will perform 35 trillion operations per second with their “neural engines.” Apple CEO Tim Cook hardly overstated it when he began Monday’s product launch explaining, “Today, we are going to talk about Apple Watch, AirPods, and iPhone, and the profound impact these products are making in our lives.” Apple isn’t wrong to routinely capitalize on the life saving utility that these pocket (and wrist) computers can offer.

Yet even still, I can hardly help myself from succumbing to that toxic “I wish they’d done a little more this year” mentality. These numbers and terminologies our phones traffic in float a mile above my head and still I have the audacity to whine. The achievements symbolize a species standing at a pinnacle point. How much higher it’s possible to go is uncertain. Each step further up this mountain of innovation we clamber is another one deeper into this precipitous fog. 

A strange truth is that a ceiling to innovation may exist. There may not only be a point at which we can no longer insert more and more transistors into each phone. But there may also be a point at which we can no longer bear the growing pains that arrive with these new technologies. It’s no guarantee that we can survive the blow it will mean to become a few steps more digitized than we are today. 

As Apple introduces the world to its take on artificial intelligence, the company has once again entered into a new paradigm. Apple Intelligence doesn’t need to reinvent the wheel that OpenAI and its competitors have established in order for it to change the world. Even if Apple can’t parallel the most cutting edge generative AI models that are available on the market today, the company will play a critical role in normalizing the strange. 

What the tech giant gradually unveils these next few months as these iPhones hit store shelves — and the next few updates go into effect — may not be something different in essence than the best AI tools that are available to the world already today. In its raw capabilities, they may not even rival them. Apple’s success as a company has rarely been a result of offering the most cutting edge technology. But placed in front of users with Apple’s hallmark ease of use, they won’t need to be groundbreaking to shift the earth beneath our feet.

We saw a similar line of thinking with the Apple Vision Pro. At its staggering pre-tax price tag of $3500, Apple could have reasonably gambled beforehand that this initial line of their headsets wouldn’t be the ones to take over the world. The cumbersome white helmets are more likely to follow the very same model that iPhones have. The products will begin to pop up sporadically within crowds and spur gawks from passersby before they spread like wildfire. It wasn’t until a few iterations into the iPhone’s lineage that the company had convinced the public that the machines were actually worth their cost. 

It isn’t the Apple Vision Pro that will usher in a world of virtual reality. It’s the Vision Pro 3 and 4. 

The generative AI tools that entered the world less than two years ago will reach a new phase of ubiquity when Apple Intelligence enters our phones. And a couple of years from now, these integrated features will be such a humdrum component of our day-to-day lives that they’ll no longer elicit even passing shrugs. 

Text generators will become so seamless to operate that the stigma around them will continue to fall. Pretty soon, grandparents will be sending AI-generated emojis to one another to correspond to their specific conversations. We’ll break new barriers of accessibility at the same time that we raise profound new philosophical quandaries. 

This future we’re pioneering may sound strange, but the path toward it has already been paved.