Charles Arthur
1 min readSep 17, 2019

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None of those first three is an epochal difference in what they can do. And my point was about smartphones in general, not iPhones. I didn’t say “iPhones aren’t doing it, but look at these other smartphones that are.” All smartphones are smartphones. They aren’t featurephones. Featurephones aren’t smartphones.

In detail:

Prices fall naturally as scale grows, and then it’s just a question of what margin you want. Selling stuff cheaper is not “technological innovation”, it’s a business model.

Encroaching on PCs or games consoles is effectively just upping the processor power.

The fourth, AR glasses, is a possible next development that takes us away from slabs held in our hand. That would be a shift on a par with (to reset the metaphor) going from Gemini to Apollo.

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Charles Arthur
Charles Arthur

Written by Charles Arthur

Tech journalist; author of “Social Warming: how social media polarises us all” and two others. The Guardian’s Technology editor 2005–14. Speaker, moderator.

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