Many have predicted the death of the iPhone. We’ve been at Peak iPhone a bunch of different times. We’ve seen “stagnant growth,” “looming trouble,” and prognostications that other companies would steal Apple’s market share or that wearables or hearables or AR or VR or XR or SomethingElseR would usurp the smartphone. And yet, the iPhone remains what it has been for a decade and a half: the most successful product in consumer electronics, a $51 billion business in the first three months of this year alone.
A more fair thing to say might be that the iPhone is complete. That’s what we get into in this Status Update. It’s not dead, it’s not dying, but maybe it’s a product on which there is not much more work to do. It’s true of smartphones in…