iPhone is the New Fashion (or Buh-bye Moto)
The iMac case went from white plastic to aluminum and glass, and the iPhone went from aluminum and glass to black plastic. Or white plastic to show off you got a premium 16GB version, just like the high-end MacBook is only in black.
None of that is coincidence. As technical advances slow and feature creep becomes more of a crawl, electronics is shifting from being all about the speeds and feeds and becoming more about the fashions and faux-pas.
Apple knows this and a new study shows consumers are driving it:
In another study by Rubicon Consulting, the firm asked iPhone owners “When you got your iPhone, what model of mobile phone, if any, did it replace?” The findings are quite interesting. Unsurprisingly, many of the replaced models are high-end smartphones like Windows Mobile phones (14%), Blackberries (13%) and Palm (7%) devices. However, almost a quarter (24%) of respondents upgraded to their iPhone having previously owned a Motorola RAZR.
RAZR was once the trendy new chic in town, now the iPhone is becoming the go-to-device. Though hopefully we aren’t — and will never be — at the level of thousand dollar designer pumps and purses, the same study does show the price consumers are willing to pay for their fashionable handsets has gone up by $9 over the last six months alone.
Swords being double-edges, however, the sheer market share lost from RAZR to iPhone and the current problems facing Motorola show that, increasingly, no company may be more than one hot handset away from either blinding success or abysmal failure.
June 23rd, 2008 at 9:59 am
“the iPhone went from aluminum and glass to black plastic”
Is the glass gone in the 3G?
June 23rd, 2008 at 5:55 pm
Glass still there. Just plastic black or white back. I would have preferred the aluminum back. Therefore it would maintain the fashionable look the 1st iPhone had.
June 24th, 2008 at 12:49 am
some say it is plastic because of GPS, but I’m not sure if aluminium affects GPS.