The Secret Product the iPhone 7 Enables
Predicting the unification of all Apple’s product roadmaps
I. Overview
The Apple Watch Series 2, wireless AirPod headphones, and the iPhone 7 are all clues into the future that Apple is carefully crafting one entirely connected product experience.
The one unifying goal of all product roadmaps lead in one visionary direction. Remove wires, reduce size, and increase usability until the tech disappears into a human.
Below, we will reveal the steps Apple is already undertaking on the path to true magic. But, if you’ve been reading Humanizing Tech for some time, you might have already been connecting the dots I’m about to spell out below.
Note: every link you see below will transport you to a deeper thought piece on this subject. This aggregated article will make more sense if you follow the white rabbit down each one of these hyperlinked holes.
II. Step 1: Personalization
The second most expensive product most people will ever buy has almost no personalization. A car comes off the assembly line and that’s pretty much your car, save for color and some upgrades like a surround sound stereo or a spoiler.
Whether it’s a solar paneled roof like Tesla is secretly working on or a modular interior that Apple is secretly working on, a personalized product experience is tantamount to Apple’s product underpinnings.
Also, just because we humans live solely on one planet called Earth today doesn’t mean we won’t ever need products to help us live on other planets called Mars or the moon tomorrow. It’s easy to predict Nike’s partnership with Apple for wearables, but much harder when you extend that product partnership to the smart space shoe stars.
Heck, even your home will go the way of software allowing you to easily upgrade your modular flooring, kitchen appliances, and even granite countertops via an additional monthly mortgage fee. Google and Facebook will see to that in the cities of the future.
III. Step 2: Sensory Immersion
It’s no secret that Apple is interested in augmented and virtual reality. Tim Cook has said as much many times. We’ve seen with the iPhone 7 how the Retina HD display is allowing for brighter color saturation, more pixel density, and therefore more immersion.
But what will happen with their vision may be completely different than what you expect from the rest of the VR world. Apple has control over every aspect of the product:
- Producing the 3D, depth-sensing cameras in the iPhone 7
- Improved GPU for on-the-fly ultra high resolution video rendering and machine learning computation
- Higher resolution display for when it’s sitting an inch from your eyeballs
- Faster cellular connections for transporting all that data
Did you know that the iPhone 7 is somehow marginally lighter, 5 grams to be precise, than the iPhone 6S? Every gram counts when you’re wearing a phone on your face. But be careful, nobody’s talking about the potential for eye strain and retina damage from focusing on a screen an inch from your eye.
It all adds up to a new AR and VR product experience I’ve predicted from reading Apple’s patent tea leaves. It will create new apps for health, repair work, exploring cities, and routing (hint: Apple Car) and communicating.
With the AirPods, you no longer have to split headphones with friends and be tethered by wires. You can do it with a new app, or by sharing one single AirPod. The perfect corporate gift (for conference calls because productivity) or stocking stuffer this Christmas, these puppies allow you to go from a 3 mile jog to overseas calls straight from your Dick Tracy Watch.
Whether it’s the future of Instagram and Snapchat “stories” or a trip to the stars, you can bet Apple wants to be wherever humans are.
So lets review.
Apple is slowly encroaching on all our major senses. Our eyes with higher resolution displays that will turn into their AR/VR product. Ears with AirPods that will, of course, turn into their AR/VR product. Touch with fingerprint scanners on home buttons and taptic feedback on, yep, 3D touch that will, again turn into their AR/VR product. And finally, wrist orientation and internal organ heart rate monitoring which will turn into, you guessed it, their AR/VR product.
Next year’s total hardware refresh will all be focused on a single, unifying product: Apple Glasses.
- You see with the iPhone display.
- You hear with wireless AirPods.
- You reach for and biologically respond with the Apple Watch.
- You haptically touch with your fingers.
Below are a few screenshots from Apple’s newest marketing site to help connect the dots a bit more.
The only sense they are missing is smell. And they’re not working on a product for that, right? Wouldn’t you need some type of controlled environment for smell-o-vision?
Oh wait. That’s the interior of the self-driving Apple Car.
The original iPod was released on October 23, 2001. The Apple Car likely won’t be released until October 23, 2021. It took exactly two decades from launching the original human tech product (clickwheel for your sense of touch) to the completion of that vision (virtual reality for all 5 senses).
IV. Step 3: Biological Augmentation
Augmenting your reality with virtual overlays is one thing. Augmenting your biology is another thing entirely.
There’s the concept of a Neural Lace, injected into your body’s connectome to give you superpowers of intelligence and agility.
Or CRISPR, which taken to its end state, means you could edit your DNA from an iPhone app as a drinking game (don’t try this at home, kids). Or maybe you just want to use differential privacy to enable a crypographic back-up of your DNA so you can live on forever, maybe inside Superman’s Fortress of Solitude. Maybe it’s just a CHEM-7 blood test from your smart watch band. Obi Wan, are you there?
It’s all part of Apple’s next move towards what I call Health 2.0, the next mega trend for our species. Defined as the most simple equation, it’s
Health 2.0 = Fitness + Food + Blood + DNA + AI
But said more simply, our technology will become invisible as it becomes a part of our internal biology. Nanobots in our bloodstream that automatically detect and kill cancerous cells as they initially materialize, neural laces laid over our retinas for better vision with a heads up display. Or laces placed inside our brain for faster learning.
V. Conclusion
If you’ve made it this far, clicked on each of the links I’ve embedded to other stories I’ve written, then you might just be convinced that there is a very real master plan at play in the tech community. And you’d be right.
The supercomputer that rendered the first fully animated film, Toy Story, was less powerful than the current iPhones in our pocket. The iPhone 7 could do it in a day. That’s what 20 short years of progress does.
We assume it will just happen, by magic. But it’s a very sensitive system at work. Family foundations, pension funds, and wealthy individuals need to believe that putting their money into tech and startups is an investment that will provide a return. Young people need the awareness that taking crazy leaps is even possible, and a self-starting, goal-oriented Soctratic style education to make it possible. Assembly line memorization isn’t going to cut it. And finally, you need middle class business people to believe their own financial lives are safe enough to go to work at these new companies.
If any major part of that equation fails, or even small disruptions in that mechanical system fail, the steady march of progress won’t be so steady. At the end of the day, we are all humans driven by primal emotions. Fear is stronger than greed, so those who can project confidence even in the wildest of storms are likely to be the leaders who pull us all along into the future we’ve imagined above.
Don’t forget to thank the people who push our world forward every day. Without them, you wouldn’t even have a calculator.
Besides, writing cursive notes on spiral notebook paper with a #2 pencil is so 80s anyways.
— Sean
