Nik Rawlinson
…Apple has piped the final icing on the iPhone cake: a choice of network.
Apple CEO Steve Jobs came to London in 2007. He pulled up a stool at the front of the Regent Street Apple Store and announced to the nation that iPhone was here. Or at least it would be within the next two months.
Key to that plan was O2, the network partner Apple had chosen to carry the gadget – a choice that, Jobs said: ‘Wasn’t an economic choice, it was a cultural choice. They think the way we do, work the same way as us.’
The two were faithful partners for two years and one day until Apple strayed and involved the handset in a digital menage a trois that welcomed Orange into the bed. Was that a cultural choice, too? Has Orange really changed so much over that time that it’s a fundamentally, culturally different company to the one Apple left on the sidelines on the day the iPhone first graced these shores: 9 November 2007?
No. I don’t think it is. It’s still a highly respected brand. It still sponsors cheap movie tickets on Wednesday night. It’s still one of the big five networks with broad UK coverage and its logo is nothing more than a big amber square. Any cultural shift, then, isn’t on Orange’s part, but Apple’s. It has seen how phenomenally successful the iPhone has become on just one network, and it’s seen economic sense. Why not repeat that success on other networks, too?
If it’s going to attract any new users, then it’s going to have to offer them something more. And when the handset itself already has as many features as you could ever expect to find in a device that’s dwarfed by a simple pack of cards and your App Store already boasts 100,000+ applications, that ‘something more’ has to come from ‘somewhere else’.
Apple has seen that the final obstacle to adoption for many users was its original choice of network. Some people simply don’t like O2, whatever its culture, just as still others don’t like Vodafone or 3, some are turned off by T-Mobile and an equal number would likely steer clear of Orange itself.
It was a simple revelation, and one that has paid enormous dividends. On its first day with the handset, Orange shifted more than 30,000 units, which is an extraordinary number for any handset on any network, and one that will have Apple breathing a sigh of relief. The gamble paid off.
Yet perhaps the truth of the matter is that the iPhone has become as much a part of what defines the late first decade of the second millennium as reality TV, surveillance society and manufactured bubblegum pop. It’s a cultural phenomenon in its own right, whatever the network that hosts it, and that makes the medium irrelevant.
