How Apple's iPhones Change the Smartphone Market Every Year

[Lauren] It' been nearly a year

since the iPhone X was announced.

It is the biggest leap forward since the original iPhone.

Which means it's been a year

of all the other phone manufacturers

trying in some way to capture the mystique

and the endless chatter about the iPhone X.

So if that meant shipping a new phone with a notch,

or adapting a new gesture based UI,

that's what phone makers have done this year.

Okay, to be fair it's not like everyone's waiting to see

what Apple's going to do in September,

and then rushing to copy them necessarily.

Most phones are in production for many months

before they ship to consumers,

but Apple has the uncanny ability to set the tone

for what a premium phone is going to look like.

Here are some examples.

The notch is the most obvious physical attribute

that started popping up on phones this year,

and it was driven by one key design choice,

bezel-less screens.

If the display takes up the whole face of the phone,

there's no place to put the camera, or a 3D sensor,

or a speaker, so the solution is a cutout.

Now Apple actually wasn't first to this.

The Essential Phone, which launched last August

has a round notch at the top here.

Then came the iPhone X,

and the notch became a big topic of conversation.

After that Huawei, OnePlus, LG, Xiaomi,

all released phones with some sort of notch, among others.

Some people really hate the notch.

Personally, I don't mind it so much,

but we do have Apple to thank

for bringing the notch into our smartphone vernacular.

After the notch, the second most noticeable feature

of this year's phones were glass backs.

Now Apple of course had a glass back on the iPhone 4,

and since then Samsung's had glass backed phones,

but to support wireless charging,

Apple rolled it out again with the iPhone 8 and iPhone X,

after which glass backs were everywhere.

What's interesting is that this trend even trickled down

to what you might consider budget phones.

Something like the Motorola G6,

which costs a fifth of what the iPhone X costs.

While this has given smartphones a nice premium look,

it's also made them slippery as hell, case in point.

But hey, it's probably been great for companies

that make phone cases or you know,

giant tech companies that offer repair services like Apple.

Moving on, unlocking your phone

with your fingerprint is so 2013.

Last fall Apple raised the bar by introducing Face ID,

which lets you unlock your iPhone X

with you guessed it, your face.

Now that raised all kinds of questions ranging from

the important stuff like, how secure is Face ID?

To the inane like, can I fool Face ID

with a really well made mask of my face?

Nope.

Hi David.

Now Samsung had been doing face recognition

and iris scanning for awhile before,

and others were pushing boundaries too.

Chinese phone maker Vivo shipped a phone this year

that has a fingerprint sensor built into the display.

But Apple's Face ID has 3D depth sensors,

which helps push face scanning to the next level,

which brings me to Animoji.

I mean really, what good would your $1000 smartphone be

if you couldn't turn yourself into a goofy unicorn

or have a bunch of farm animals

sing along to Bohemian Rhapsody, right?

In either case, the iPhone X's 3D sensors

made animated emoji possible,

and since no one wants to be seen as behind the curve

or slow to adapt whatever new tech the kids are into,

others followed suit.

With the Galaxy S9 phone, Samsung rolled out AR Emoji.

Now these aren't exactly the same as Animoji.

Samsung's AR Emoji look like you, well sort of,

but these also track your face and your movements.

AR features in general were a big focus

around the launch of the iPhone X, although again,

Google Tango came first, which showed up

in phones like the ZenFone AR last summer.

Once Apple ditched the physical home button,

it had to come up with a way for people

to access apps and multitask,

so we have this gesture based navigation,

which is a long way of saying swiping, lots of swiping,

but the system was clearly appealing enough

for Google to mimic it in Android Pie,

its newest mobile operating system.

Google replaced the familiar lineup

of three virtual buttons at the bottom of the phone

with this single pill shaped icon.

Swipe up and it shows you all of your open apps,

which you can then swipe side to side on.

Since this is software and not hardware

that was predetermined months in advance,

safe to say you can really see the Apple influence here.

Now those are just a few examples of how Apple

set the tone for phone design from last fall up until now,

but the bigger question is,

what trends are we going to see next?

The short answer for now is, we don't really know.

Samsung did just announce the new Galaxy Note 9 smartphone,

but that looks pretty similar to last year's Galaxy Note 8.

So again, we'll all be looking to see what Apple does.

If Apple goes all glass again, it's already been done.

If Apple makes a plus sized phone, it's been done before.

If they go with a smaller phone,

that's been done before too.

If they make the camera better,

well everybody is doing dual lens cameras

and fancy portrait modes.

Really, Apple's advantages are in design,

engineering, and software.

Unfortunately its software locks you in,

but it also works well between devices

and its hardware keeps converging more and more.

The feature everyone tries to ace

might not be a hardware feature.

It might be an AI feature.

Basically, how smart a smartphone can be,

and that's when we'll find out

who the real trendsetters are.

(upbeat music)