Apple’s iPhone 15 is the most complex introduction yet

Apple’s iPhone launch cycle feels a little different this year. Sure, the optimism remains, but the challenges are far greater than before with Apple’s business constrained by international politics, environmental breakdown, and waves of Big Tech regulation.

A (broken) new world order

These great challenges mean that no matter how great its next products happen to be, Apple’s big struggle will be to maintain momentum in a tough market. We kind of know some of the strategies the company is using to help protect and grow its business:

• Working with partners to build manufacturing capacity outside China in an attempt to protect against rapidly eroding international relations.
• Developing its business in key emerging economies, including India, but also Mexico, Brazil, Vietnam and elsewhere.
• Improving and extending its services offer as it builds revenues beyond hardware sales.
• Engaging with regulators in a relatively positive way, while also fighting over every inch of ground – and then developing the most optimal response it can to any regulation that is laid down.
• That recently published webpage of Apple apps semaphores this approach. Sideloading may work both ways, in the end.
• Introducing advanced technology products such as Vision Pro to maintain its iconic tech industry status, while building a platform for a post-smartphone future.
• Investment in research & development to build its position once/if we ever enter more normal times.

Naturally, all these efforts take time and money.

Get big, move slow

It’s a known that as a company becomes larger and more successful it must dedicate more resources to maintain its business. There’s a limit to growth, and while Apple’s strategies suggest it has a way to continue to generate some, there’s no doubt at all that chasing it becomes much, much harder in an economy characterized by international tension and finite resource availability.

China’s recent decision to tighten its own noose around Apple’s business with a ban on iPhone use in governments and government-owned businesses is already having a negative impact on Apple.

But it’s not just China.

In the UK, a failing government continues to generate challenges for the company by pressing against encryption and insisting on rights that may delay essential security updates to respond to in progress attacks such as last week’s newly exposed zero-click hack from Israel’s NSO Group. Of course, the existence of attacks like that from NSO lends a little fuel to China’s accusations around iPhone security. Meanwhile, in the EU, Apple faces increasingly stringent regulation that is also being emulated elsewhere, including the US.

Reliable friends are hard to find

With so much already invested in India by Apple and its partners, that government’s recent decision to bang a big surcharge on PC imports into that country reinforced the sense of risk. While the government backtracked on those plans to some extent, it’s clear that the sheer scale of Apple’s business means it is increasingly exposed to governments, the nature of which can change in one day at the ballot box.

All of these forces combined mean Apple must now and will in future be forced to spend more and more of its resources working really, really hard just to stand still. To some extent, this is already happening, and it’s a testament to how well the company runs that it is increasing market share in broadly depressed environments, but it’s still fair to say there’s a whole lot hanging onto how people will respond to iPhone 15.

It’s complicated

At time of writing, we expect that smartphone will be lighter and thinner, with the most innovative features pressed inside the Pro range: periscopic lens, A16 chip, more RAM, more e-SIM-only models, more expensive. All the iPhones will have USB-C and Dynamic Island, all will have better cameras, and colors will include gray, blue, silver, and black.

But will these new models be enough to help Apple hold the line? And what is the company’s Plan B if it doesn’t?

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