After some serious market research, HTC has just concluded that the iPhone is officially uncool. The distinct design, quality materials and fluid OS just doesn’t cut it anymore in a world of 4.5-inch, 1-point-plus-gigahertz Android clones. Now that the iPhone has penetrated high and low-end markets, and has crossed most demographic lines, its saturation has apparently also caused the demise of its desirability.
How did HTC come to this staggering conclusion? Martin Fichter, acting president of HTC America, says the following via Geekwire (emphasis mine):
“Apple is innovating. Samsung is innovating. We are innovating. Everybody is innovating. And everybody is doing different things for the end consumers. I brought my daughter back to college — she’s down in Portland at Reed — and I talked to a few of the kids on her floor. And none of them has an iPhone because they told me: ‘My dad has an iPhone.’ There’s an interesting thing that’s going on in the market. The iPhone becomes a little less cool than it was. They were carrying HTCs. They were carrying Samsungs. They were even carrying some Chinese manufacture’s devices. If you look at a college campus, Mac Book Airs are cool. iPhones are not that cool anymore. We here are using iPhones, but our kids don’t find them that cool anymore.”
Stop the presses. A hip Reed student in hip Portland says the iPhone is for old people..
It used to be that you’d walk onto a college campus and see nothing but iPhones. Now that you can spy some Android devices here and there, it’s official: the iPhone is no longer hip. Who wants to be seen using the same device that mom and dad use? Bless their souls, but there is no way that mom and pops is going to rock the same smartphone I do, so instead, I’m going to use “some Chinese manufacturer’s device,” like one of those ZTE Android handsets.
Grabbing a smartphone that has access to a gazillion apps, has excellent battery life and a great camera is overrated. My Android phone shoots 3-FRICKIN-D videos. Awesome. It also has a 1.2GHz processor. Benchmarks!
So, dad, what can your iPhone do? Enjoying yourself in Steve Jobs’ reality distortion field?