Apple’s jet black iPhone 7 is its cheapest trick yet

When Apple’s new iPhone 7 phones went on sale last week, they went on sale with a new color: jet black. In its launch video, Apple laid the marketing on pretty thick; designer Jony Ive says the black is the result of a “whole new process” that produces “the most singular, most evolved” iPhone ever.

With all due respect to Mr Ive, I disagree. Apple’s jet black iPhone isn’t singular. It’s derivative, it’s user-unfriendly, and it’s a pretty transparent cash-grab.



This isn’t even new!

First of all, does no one remember that early iPhones, including the iPhone 3G came with a glossy black finish? I’m not sure whether or not those phones went through “rotational 3D polishing” with a “specialized compound” or “a magnetized ultra-fine ion particle bath” like I've gushed about with the iPhone 7. But the end result is pretty much the same. It’s a shiny black iPhone.

Remind me again why I’m supposed to be drooling over a color I had on an iPhone back in 2008?

Fingerprint magnet

Of course, there is a good reason glossy black hasn’t been available on iPhones since the early days. That glossy mirror-black that looks so great in promotional photos looks pretty terrible in real life when the phone’s being handled by a human. The shiny finish collects smudges and fingerprints, and the black color helps them stand out. The end result is that after a few days of real use, the old gloss-black iPhones generally had back covers that looked like they’d been worked over by a sticky-fingered toddler.

iPhone 7 glossy jetblack PHOTO: APPLE



And despite all of the complex jargon Ive used to describe the iPhone 7’s “new” jet black finish, it shares the exact same problem as older black gloss finishes. Don’t take my word for it; here’s Wired on the new jet black phones:

"Most of [jet black iPhone 7 buyers] will admire their super shiny phone exactly once, because, as reviewers have noted, that lust-worthy luster turns into a serious smudgefest within minutes. Like, way worse than the not-jet-black black. Turns out, the same properties that make for superior sheen also attract fingerprints faster than a season of CSI: Miami."

Whoops. And of course, glossy finishes tend to show scrapes and scratches more conspicuously too.

Xiaomi-style sales tactics

So, you’ve got a not-really-new color that actually looks worse than any other iPhone color as soon as people put their hands on the phone. How do you sell that? You hype the crap out of it and then tell people supplies are limited.

In Apple’s defense, as a business tactic this works well. It certainly worked for Xiaomi in the early days. And given that jet black phones are mostly sold out across the globe, it’s obviously working for Apple, too. It’s not very consumer-friendly, though, because it encourages phone-scalping. And at least in China (Apple’s biggest market) it seems like things are already getting out of hand; Chinese media has reported scalpers charging as much as US$3,000 for jet black iPhones, having bought up all the supply themselves.

Apple could have prevented this. Given that the phone’s physical design is so similar to previous versions, it’s very difficult to believe that time or technical limitations could have prevented Apple from producing more jet black phones if it had wanted to. And Apple certainly could (and should) have guessed that scalpers would be all over the jet black models given how much Apple hyped them during the launch event. But of course, Apple didn’t want to prevent this, because news of the jet black phones being sold out is great marketing that makes the new phones seem desirable and more likely to sell better in the long run.



We can’t blame Apple too much for trying to make money. But that doesn’t mean we need to buy into this cheap trick. Buy whatever phone you want, but don’t be fooled by the hype of jet black. And whatever you do, don’t pay scalper prices for a phone that (I’d be willing to bet) will be available on a broad scale at list price within a few months.

This article originally appeared on Tech in Asia.