Opinion | Why the coronavirus outbreak may hasten the demise of the smartphone as we know it
- Every electronics company CEO is now doubling down on efforts to diversify their reliance on China-based supply chains
We've all had those heart stopping moments, “Where's my phone?!” Is it on the back seat of the taxi disappearing into traffic, or did I leave it at home? Maybe I haven't lost everything.
For more than a decade, we have been tethered to a flat piece of metal and glass that is now central to our lives – combining communications (voice and text), photography, music, videos, news, web search and dozens of other seemingly essential apps into one indispensable device we have to carry everywhere.
The smartphone hasn’t changed much since Apple revolutionised mobile telephones with a touch screen version in 2007. In fact, the decade of the 2010s saw only incremental innovations in smartphones, or gimmicks like folding screens.
Now the double whammy of the US-China trade war and the coronavirus outbreak might provide the jolt needed to accelerate a shift to smartphones 2.0 – something you won’t need to carry everywhere because it won’t be a “device”.
Here’s why: supply chains hum along nicely under normal circumstances. Every link in the chain is rewarded for their small part and those at the top, like Apple, are able to charge premium prices for new models that offer incremental improvements to entice buyers to upgrade. Nothing revolutionary happens as far as the technology goes because there is too much invested in the existing supply chain infrastructure.
But Apple CEO Tim Cook bet the orchard on China and now he's paying the price. Last year Cook had to plead with Trump to get iPhones exempt from the tariffs and now the mainland Chinese Foxconn factories that make most iPhones are experiencing disruptions as returning migrant workers face 14 days of quarantine due to the coronavirus outbreak.
