Why the iPhone will never be beaten

When the iPhone was released it had a lot of expectations, but not even apple could have predicted such popularity. The iPhone has single handedly managed to give Apple 20% of global marketshare and 30% US marketshare, almost destroy AT&T's network and sell a record breaking 8.7 Million phones in a single quarter making a grand total of just under 70 Million iPhones sold to date. The iPhone is undoubtably a huge game changer and, to me, the best handheld device ever to walk this earth.

But along with any ground breaking invention comes masses of competition. Wether its palm with the pre, RIM with the Bold, curve and storm, Motorola with the Droid or even Google with the Nexus One, everyone is out to make an iPhone killer. All these phones have come and gone claiming to be the next big thing; but do you ever see someone walking around with a Droid a Nexus or a Pre?… No. I cannot deny the fact that i do often see someone welding a blackberry, but only ever a stern business man. The iPhone is used globally by casual users, Geeks and even the stern business men.

There are several main reasons why these phones have failed. The first that Apple released the iPhone first, everyone saw the ads first, everyone heard about it first … everyone wanted one first. This of course gave Apple a huge head start, setting the standards from the beginning


Secondly the iPhone is just a better phone overall. All though the other phones may have better screens, faster processors and more memory they just don't have the same experience as the iPhone. For example the Droid is a great phone and can do the big things like multi-tasking well but it just can't do the little things for example it is very easy to hit the enter key when trying to hit the backspace key. Things like this are where all these phones let down. I mean why would you use that keyboard when you could use the iPhones perfected keyboard.
If you look at the interface of many of the "iPhone Killers" it is usually very similar to what the iPhone first introduced. The icons along the bottom are very much like the iPhones dock, the whole idea of having icons on some sort of home screen that you click to open the application. Even that, applications, initially came from the iPhone.



The iPhone has one thing that no one else does, the whole apple Eco-system. If you have a mac it works perfectly with the iPhone, from amazing syncing to discounts when you buy a mac. It syncs everything between you mac, Apple TV and iPhone so you are always with all your media. Most importantly once you start buying apps you cant stop and they sync with your mac and then you can home share them across with all your macs and other iPhones and iPod Touches so everyone in you home can have them. If you decide to ditch the iPhone for another phone then all of these apps that you have spent your hard earned money on become useless to you. Even if you don't mind re buying the apps for the new platform you simply can't because there are so many apps that are exclusive to the iPhone. It is almost impossible to port every single application because every user has their own specific combination of apps for them no amount of work could bring all 100,000 of them successfully to a new platform.

All the reasons why the iPhone is invincible are impossible to list, but putting aside all of these there still remains one reason why someone would choose not to have the iPhone. This reason is nothing whatsoever to do with the iPhone itself but more to do with the carrier it is available on. Many people refuse to use Apples device simply because it is only available on AT&T, if Apple were to move to even just Verizon then the iPhone's user base could expand almost without limits. I recently wrote a post on this topic here.

But the reason that stands above all for me is the fact that 70 MILLION people own an iPhone, a number is every increasing, anyone with an iPhone will only ever switch to a better iPhone. Apples main competition is themselves; the next iPhone killer is the iPhone 4G.