When did it start? That moment when you get a new iPhone and, before the excitement has even worn off, a thought creeps in: why does this feel so much like my last one?
For me, it was February 2026.
I pushed the thought aside almost as soon as it appeared. Whatever else you might say, this was the latest iPhone. It was beautiful, with the kind of craftsmanship that makes you want to look at it a little longer. People want to hold the best things in their hands. But the thought would not quite go away. After a few days, yes, it was smooth, and yes, it was a little better. But only a little. When I lay down at night and it went to sleep beside me, something still felt off. It took a while to admit that what had really made me replace my phone was the failing battery in the old one.
There is a thing called Moore’s law: the number of transistors on a chip roughly doubles every eighteen months. That doubling went on for years. Lately, though, as manufacturing processes scrape away at one nanometre after another, it seems harder and harder to keep going. What does that have to do with the iPhone? Perhaps this: people used to buy iPhones without caring much about the specifications. It did not matter if the numbers were a little worse than those of Android phones. Now the iPhone’s specifications have reached the top, and somehow it leaves me feeling emptier.
I think back to getting an iPhone 4 in 2011, and an iPhone 5 in 2012. Their specifications look rather modest today, but each felt nothing like the one before it. In those years, I seemed to want every generation. I wanted the iPhone 6. I wanted the iPhone X. Later, it became a matter of choosing something more practical, or choosing a bigger screen. There did not seem to be much else. What used to make you say “wow” was the design, that feeling of something entirely new, in every way. Each time you held one, there was a freshness you had not felt before.
Now, every year brings anticipation, and every year it falls short. The hardware keeps improving. Hardware far ahead of the competition, hardware better than Android. Perhaps that is simply no longer enough to sustain the feeling.
So I bought an iPhone Air. Only later did I understand why I had chosen it. Among a row of fairly similar options, I had picked the one that best fitted my version of “Moore’s law.” Its performance had not doubled. It just had not sold very well, and the price had dropped by two or three thousand yuan. What really moved me in that moment was probably the bargain itself: the iPhone Air was not selling, so they knocked 2,000 yuan off.
That thought brought an image to mind: a supermarket entrance, early in the morning, before the doors open. A line of elderly women carrying cloth shopping bags, waiting to collect free eggs. The world has probably never been short of people like that. They were getting a box of eggs. I was getting a 2,000-yuan discount voucher.
The iPhone 18 came out recently, and my younger cousin was delighted too. He had finally found a phone to be excited about: the iPhone 17e. Its price had finally come down. He brought it home so happily. I understood exactly how he felt, and I was honestly pleased for him.
We are all people queuing outside the supermarket for free eggs. This time, he was just six months behind me.