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 first iPhone ever, 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 magentized ultra-fine ion particle bath” like Ive 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.

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.