Are you going to pay £999 for a phone?

I’ve just caught up on the iPhone X reveal, and I’m impressed. The chutzpah needed to get away with charging £999 for a phone ($999 in the US) is seriously impressive.

I mean, it looks nice. It’s got a fancy screen. And the face recognition is a clever touch. It’s a bit faster, too. But do we actually need any of that stuff?

I wouldn’t describe myself as a die-hard Apple fan, but I’ve had a couple of iPhones over the years, and I really like them. They’re easy to use, with an intuitive operating system, and they tend to just work with the minimum amount of faffing about, which is the most important thing for me. The build quality is great, and I’ve never had any problems with any of them. I’m pretty happy with my current iPhone 6S. I’m also not in a hurry to upgrade it.

It seems to me that we’ve reached the point where there’s very little that the tech companies can add to phones to make them significantly better. The major milestones have all been passed: having maps, cameras, emails, and so on all in one neat case genuinely changed my life for the better. The dawn of the smartphone was a genuine revolution. The smartphone has changed the way people work and live. But the revolution is long past – now we’re just tinkering.

And I balk at paying nearly a grand for what amounts to tinkering with an object that was pretty much perfected years ago – there’s nothing the iPhone X does that I want or, more importantly, actually need.