I agree with you. I guess the question is the overlap / and or market.

I don’t know about anything at the scale of Apple.

But my simplified imagination of any product is: focus on core customer/demo, once you’ve captured a significant portion, expand.

But I also wonder if at apples level, if the customer is “everyone” which I always think of as folly for most business.

Example (which may partially disprove this): I know some people in developing countries, who consider an iPad an essential device. (They have a cheap android phone) and for them, it’s much more valuable than a computer.

(Though, the people I am thinking of are “high” earners in their country, making 20-40k a year. Even if an iPad is almost double the cost.)

I think for in the range of 98% of smartphone users the phone is the least useful feature. In truth they’re often really crap phones and my old flip phone had better all around phone quality and utility. But at this point I feel annoyed when I have to speak to a person. If I were meant to speak to people I wouldn’t have been born an engineer.

> I think for in the range of 98% of smartphone users the phone is the least useful feature.

Part of the reason this number's so high is that if a phone feature is really important to you, you're liable to get a standalone VoIP line and a headset to go with whatever handset you have rather than using a smartphone.

Yeah certainly the fact they’re universally bad phones makes them less useful as a phone, and phone phones are better at being phones.

But I would also hold that phones generally suck, but that’s opinion.

> But I would also hold that phones generally suck, but that’s opinion.

Technically compared to e.g. internet-native voice communication, or you just think that remote voice communication is bad?

Voice is for jocks.

If those "others" are a small minority, then the parent's point still stands.

I don't think we're that small of a minority. Quite a few people don't actively use any social media, and taking memento photos is an unusual activity for many people, done mostly when going on rare vacations if at all. That leaves purely utilitarian photo taking, like uploading checks or taking a picture to help you remember where you parked your car.

Those people perhaps don't buy fancy smartphones though, but more like "purely utilitarian" ones? Whereas this subthread is about the possibility of the Apple Watch replacing the smartphone for iPhone users...

No, a lot of people like I describe buy iphones simply because they're fashionable. If fashions change, they could be well served by a smart watch instead.