If there's one constant on the consumer tech calendar, it's iPhone reviews day. Happening sometime between the announcement and the release of the latest iPhone, it manifests itself with glowing accounts of the latest Apple smartphone at the top of the page, and irate accusations of Apple-favoring bias in the comments at the bottom. This is as reliable a phenomenon as today's autumnal equinox.

The funny thing is that everyone's right. Readers are right to claim that the iPhone is treated differently from other smartphones, and reviewers are correct in doing so. Apple makes more in quarterly profit than many of its mobile competitors are worth, and the success and failure of its smartphone plays a large role in shaping the fate of multiple related industries. The iPhone is reviewed like a transcendental entity that's more than just the sum of its metal, plastic, and silicon parts, because that's what it is.

The bias is almost everywhere and spreading fast

Consider the scale of Apple’s achievement every year. With iPhone hype reaching cosmic proportions every September — and the price never falling — Apple still manages to exceed expectations and maintain some of the highest user satisfaction ratings in the United States. That’s in spite of stringing people along without a large-screened phone until last year, and despite continuing to sell an inadequate 16GB entry-level model today. The only explanation for this pattern, short of a mass delusion on a religion-like global scale, is that Apple provides substantial value to its hundreds of millions of satisfied iPhone buyers. Tech consumers are biased in favor of Apple products.

The iPhone is ubiquitous and there are many benefits accruing to its users from this omnipresence. iPhone cases and accessories are an industry unto themselves, which has most recently and impressively been highlighted by the DxO One camera. "Made for iPhone" (MFI) is a mark of pride for peripheral makers, who dive enthusiastically into any new initiative that Apple chooses to embrace. Just witness the ill-fated iPhone game controller movement of 2013: it never had any compelling games that required physical controls, but that didn’t deter eager Apple partners from producing a broad range of weird and wonderful MFI gamepads. They did so — and they’d do it again in a heartbeat — because riding the iPhone’s coattails to sales is now a proven business strategy. Accessory makers are biased in favor of Apple products.

Riding the iPhone’s coattails to sales is a proven business strategy

Even the proprietary Lightning power connector isn’t a problem for Apple because you probably have a friend who can lend you one. Or if not, there’s always a Starbucks nearby, which will be full of fellow iPhone users. When Apple announced Apple Pay last year, it had the support of Visa, MasterCard, American Express, and most of the big US banks and retailers, including JPMorgan Chase, Bank of America, McDonald’s, and Staples. App makers like Groupon and Uber immediately jumped on board as well. The whole business world knew, in advance, that Apple Pay would be the fastest-growing and most quickly adopted mobile payment solution in the oddly long and wonky history of mobile payments. Apple strode into a fragmented, fiercely territorial and competitive field and managed to unite everyone, primarily on the strength of the iPhone’s unique history of creating industries and revenue sources where there once were none. Retailers are biased in favor of Apple products.

Nobody wants to miss the next iTunes train

There are other groups who don’t necessarily like what Apple is doing, but are forced to dance to its tune. Among them are all the web publishers sweating the contentious enabling of ad blockers in iOS 9. Apple’s decision could undermine the traditional business model for websites — who see iOS users as one of their highest-value demographics to present ads to — and serves as a push factor to nudge publishers toward making their content available on the new Apple News app. Wired is already doing short-term exclusives of some articles on Apple News, and other sites are tweeting out the Apple News versions of their stories. Music labels know these dynamics well, having ridden the iTunes transition to digital distribution, and now cable channels like HBO are just the latest to conjoin their fates to Apple’s seemingly unerring rise to greater power and profitability. Content producers are biased in favor of Apple products.

There were mobile apps before Apple's App Store came along, but they were mostly afterthought additions rather than compelling reasons to buy a new device. Today, the foremost reason to buy an iPad over an Android tablet or an iPhone over any other smartphone is precisely the app ecosystem of Apple's iOS platform. And the foremost reason to develop new software for that platform is the same thing keeping every other business interested: iPhone owners are a large and growing population of consumers willing to spend money on their phones. App developers may chafe under Apple’s stringent App Store regulations, but they consistently find iOS to be the most lucrative mobile platform available. They, too, are biased in favor of Apple products.

You can't have meaning without bias

The next time you read an iPhone review, keep all these biases in mind. The iPhone is the favored tech product of a vast swathe of our planet’s population, serving both utilitarian and aspirational purposes. It is the catalyst for and sole supporter of entire ancillary industries. It is the nexus where communication and commerce blend most easily, and it is the surest harbinger of the future that is to come. Any review that doesn’t account for all of these factors might be considered technically objective and unbiased, but it would also be frightfully uninformative. Assessing an iPhone against a blank canvas is akin to describing Notre Dame or Sagrada Família as old, large, religious buildings.

Apple bias exists in reviews because it exists in the real world. The company’s track record with the iPhone and other products like it — characterized by a great deal more right decisions than wrong ones — encourages optimism about its riskier new ventures today. The Apple Watch is credited with greater potential than the Samsung Gear S2 because of the two companies’ different histories. The Huawei Mate S has Force Touch similar to the iPhone 6S, but only Apple’s phone is expected to turn that technology into a transformative new mode of interaction.

That’s justified bias. That’s relevant context derived from history and experience. Without it, we'd be reciting facts and figures, but no meaning. Megabytes and millimeters matter only after they've been passed through the prism of human judgment, and we shouldn't pretend that it can, or should, ever be unbiased.

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