When Phil Schiller, Apple’s senior vice president of worldwide product marketing, proudly took the stage this week to call the iPhone 7 the best phone that Apple has ever made, he led with a customary handoff to a Jonathan Ive video. You know, the ones where Ive, Apple’s chief design officer, seems to talk in slow-motion about how very, very carefully designed the newest Apple wares are. It’s as if to say: Listen to every word twice, people! Because you can’t even come close to doing anything like this.

In the age of the smartphone, there is very little industrial design left for us to get excited about.

Fair enough. There is no company in the world that can design and engineer a smartphone the way Apple does. There is no other company in the world that can bend the globe’s supply chains around its most exacting whim, and no other company that can afford such extreme care in designing even the smallest details. Truly, Apple is the greatest force in industrial design that any of us will ever see in our lifetimes.

Therein lies the strange contradiction at the heart of Ive’s accomplishments—seven generations of iPhone, and dozens more iPads, iMacs, MacBooks, and the Apple Watch. Literally, trillions of dollars in merchandise. But in the age of the smartphone, there is very little industrial design left for us to get excited about. The smartphone itself is rapidly approaching its platonic form: A single, monolithic sheet of glass that simply delivers all the content you want, whenever you want it. No matter how powerful smartphones become, they simply aren’t capable of wowing us any more as a pure design object, because what the screen is mounted on matters so much less than what plays across it.

That’s what I was thinking, when Jony Ive intoned his customary voiceover as the video played of the iPhone 7’s sumptuously lit curves. Ive usually appears looking wide-eyed and a little stunned in those videos. This time, he didn’t appear at all. It was just his voice. Ive floated above the latest iPhone announcement like a ghost.