Time was you'd get something new, then a better version of it, then something new again. You could count on it, like the tick-tock of some great clock. And you could plan for it—getting every one of them if you wanted to, or alternating between just the new or just the improved, depending on what you felt was the best strategy. But now it's all being burned down. Instead of tick-tock we're faced with the ultimate horror: Rumors of a tick-tock... TOCK. I'm talking, of course, about Intel and how, after decades of die shrinks followed by architectural improvements, for the first time the company will be following the former with two of the latter. Broadwell. Skylake. Kaby Lake. And we'll have to wait until after that for the next die shrink. The. Worst. Get an iPhone SE with Mint Mobile service for $30/mo No, wait, I'm actually talking about Apple and how, after almost a decade of new designs followed by new internals, for the first time the company is rumored to be following the former with two of the latter. iPhone 6. iPhone 6s. iPhone 7 or iPhone 6se (or whatever it may be called). And we'll have to wait until after that for the next redesign. The. Worst. Why would Apple do this? It flies in the face of the general internet armchair wisdom that the company needs to combat saturation and the general malaise of smartphone modernity not by adding tocks but by removing them — by fielding new design not every second year (much less third) year, but every year. Donut shaped this year, triangular the next!

For the last few years Apple has been following newly numbered design tick updates with S-variant, feature-enhanced tocks. It started in 2009 with iPhone 3GS and continued through last year's iPhone 6s. To sort-of solve for the lack of design changes in the tock years, the company has added whiz-bang new features, like Siri, Touch ID, and most recently, 3D Touch. More superficially—and hence likely more effectively—Apple has also used the tock years to introduce new finishes, including gold with iPhone 5s and rose gold with iPhone 6s. That way, even if you have the same design as before, you can make damn sure that the color still shows everyone you have the newer version. For some, though, it's not enough. For some, even the tick changes are not enough. I wrote about the sentiment in 2012—and, in doing so, got to use one of my favorite titles ever. Back then people were up in arms about the iPhone 5 looking too much like the iPhone 4 and iPhone 4s. Forget the then-new 4-inch, 16:9 display and the then-new chamfered edges, it was still a rounded rectangle, Apple had clearly lost its ability to innovate, and you know the rest: Apple went out of business. Wait, no, Apple posted record sales and this year returned to a version of that very same design—now beloved and referred to as "iconic"—for the internally-upgraded iPhone SE. 2016 is different from 2012, though. Then, Verizon had just launched the year before and Sprint and T-Mobile were following suit. NTT DoCoMo and China Mobile were still on the horizon. And the even big and bigger iPhones were still two years away. In other words, there was significant growth ahead for the iPhone. That's in sharp contrast to today, where the iPhone rollout is effectively complete across carriers and regions, and a range of display sizes are all on the market and up to date. China is also showing signs of being more protectionist, and the iPhone less in demand, than anticipated. India hasn't let older iPhones in and newer ones haven't been priced to move. And, globally, what happened to the PC industry is happening to phones—for most people, most of the time, what they currently own is proving good enough that momentum might be swinging away from faster and towards slower upgrade cycles. All of that hurts iPhone and, since iPhone is Apple's biggest business, hurts Apple. It puts the company under enormous pressure from shareholders, analysts, and media alike. Hence, the narrative that Apple needs to abandon the tock, ditch the S, and switch to annual redesign. That it needs to embrace change for change's sake—something that many of us who've watched Apple for a long time have previously said would be the real sign that the company was becoming reactionary and getting into real trouble. Apple could, after all, make a triangular or donut shaped smartphone to win back the coveted analyst and media "innovative" award. Hell, BlackBerry made a Pop-Tart-shaped one and that certainly did the trick. Except many of the same people currently criticizing the lack of design innovation would be first in line to mock it and last in line to cover the bills when it failed. Hard. Form phone