Why buy the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus when there’s an even better one in the pipeline?

A few days ago Apple announced their next generation iPhone, the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus. Both phones improve on Apple’s already winning formula, and despite the incremental hardware update, both devices were the best iPhones the company had ever made up to that point.

Then they made them obsolete a few minutes later with the announcement of the iPhone X.

The iPhone X is quite unlike anything that Apple had ever released up to that point (the two earlier iPhones included). It had an edge-to-edge screen, a highly advanced facial recognition system dubbed FaceID, as well as massive improvements on its two rear cameras. I’m not an Apple fan, but if I had to choose between the iPhone 8 Plus and the iPhone X, I would choose the iPhone X every time, despite its higher price tag.

Which makes me wonder, why did Apple even bother announcing the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus in the first place? Sure both phones are slightly cheaper than the iPhone X, but honestly, if I was making a choice of upgrading to a better device coming from someone with a telco contract, why half ass it? I’d just take the hit of the higher price of iPhone X (which probably will have telco pricing similar to Samsung’s Galaxy Note 8) and be done with it. There’s no point, at least for me, of getting the lower tier iPhone 8 and 8 Plus aside from the lower price.

Both the iPhone 8 and 8 Plus are basically iPhone 7 and 7 Pluses with glass backs and a slightly better processor and tweaked cameras. Apple’s design, as good as it is already looks dated on the two phones compared to the efforts of its Android rivals the minute they were revealed on stage. They were boring placeholders for Cook’s expected “one more thing” during the Sept. 12 event in the Steve Jobs Theater. It’s sad really – they were the highlight of the event in one minute, then quickly forgotten the next.

There will probably be people who will still willingly buy either the iPhone 8 and iPhone 8 Plus when they finally make their way here in the Philippines. Heck, the people who buy it will probably feel a little smug over the other peeps who foolishly decided to wait and pay more for the iPhone X when it finally ships at the end of the year. But I guarantee that they’ll always feel a pang of regret any time they see an iPhone X in the wild, or even when they take a look at other edge-to-edge flagships being touted by other users, and wonder if they could have just waited and spent a little bit more for the real star of Apple this year.