Apple’s iPhone XR: Bad marketing?

“I took out my iPhone XR to check a text — surely someone was finally wishing me a Merry Christmas — and one of my wife’s relatives asked: ‘What’s that?'” Chris Matyszczyk writes for CNET. “‘It’s an iPhone XR,’ I replied, sinking, as many people do, to the Eks-R pronunciation. ‘What’s that?'” she replied… ‘Well, it’s the newest iPhone,’ I said. ‘Never heard of it,’ she replied. ‘Never seen one either.'”
“My thoughts drifted to how Apple has advertised these new, cheaper beasts. First, it did the usual phones-floating-in-mid-air sort of ad, with all sorts of product benefits featured in words,” Matyszczyk writes. “Depth control. Liquid retina. Color-accurate LCD. Did these things impress anyone?”

“Could it be that Cupertino doesn’t have a clue how to sell a phone that, to many eyes — including my own — offers a far more satisfying value than, say, the XS?” Matyszczyk writes. “Could it be that, by launching three new iPhones in quick succession, Apple has muddied the perception of all three? …I fear Apple needs to be a lot clearer about its phones’ individual identities.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Okay, so we’re talking average people here, not tech-obsessed folk like us. It’ll take a bit longer for them to figure out that there are new iPhones and why they might want to get one (with Apple’s help, colorful jumpsuited dystopian somethings or other notwithstanding).
Matyszczyk brings up what we call “Gesture Phobia” and “Face ID Fear.” That is, people fear Face ID is some Big Brother thing beaming their bad hair days back to the central office for identification (i.e. the average schmoe still don’t understand how it works; Apple marketing’s fault) or they’re scared they won’t be able to learn how to use an iPhone that lacks a Home button (i.e. the average schmoe still don’t understand how it works and how easy it is to adapt; also Apple marketing’s fault).
As we asked back on December 7th:
Could more people than we think be afraid of iPhones without Home buttons; worried that they won’t be able to use them? We know this isn’t the case, as it’s extremely intuitive home to use a modern X-class iPhone (and iPad Pro), but that doesn’t mean less savvy iPhone owners aren’t opting to stick with the Home button paradigm for one more iPhone (that’ll they’ll own for some 3 or more years).
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The learning curve is so slight as to be nonexistent. The retraining is measured in hours, or no more than a couple of days for even the slowest of learners. Losing the Home button was excellent in all respects, except it’s made us hate our iPads over the past year… As iPhone X users already know, the Home button is the bane of smooth iOS use. The Home button is a staccato inducer; an iOS-interruptor that needs to disappear. Every time we pick up a non-iPhone X iOS device, we cannot believe the rudimentariness of the Home button-based UI. Over the past year, we’ve come to hate the Home button anachronism. Die, Home button, die! — MacDailyNews, August 29, 2018