Apple’s marketing department finely crafts, with each iPhone release, a catchy slogan. Beginning with “Apple reinvents the iPhone”, these one sentence blurbs pack a punch and hint at the flagship feature of that year’s model. The iPhone 5’s size increase birthed “The biggest thing to happen to iPhone since iPhone”. We often kid about how ridiculous they seem but they are truly thoughtful. These tag lines taunt our desires and highlight each new offering’s strengths.
The latest slogans, for the new iPhones, reveal the significance with which Apple views the iPhone X. “Say hello to the future” headlines the iPhone X while “A new generation of iPhone” is used to describe iPhone 8. “Say hello…” or at least “hello” has a rich heritage within Apple marketing. It dates all the way back to the original Macintosh when Steve Jobs famously revealed that single cursive word sprawled across the screen. Nearly fifteen years later they revived it for the iMac marketing and shortly thereafter for the iPod. “Say hello to the future” tells of Apple’s sentiment about the iPhone X. It’s not just a new generation of iPhone, it’s their next major leap into the future. Anything else is just the this year’s iPhone.