iPhone 7: how the internet reacted to Apple pulling the headphone plug
Apple's changes to the iPhone 7 created social media mayhem this week. Social analyst Brodie Evans breaks down what happened following the announcement.
An eventful week in the world of big tech with Apple announcing they are cutting ties with the 3.5 mini-jack in their new iPhone7, in favour of the proprietary lightning connector and wireless earbuds.
The reaction across social media was immediate, fierce and highly emotional. Given just how emotionally-charged the conversation is, you would be forgiven for thinking a different sort of plug was being pulled.
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Across the public social data, we can see almost 1 million posts make up the conversation in the four days since the announcement.
Generating a visualisation of the iPhone conversation in Crimson Hexagon, we see the extent of how the conversation has revolved around the removal of the headphone jack. Already the negative sentiment surrounding this topic is evident with subjects like ‘losing one’ referring to the wireless AirPods that will be released alongside the new iPhone.
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The headphone conversation has eaten into the usual brand-positive conversations focused on the additional features, or the desire to pre-order and all the positive design attributes of the handset.
Although we can see that a smaller portion of the social conversation was still positively giddy over the new jet black colour option, this has played second to the response the removal of the headphone jack elicited.
Adding fuel to the fire was Apple’s Phil Schiller justifying that the tech giant showed “courage” in the removal of the universal plug type, generating around 12,000 posts dedicated to addressing his choice of words. His statement has — not surprisingly — been largely mocked online.
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Factoring the emotional response online is that Apple is simply looking to “extort” both its users and the manufacturers of third party peripherals such as headphones, by forcing them towards its proprietary lightning connector.
Apple’s Made For iPhone/iPad/iPod (MFi) Program has been running since 2005, originally charging a fee of $10, or 10% per product (whichever was greater) to licence the use of its Apple connector.
This has since been lowered and the new costs are withheld under a non-disclosure agreement (NDA) on the MFi page, however Reddit’s Technology subreddits hint that the lightning royalty now sits between $4–8 per product sold.
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An interesting comparison is drawn by comparing the reaction of this announcement to the early 2015 announcement that the next release of new Macbooks would have only a single USB-c port.
This change rendered any regular USB devices unusable without an adaptor plugged in. It was theorised at the time that this was a calculated push to force more dependency on the iCloud service. Similar themes to the iPhone headphone jack conversation are being had now.
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Though the conversation around last year’s Macbook only makes up 1.5% of the iPhone conversation in volume, comparing the two reactions using Crimson Hexagon’s emotional analysis reveals anger as the most dominant emotion across both.
What is interesting is that more personal emotions like disgust, joy and sadness are present in the iPhone7 conversation.
This indicates a closer connection people have to their phone, and potentially a deepening public understanding of the far-reaching implications of Apple removing the universal headphone jack.
Since Apple omitted the DVD optical drive from it’s original Macbook Air back in 2008, the trends have shown that Apple ditching a format leads to the eventual death of that particular format.
The difference between a MacBook and an iPhone, and the relationship people have to each should be noted here. It leaves a question in the air whether this move towards wireless headphones is the right one, and whether Android, the market-leader for smartphones, will follow suit.
Or will it just be another case of not enough making room for the essentials, with no good reason?
Brodie Evans is a social analyst at One Small Step Collective
This article originally appeared here and is published with permission
topics
analytics
audience measurement
brodie evans
crimson hexagon
iphone 7
iphone7
One Small Step Collective
social media
One notable shift in analytics is the increasing demand for actionable intelligence, not more data. This falls in the latter category.
Data without context is noise. The utility of vanity metrics even when dressed up in beautiful charts is limited. There is real value to be extracted from social data but not at this level.
The real value for brands and marketers comes from being able to ask the right questions – who, what, where, when and why…and for that you need a more powerful tool.
It’s of limited value to know there were 866k posts, that saddness was a featured emotion and that 12k mentioned “courage”. The value lies in understanding and quantifying what impact the removal of jacks will have on the brand, loyalty, sales, competitors and experience.
This is where the market is going….turning data in to intelligence
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Hi Patrick
I completely agree with the point you’re making, but this article was written to provide a top-level overview of emotion in the social conversation. I wanted to see how emotion played a role in the social conversation, not forecast/measure brand impact.
If I wanted to dive deeper into brand impact, competitor analysis and customer experience (etc), I would train the Crimson Hexagon algorthim to breakdown the conversation in individual analysis monitors, then compile my results at the end into a comprehensive case study. If you would like to commission such a study, feel free to get in touch!
Social data provides insight into unsolicited opinions being expressed online, and can be a powerful tool to educate understanding of consumer reaction. I would never claim it is a solve-all solution for brand impact insights, but used in conjunction with other market research methods it is worthy analysis and shouldn’t be ignored.
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