Apple in Bharat

The iPhone is here, or will be soon. Amid the starry-eyed enthusiasm, it might be useful to take a step back and try and look at the big picture — by which we do not mean the picture provided by the iPhone’s large screen. India has gone through, and is going through, a mobile communication revolution. Linking the arrival of such devices as the iPhone and Nokia’s “iPhone killer” to that revolution, however, is sloppy thinking. It is low-cost, easily adaptable mobiles that have pushed the change. The higher end of the market, of course, performs many useful functions — pushing through much-needed innovations like 3G among them — but India is a country where our attention should be focused on the incredible churning and creativity at the lower end.

Indeed, the aspects of the Indian market that are most important are precisely those that the iPhone does not represent. Its price is strangely high; as our columnist today points out, the Indian consumer is price-conscious, which helps technological innovation and the ground-up rebuilding of products. (The Tata Nano, an engineering marvel, is an example of what this pressure can produce.) Nor is the iPhone adaptable: like most Apple products which bear the stamp of its famously control-freak founder, third-party innovations are rigidly controlled, and the consumer’s options are severely curtailed. Indian consumers typically demand infinitely extensible products. The true representatives of mobile phones in India are handsets incorporating flashlights marketed to truck drivers. India demands sturdy products which can take this country’s extremes of temperature and humidity — it remains to be seen how the iPhone’s elegant screen responds to Mumbai mugginess.

Of course, it is a matter for celebration that so many people want and can afford the instrument now, and that world-spanning companies launch their products here with far less of a time lag than earlier. When the day comes on which those corporations adopt the Indian consumer’s savvy price-sensitivity, near-immunity to pointless marketing and demands for flexibility, we will be even happier.

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