Not every successful product is “the best” product in its category.
The point of Ikea or Toyota isn’t to be the greatest, most high-end offering in the realm of houseware or cars, the point is to meet a practical consumer need at an attractive price. There are Ferraris and Porsches in the marketplace, too, but making “the best” car isn’t necessarily a more successful business strategy than making a good enough car at a reasonable price.
But the iPhone is different. From the day it was first introduced, it was positioned in the market as the best phone in the world. But it’s also become the best-selling phone in the world. And like any marquee smartphone, it needs to be updated and upgraded every year.
This gives Apple a big problem. Year after year, any new ideas they want to bring to the iPhone need to be capable of being manufactured on a massive scale in a relatively compressed timeline. That’s hard to do and, in practice, it means that certain things simply can’t be done. And that means risking the iPhone’s quality leadership.
The solution is the iPhone X. It’s essentially a Lexus to the iPhone’s Toyota. Most people probably won’t want to shell out a thousand bucks or more for a smartphone, but that’s fine because Apple couldn’t make this phone in high volume anyway.