iPhone 7: Why this year’s launch will be the most important in Apple history

Apple hasn't launched a flagship phone into a declining market before

Apple CEO Tim Cook waves to the crowd as takes the stage at Apple's annual Worldwide Developers Conference at the Bill Graham Civic Auditorium in San Francisco, California, onJune 13, 2016 (GABRIELLE LURIE/AFP/Getty Images)

Claiming that each year’s Apple launch is the “most important ever” could rival the company’s own annual claim that its iPhone is the best ever for grandiosity. But this year, it’s true.

This iPhone launch won’t do anything as dramatic as decide Apple’s fate, bring it down in one fell swoop or allow the supposedly troubled company to soar back to dominance. But it could set the tone for the future of Apple, and might come to serve as the point at which the iPhone as the world’s dominating consumer product came to an end or came back to life.

Apple is having a tough time of it, this Apple launch. It comes not only as the controversy about its tax bill rages on – and Irish authorities are arguing about it as Apple prepares for its event – but it is also the first time that Apple is launching an iPhone since sales started to slump.

(The only comfort might be the even more difficult time that Samsung is having. Just two weeks after it launched its flagship Note phone, and a week before Apple’s own launch, reports emerged that the phone was exploding and it had to begin a global recall.)

Apple’s declining iPhone sales look to be the result of global markets and other complicating factors as much as the handset themselves. But when it announced in July that its earnings had fallen because sales of the phone had dropped, some people took it as proof that Apple was doomed – an eternal prediction, and one that people like to make even more than usual when they have a scrap of data to point to.

Apple simply hasn’t sold an iPhone into a market that was shrinking before. And that's happened the last two quarters.

Many of those doom-mongers pointed to the iPhone as the centre of their argument. The handset was once exciting, they argued – but the 6s was just the latest phone to take an existing body and add some small features in the hope that people would keep buying it.

That’s likely to happen again this year: Apple’s iPhone 7 is expected to look almost identical with the 6 and 6s design, barring the re-arrangement of the antenna lines on the back. And the features are going to be incremental too, it appears, with an improved camera, processor and screen.

Because of that declining interest and maturing market, Apple’s launch this year will be more important than ever. Getting people excited about the iPhone won’t make or break Apple – but if it can’t, and it keeps relying on the phone for its sales, then it could start to get worrying.

It will have to show iPhone buyers as well as its shareholders that it can still get people excited – and that those predictions of doom are just the continuing rumbles of people who enjoy being doubtful, rather than a real vision of the future.