Bendable iPads – Will Apple Consider?

This might sound like an unusual question, and it would have sounded even more unusual before the release of the iPhone 6 and iPhone 6 Plus, but those phones, and the BendGate “scandal” that followed, changed things. To call it a scandal is a bit of a push, as many took it as a joke more than anything else, except of course for those whose phones suffered as a result. If you missed it, BendGate came about when people realised that their brand new phones were bending in their pockets. Simply put, the iPhone was designed to be thinner than ever before and people wearing particularly tight trousers were discovering that the phone was bending. This didn’t happen to all users, but it seemed that a little wear and tear was too much for the new iPhones. Some “people” (again, it doesn’t feel right to class them as such) took it upon themselves to visit an Apple store, where they filmed themselves physically bending every iPhone they could find.

The fact that they put their evidence on their Youtube, next to their faces and all of their personal details, meant they were dealt the karma that was always going to come to them, but in doing so they did prove a point, although it wasn’t the one they had intended. The iPhones did indeed bend, but not easily. It took some doing to bend them, using both hands and a considerable amount of pressure, so it is unfair to really use the suffix “Gate” and to blame Apple for this, as it was nothing more than a few isolated incidents blown out of proportion by the media.

The question remains though. We already have curved screens and it has been suggested that in the future we might be able to use phones that wrap around our wrists like watches, so will Apple consider creating such a device?

The first question, you would think, would be is if such a device would even warrant a creation, whether it would do anything that the phones and other devices we already have can’t do. The truth is that none of that matters. We only need to look at the first iPad to see that. Here is a machine that is essentially a giant version of the iPhone, costing a similar price, only without phone capability. But look at what happened there, not only did they improve on it, making it more powerful and effectively creating a market and a need where there was none, but the iPad now sells almost as well as the iPhone. The same can be said about the Apple Watch. Here is a device that doesn’t look as nice as a real watch and yet pretty much costs the same as a top-end one. It does not work on its own and needs you to have your phone on you, which begs the question why you would even need it in the first place, as you can just take out your phone. Despite that, people are queuing up to buy one of these watches.

So yes, there is a market for one, purely because when you’re Apple, and when you create products that have millions of people swooning all over the world, there is a market for anything that you want there to be a market for. The fact is that we don’t need phones that can bend, not if the only defining feature is the bendability, but because we don’t need it doesn’t mean that they won’t create it and that we won’t buy it in our millions.

Apple are not a company that goes with the flow, they are not a company that creates what the people want, they are a company that creates something new, something exciting, something unique, and then waits for the people to decide that that’s exactly what they have been waiting for. So yes, it is possible that Apple will create a bendable phone, but only because it is possible that Apple will create anything that sounds ridiculous now, but will probably sound ingenious when it is released. From a personal perspective, we have no desire for a bendable phone, other that playing with it when we get bored and making our selfies look like a morphed-alien heads, we have no use for it, yet if they make it, we’ll probably be the first in line to buy it.

To be honest, we weren’t huge fans of the Apple Watch and it is the one Apple product that we have not rushed out to buy. It is also the one that will probably excite even their most diehard of fans the least, yet they will still sell enough to make it worth their while. A bendable phone, however, does intrigue us, and at the very least we can use it to wrap around our wrists and to make the Apple Watch redundant, because unlike a watch that essentially connects to a phone in your pocket, making it as exciting and innovative as a walkie-talkie, such a device will actually be able to work on its own.