No, a phablet version will not save the iPhone

I’m at an age where I like my screens to be bigger, as long as their text is too. Apple has not seen fit to address this need, and its iPhone screen has become the runt of the smartphone litter, as most high-end competitors have focused on larger and larger screens. Some even approach 6 inches in diagonal screen size and are dubbed “phablet” (a cross between phone and a tablet).

Although Apple’s iPhone sales continue to set records and grow in market share in the United States and other countries, the din of pundits telling Apple it needs to come up with its own phablet iPhone model is only getting louder. Apple’s recent revenue report was the latest excuse for this advice that has been urged for at least two years upon the company.

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Although the company broke its previous records, people worried that the growth rate is slowing and the iPhone cash cow may be going the way of the iPod — done in by saturation. Apple’s salvation is a phablet, these folks say. The Wall Street Journal reported last week that bigger-screen models will debut this fall — a variation of the same rumor we’ve been hearing every few weeks over the last three years.

Sorry, but a phablet isn’t Apple’s salvation. And I say that as someone who personally would like a bigger-screen iPhone.

“But, wait!” you say, “Look at how well Samsung is doing with the Galaxy Note line, whose latest model has a 5.8-inch screen and sold 10 million units in two months. And Samsung’s Galaxy S series has done very well; the latest model, the 5-inch Galaxy S 4, sold 10 million units in under four weeks.” Impressive, right?

Except the iPhone 5s despite its 4-inch screen took just a week to match the 10 million mark. Globally, Samsung sold about 320 million smartphones last year, of which a third (about 100 million) are high-end, bigger-screen smartphones like the Galaxy S and Galaxy Note. In that same period, Apple sold 150 million iPhones — outselling Samsung when it comes to “real” smartphones. The same pattern has been true for previous versions of iPhones versus previous versions of Galaxy S and Galaxy Note smartphones.

If the phablet is Apple’s salvation, buyers don’t know that. Even in the Android world, the big-screen smartphone is not the red-hot seller you might think. Neither Samsung nor Apple reveals the breakdown for each model, but by triangulating various market researchers reports for the final quarter of 2014, when both the iPhone 5s and the Galaxy Note 3 were on sale, I come up with about 32 million iPhone 5s units (despite constrained supplies), 13 million iPhone 5c units, 20 million Galaxy S 4 units, and 11 million Note 3 units sold over that period. (Samsung also sold about 55 million lower-end smartphones in that period, and by my rough estimates Apple sold about 6 million iPhone 4s units.)

Data shows that the bigger Galaxy smartphones aren’t outselling the smaller iPhones, though Android outsells iOS three to one for smartphones. There’s no doubt a bigger iPhone model will attract some people, but it won’t dramatically grow Apple’s iPhone sales, just as it hasn’t done for Samsung. And big-screen smartphones from other Android smartphone makers have had almost no market impact.

If you want to grow smartphone sales dramatically, you need to have much cheaper models that appeal to the billions of people in poor countries who can’rt afford high-end devices. That’s where the growth is — but not the profits, which is a whole other story.

What can Apple do to “save” the iPhone, which means create a huge growth wave to make Wall Street happy? I don’t think it can do anything. The smartphone market in developed countries is getting saturated. In the high-end market, Apple is already winning. It can continue to win — and perhaps win a little more — by continuing to innovate its devices, as it did in the iPhone 5s with its Touch ID sensor lock and M8 motion coprocessor. Bigger screens will help a little. But that’s defending the turf it already has, not growing in new ways.

Which brings me to the iPod: A decade ago, the iPod was the hot product, quickly taking over the MP3 player market. Once it saturated that market, Apple came up with the new models in various shapes and sizes, but sales began to crumble. For a while, its iPod Touch gave the iPod a market boost, providing an iPhone set of training wheels for kids and a neat gaming device to boot. But 7-inch tablets like the iPad Mini and Google Nexus 7 now own that market. iPod sales dropped in half last year and had slowed well before 2013.

For Apple, the big growth potential is now in the iPad, not the iPhone. At some point, a product will need to come along to supplant the iPad when that hits saturation. It’s how the world works — it’s happening to Samsung, too, which is finding that its own tablets (especially its smaller models) are becoming stronger profit engines than its smartphones.

Forget about saving the iPhone — it’s not dying. But it is hitting middle age, and as such it will have to work harder to maintain its good health.

This article, “No, a phablet version will not save the iPhone,” was originally published at InfoWorld.com. Read more of Galen Gruman’s Mobile Edge blog and follow the latest developments in mobile technology at InfoWorld.com. Follow Galen’s mobile musings on Twitter at MobileGalen. For the latest business technology news, follow InfoWorld.com on Twitter.