Apple’s New Era Has Begun
&quot;Apple is moving to services&quot; is hardly a ground-breaking take. The problem for Apple isn&#x27;t that their device sales are down, it&#x27;s that their pivot to services based revenue is not going well.<p>Apple have taken their absolute dominance in selling music and moved to middle of the pack in music streaming squeezed between Spotify and Youtube.<p>They&#x27;re late to TV streaming and somehow, despite being incredibly closely linked to Disney have failed to tie up a deal.<p>Apple&#x27;s Siri is distinctly second tier, losing them both for Apple Music, but also potential shopping via smart assistant.<p>iCloud comes across as Apple nickle and dime-ing their customers, insisting you need to back up your phone but providing laughable amounts of storage for free - and then becoming nagware.<p>Then you have Apple One - Apple&#x27;s bundle. Which offers a whole selection truly terrible deals. Did you know you can pay $15 per month for enough iCloud storage to <i>still not be able to back up your iPhone</i>. For $20 a month your whole family can share less storage space than each of you probably needs individually. Double that price with practically no other benefits just to be able to actually use iCloud for a macbook. What do you think when you think Apple? iPads, iPhones, Macbooks. So obviously, their headline bundle includes literally none of those products even as an option. Oh and AppleCare - the only thing people actually do subscribe to... not included either.<p>Not forgetting the handful of absolutely forgetable bundled products, Apple Arcade, Apple News+ and Apple Fitness+ (which doesn&#x27;t exist). Filling your bundle full of rubbish that no one uses isn&#x27;t a good strategic move. If you had a bundle of 20 things it would be fine, but a bundle of 6 things, 2 of which should be bundled with hardware, 2 of which are mediocre, is just not compelling.<p>Finally you&#x27;ve got the Appstore. Apple is getting absolutely hammered on their 30% fee. At this point it looks almost certain that they&#x27;ll either change their fee structure or face regulatory action.<p>So yes, fine, we can talk about Apple&#x27;s move from products to services. But if we&#x27;re going to do that we need to do it in the context of &quot;Apple is failing to move from products to services&quot;. There is no clear path for Apple on the services side. If Apple is a services company why isn&#x27;t FaceTime adding $100Bn of market cap to Apple&#x27;s value as a competitor to Zoom?