Apple Used to Be an Inventor. Now It’s Mainly a Landlord
Yeah, that&#x27;s a click-baity headline; but they&#x27;re not wrong. There&#x27;s a shift from the &quot;line up at dawn for the new Apple Dingus&quot; to an arguably more stable &quot;tic-toc&quot; upgrade cycle, with hopefully some Apple Music and iCloud subscriptions thrown in. That&#x27;s where I&#x27;m at right now. Both of us are still on iPhone 6s. I have an iPad from last year that I expect to last a few more. Hers is the generation prior, and will get replaced when iOS no longer supports it (or I upgrade). Newest Mac is from 2012. Now, part of it is &quot;good enough&quot;. The new phones aren&#x27;t so outstanding as to warrant an upgrade, the 6s does the jobs we need just fine. Part of it is &quot;there&#x27;s nothing to buy&quot;; see: laptops. But Apple still gets money for Apple Music, iCloud, and whatever we get off iTunes.<p>But as for the click-bait headline, we both just bought our first Apple Watches, the Series 4. Strap one of those puppies on your wrist for a day and talk to me about &quot;used to be an inventor&quot;. (Side note: AAPL might not have sold us phones for a while, but they <i>did</i> &quot;invent&quot; a watch that we&#x27;d buy. They still got our hardware money.)