Sure, but historically Apple made that recurring revenue by simply selling expensive hardware devices at intervals, one sale at a time. The growth period of those is now over. There aren’t ever going to be 5x as many smartphone or tablet or laptop users in the future as there are today. To support continued y/y increases they need to increase revenue somewhere and it’s not going to be from new product categories, at least for a few years, such as when the AV(non-P) is much lighter and an order of magnitude cheaper.
The problem is that they can’t simply continue to earn four hundred billion a year - that’s not enough. Each year it must increase. No revenue figure is ever sufficient.
Apple’s eras are:
- the growth of the pre-graphical personal computer market
- the growth of the graphical computer market (Mac) (worth noting that they mostly failed to capture this)
- the growth of the portable/internet graphical computer market (ie affordable personal laptops)
- the growth of the smartphone market
- rentseeking (and maybe the growth of the VR hardware market if they and Zucc have guessed correctly)
There isn’t another growing hardware market for them to surf at this point. They’re doing their best with smart speakers, earbuds, headphones, watches, and tablets but in the grand scheme of revenue nobody really cares about those and they won’t grow substantially in the future.
The problem is that they can’t simply continue to earn four hundred billion a year - that’s not enough. Each year it must increase. No revenue figure is ever sufficient.
Apple’s eras are:
- the growth of the pre-graphical personal computer market
- the growth of the graphical computer market (Mac) (worth noting that they mostly failed to capture this)
- the growth of the portable/internet graphical computer market (ie affordable personal laptops)
- the growth of the smartphone market
- rentseeking (and maybe the growth of the VR hardware market if they and Zucc have guessed correctly)
There isn’t another growing hardware market for them to surf at this point. They’re doing their best with smart speakers, earbuds, headphones, watches, and tablets but in the grand scheme of revenue nobody really cares about those and they won’t grow substantially in the future.