Apple's Reinvention as a Services Company Starts for Real Monday

One interesting question is how viable this can be if they continue their strategy of differentiation through privacy. Doing &quot;services&quot; for people intrinsically means knowing about them. What they watch, what they read, what they listen to, what they need, who they are. The more you know, the better you can &quot;service&quot; them. By pursuing this path they may quickly find themselves sucked into a slipperly slope that puts them into conflict with the primary identity they&#x27;ve tried to build up. You can see it already starting:<p>&gt; divide up the revenue between developers based on how much time users spend playing their games<p>So they&#x27;re going to spy on their users, huh? Of course, it&#x27;s perfectly innocent, but they will quickly find that with deeper metrics they can better model what games to fund, etc etc. And before you know it they&#x27;ll have a tab in their account page just like Google with a list as long as your arm of all the things they know about you.

I continue to wonder why they don&#x27;t have or push iPhone as a Services ( The iPhone Upgrade Programme ) and continue to rely on mostly Carriers for Financing.<p>By offering iPhone up to a 4 years terms and bundled with AppleCare+ Thief and Loss and iCloud Backup. With Optional Apple Music, Apple News Magazine, Apple TV and Apple Game. All paid via an Apple Branded Credit Card within Apple Pay backed by Goldman Sachs.<p>You could have the iPhone Services starting at ~$35&#x2F;Month even for an iPhone XS Max. If you add up all the other &quot;Services&quot; pack. That is roughly $75&#x2F;month for the Full Apple Experience.<p>~$40 to even $100 a month is affordable to a lot of people. And my guess this could be part of the reason why Apple has been pushing the prices of iPhone.<p>There is another advantage to Apple, this strategy requires huge cash flow and can not be easily copied by its competitor. Apple would be effectively trading its immediate return of cash from selling product for long term customer lock in.

To me, the clear indication that they&#x27;re serious about this transition to services will be making them available on third-party devices. Android has ~55% market share in the US, and &gt;80% globally. Roku has 35% of the smart TV market (through both their dedicated devices and TV integrations), Apple has ~15%.<p>A video streaming service that&#x27;s only available on iOS and Apple TV will be inevitably niche, and no real competition for Netflix. This also means they will likely have to pay a premium for content (and a _much_ larger amount per user) as creators will prefer to be on platforms where more people will see their work.<p>But ultimately, supporting Android and 3rd party streaming devices goes against Apple&#x27;s DNA. Apple still sees itself as a hardware company, and software and services exist to give people reasons to buy their hardware.

&gt; The company would collect these monthly fees, then divide up the revenue between developers based on how much time users spend playing their games<p>Sounds terrible for short indie games and good for long grindy games.<p>That&#x27;s not a future I want for my gaming. Not that I am an apple customer in the first place but hopefully this won&#x27;t affect what is delivered on the other platforms.

Apple has almost always been a services company. It&#x27;s deeply sad that its current leadership doesn&#x27;t understand that. The only difference is that the service Apple used to provide was a <i>friction-free experience</i> on its platform.<p>It feels like the current Apple doesn&#x27;t think of product experience as a service, with amortized costs built into the purchase price. In their eyes, at least insofar as it seems from my perspective, the relationship stops as soon as you decide to buy the product. Maybe a limited relationship exists afterward, if you buy AppleCare. But they don&#x27;t seem to care one whit if the experience on their product sucks. Increasingly, Apple software argues with you instead of adopting the philosophy of &quot;it just works.&quot;<p>I&#x27;m extremely unlikely to pay Apple for a content service, given its current track record of user-hostility.

Their products are stagnating because they are less robust and more expensive. The value just isn&#x27;t there compared to <i>some</i> of golden era hardware. Obviously services can help them grow, but as user of apple laptops, I&#x27;ve felt abandoned for quite a while now. Their growth in those fields are stagnating because their price &#x2F; quality ratio has reduced significantly.

&gt;<i>This service will combine stories from newspapers, websites, and magazines into a new tab in the Apple News app on iPhones, iPads, and Macs.</i><p>&gt;<i>Apple plans to charge about $10 a month. </i><p>Is it just me, or is there no way this could possibly be worth it? Hacker News and Reddit already combine stories from newspapers and websites, and they do it for free. I have a hard time believing that a managed source selected from a few business partners could possibly be as valuable as a crowd-driven scan across the entire internet.

Funny how an announcement looks different depending on the slope of your income. Apple reaching new markets vs apple « reinventing itself » is a complete different story. Apple makes great devices and can leverage that to conquer service subscription, but I don’t think anyone has been impressed by apple online services or technologies on their own merits...

They&#x27;re gonna need a huge internal cultural shift if this is going to work. Their entire company is built around hardware. Services are &quot;just good enough&quot;. No one buys an iPhone because of the services offered -- you buy the services because you already have the iPhone and it works better than the third party services. But I don&#x27;t know anyone who adores the Apple services.<p>Or to put it another way, even if they offered the Apple services on non-apple devices, I doubt many people who don&#x27;t already have an Apple device would sign up.<p>Their services make money in spite of how they work, not because of it. If they want to compete on services, they actually have to make good services and prioritize them internally.

Alan Kay once remarked “I don&#x27;t know what Silicon Valley will do when it runs out of Doug&#x27;s ideas.&quot;

I had the hardest time parsing the title. For a moment I thought it was talking about a new company, from apple, specialized in digital transformation or similar (“Reinvention as a Service”)

Of all the potential announcements, the gaming service is the most curious. Like the just-announced Google Stadia, this 100% depends on the games offered, and the cost of the service itself. $10&#x2F;month for $5 premium iOS games (which go on sale <i>very</i> frequently) is a hard value proposition to other services like Xbox Game Pass which have $60 games for the same monthly price.<p>If they do bundle it with News&#x2F;Music, now that would be interesting.

I am reading a different Bloomberg article right now on this subject <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2019-03-22&#x2F;apple-s-new-services-come-with-built-in-conflicts" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.bloomberg.com&#x2F;opinion&#x2F;articles&#x2F;2019-03-22&#x2F;apple-...</a><p>I am 100% sure (infinitely sure!) that I will sign up for Apple’s service to try it out and I am ‘almost sure’ that Apple will face a lot of regulatory and legal challenges.<p>By personal preference I would like to see more open platforms and, off topic for this conversation, a more distributed web.<p>I don’t think we will get there though. Years ago author William Gibson probably ‘got it right’ in predicting what the future will be like: corporations become all-powerful, governments become a joke if they exist at all, and talented people align themself with a corporation as we self identify now as the citizen of a country.

&gt; Apple News: This service will combine stories from newspapers, websites, and magazines into a new tab in the Apple News app on iPhones, iPads, and Macs.<p>I still don’t understand how this is any different from what’s happening in the Apple News app right now, other than it will cost $10 per month starting on Monday and is now free. Also, the Texture app requires that you _download_ issues of magazines, whereas magazines on Apple News are currently instantaneous.

if Apple combines Music, News and TV subscriptions into one payment that&#x27;s competitive with sum of those subscriptions it&#x27;s huge! I would probably drop Spotify and get Apple Music if I can save me money and give me more access to content. Uh, if it works with their Family Sharing plans it would be golden!

&gt; The service will focus on original content, including TV shows and movies from producers such as Damien Chazelle, M. Night Shyamalan, and Oprah.<p>Makes one wonder if they will show a teaser for the Asimov&#x27;s Foundation show.

Apple has long provided free services to the people who buy Apple hardware while selling the content that they have to pay to license from other content owners (while taking a cut of the sale).<p>So far, I&#x27;m not seeing a change in their business model so much as im seeing a change in how much focus is placed on the profitability of the latter.<p>If the rumors prove true and the streaming video content they produce in house will be free to those with Apple devices, but content they license from others costs money (with Apple taking a cut), this will definitely be Apple remaining true to form.

I think Apple should have been bolder a long time ago. It should be the case that with Apple you get (near) global 4G&#x2F;5G coverage on all their devices. So you take your laptop out in Spain and <i>snap</i> you’re online. Apples hardware is their bread and butter. I think they need to view it as their amazon prime... as in make a services ecosystem which means you want to stay using their hardware instead of just adding paid subscription services to their existing offering.

Perhaps I&#x27;m overly critical, but I find most paywalled journalism (let alone non-paywalled) to be low-quality. I had a subscription to The Information, and while I initially found their journalism to be high-quality, I eventually realized this perception was strongly shaped by my experience of pervasive low-quality journalism elsewhere. I cancelled my subscription because while The Information was better than pretty much anything else, it still didn&#x27;t seem high-quality (more moderate-quality).<p>Is there anything that surpasses the quality of The Economist in this environment?*<p>*(not that The Economist is clearly non-relatively high-quality)

It would be fun if the EU enforced something like the browser ballot screen, giving users choice of content provider on Apple devices.<p>It also makes sense from an environmental perspective: why have two different devices when you can view all content on one.

I might replace my FT sub with this. Only one datapoint though. But I’ll sub day 1.

They certainly haven&#x27;t been focused on designing Macintosh hardware... Isn&#x27;t the Pro level version of their desktop offering, essentially unchanged for the past 5 years?

This is basically the cable TV model for the modern age, no?

Still hoping for the ARM Macbook insteal of Netflix made by Apple.

Brilliant and the only thing left, short of another iPhone reinvention miracle (not likely for a while.) Many of us have 10 year old PCs that do 100% of the things we need, smartphones are going that way too. So milk the ecosystem.

From the article &quot;The company has only used the Steve Jobs Theater at its new headquarters twice since it opened two years ago.&quot;<p>Something is in decline at Apple.

iPaas.

Article is paywalled for me. Are these streaming services going to be usable with non-Apple devices?

Great. We are the product now.

I wonder if now is a good time to short some Netflix stock.

But if I am not an iOS device owner, what incentive do I have to use Apple&#x27;s services? Currently I see none.

Apple has completely lost its way under Cook that it’s now just rent seeking. They’re just scrambling to fill a $$$ hole for their investors at this point.<p>Apple is incredibly bad at building services and has been for their entire existence. They cannot multi-task and things will languish for 2-3 years at a time.

Service from a company that presents two options “yes” and “[nag] me again later” Fuck Apple. Any company that takes its users ability to say “no” is not worth our attention.

haha stupid ass Apple&#x27;s 2 factor authentication, provides the pin number on the same machine that I&#x27;m authenticating on. These people do not know services.

If Apple&#x27;s going to be a services company now, wouldn&#x27;t it be great if they kept themselves honest (and their products great) by honoring a level playing field for the services they compete with e.g. Spotify? Imagine if services like iCloud, Pages and Mail were comparable to or better than the existing product landscape? Apple&#x27;s been holding themselves to too low a standard for too long. Maps was a wakeup call for them, it&#x27;d be cool if they lit a fire like that across the board for their products.