In March 2016 Ben Bajarin and I put on an event called SUBSCRIBE where we asked, among other things, How will the online services business models evolve? How will hardware affect software and services and vice versa? How will users, usage, and capital connect? Now is a good time to look back on that event. … Continue reading “Subscribe Again”
About a year and a half ago in Lasts Longer I noted that “keeping iPhones in use” became a top priority for Apple’s design for sustainability. I considered this provocative because it prioritizes usage and users over units sold, in contrast to how the company was perceived by investors. This new focus was reinforced by … Continue reading “Lasts Longer (2.0)”
There is no such thing as a free internet. If you engage online you are being monitored and someone is looking to extract data from your actions. Your online life is under constant surveillance from social networks, data brokers, ad companies and others looking to “monetize” your actions. You don’t have to accept this. IVPN … Continue reading “[Sponsor] IVPN: Your Trustworthy VPN”
WWDC 2019 included a vast list of releases and it’s quite difficult to summarize. The focus is always on software updates but this year the list seems more exhaustive than usual. The highlights for me are: WatchOS now includes direct App Store access. This continues the separation of the Watch from the iPhone, on a … Continue reading “The iPad Operating System”
The iPhone is the most successful product of all time. Over 1.6 billion have been sold. Including the iOS products it spun off, the total is over 2.2 billion. Of those 2.2 billion sold, 1.5 billion are still in use. There are about 1 billion iPhone users. Economically speaking, iPhone sales have reached one trillion … Continue reading “The Pivot”
In the latest Apple Earnings report, Apple announced a few details that are relevant to the forecast of the business: The global active installed base for iPhone reached an all-time high at the end of December, surpassing 900 million devices. This represents growth y-o-y in each of five geographic segments, and growth of almost 75 … Continue reading “A Billion Users”
In June of this year Apple reported that it had paid a total of $100 billion to developers. That is the 18th such figure given in the 10 year history of App Store, making the progress of payments and hence revenue and spending easily trackable. The other regularly reported figure is the business segment revenue … Continue reading “Traffic Acquisition Costs”
I think Lisa Jackson’s presentation at the September 2018 iPhone launch event was perhaps the most interesting and most profound. Lisa Jackson is Apple’s vice president of Environment, Policy and Social Initiatives. Previously, Ms. Jackson served as Administrator of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA). In her role at Apple she has been responsible for the transition … Continue reading “Lasts Longer”
Every October, at the end of its fiscal year, Apple files its Form 10K or annual report. In this report the company includes a section titled “Capital Assets” which details expenditures for capital equipment. This is last year’s entry: The Company’s capital expenditures were $14.9 billion during 2017. The Company anticipates utilizing approximately $16.0 billion … Continue reading “Preview of the holiday quarter”
At the latest Apple Summit in Los Angeles the question of Apple’s valuation was foremost on many minds. The illustration I used there to discuss valuation is shown below. It shows the history of revenues (by reported segments) and gross margin for the five largest companies in the world by market capitalization. I have been publishing this … Continue reading “On knowing the value of everything and the price of nothing”
