[blinkingled]

Services are hardly a unique Apple specific problem though. For a few that get services right you'll find many that suck. It takes a very different collective mindset, culture, processes and iterative improvements - those are a no brainer. Beyond those it also takes unconventional innovation at multiple different levels - look at how HTTP2 happened for example and look at how everything underneath GMail must have improved to make it what it is. Also think of AWS and how many first-have problems they must have needed to solve.

It's hard to get services right and even harder to keep them right. I am of course not saying Apple can't get there but merely separating the hardware and software/services isn't a meaningful first step.

[derefr]

I don't know about processes or mindset; I think it's mostly a matter of hiring real Engineers and letting them do real Engineering on your backend. That's a cultural problem, though, on an organizational level: if you run everything in the "20-somethings burning midnight oil to ship" mode, the experienced Engineers don't want to join you. You'd have to shift your culture into one that has room for them (like e.g. Facebook is continuing to attempt to do with the Engineers from Whatsapp.)