[clairity]

yup...

1. iphone is a mature product.

2. no onvious new groundbreaking product releases on the horizon (a watch is not it).

3. desktops are dying, and their replacements, the ipads, are stagnating.

4. intel screwed them with processor roadmaps intel had no hopes of meeting (cannonlake, anyone?)

5. no longer visionary on the future of computing (seem to be chasing all the flavors of the month lately).

6. services growth is a lagging indicator on the health of the ecosystem (or walled garden, if you prefer).

7. product and design mishaps all over (dongles, broken keyboards, homepod's a dud so far).

8. waning customer loyalty (customers are staying with apple not from excitement but from apathy in the space)

9. the low hanging fruit in ubiquitous, mobile and personal computing have been plucked (just the hard stuff remains).

i'm not suggesting all is lost, but from my vantage point outside the company, it's concerning. airpods and the pencil seem most promising in the short term to me. airpods hold the promise of voice computing (if siri could get her act together), and the pencil promises to be the first techology to truly kill off paper, but neither of those hold any certainty.

[BryantD]

The Watch plus AirPods = the easier 2/3ds of a pervasive computing system. Audio plus haptic feedback is significant. Add a good set of AR glasses, which is the hard part, and you have something really interesting.

Siri needs improving, though, no question.

[clairity]

yes, but pervasive AR is not coming any time soon.

i think the next step is getting a computer to be contextually useful through an audio interface, rather than sight and touch. haptic is helpful but i don't see how it can encode enough useful yet intuitive info to be a standalone interface.

the problem is not that apple is not working on this (since it is). it's just that it's not obvious that apple has a clear vision of how to get to the future. they are chasing all the shiny things at once, throwing them all at the wall to see which one(s) sticks.

(to be clear, this is not an endorsement of google and android btw. they're even worse in this regard, but they're taking more of a microsoft strategy of being all things to all people anyway.)

[djrogers]

> 6. services growth is a lagging indicator on the health of the ecosystem (or walled garden, if you prefer).

How very convenient that you seem to think you can handwave away the ridiculously huge growth in services by saying it's a lagging indicator. No chance at all that it could be partly due to new and more compelling services offerings (music, icloud)?

You sound almost as confident as the 'analysts' who predicted a down quarter with a failing and cancelled iPhone X.

[clairity]

the point i was making is that, yes, the services business is growing, but that's basically reaping the fruits sown by the iphone/ipad business (and macs and ipods before that), so it's lagging as an indicator of the trajectory of the company.

apple is the best at understanding what ordinary consumers want out of computing devices, and services are very complementary to that. but i'm skeptical that services should be the future of apple, because that's straying away from what they're best at. services as the long term strategy is a (potentially dangerous) distraction, and apple should keep its eye on the consumer electronics ball.

i wouldn't mention such things if i didn't think it had merit to consider (as a customer, investor, competitor, or simply a spectator). we're on hacker news, not sitting in a trading pit trying to eke out 47 nanoseconds of information asymmetry, so take it for what it's worth.

[andrewjl]

Desktops are dying while they realized highest Mac revenue ever this quarter? Not following the logic.