[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.