[pixl97]

Do markets not demand continual growth forever?

New phones are no longer a growth market. Everyone has one, and buying a $1200 phone every year is something less and less people are doing.

If Apple totally trashes their reputation, who are they going to flock to... Google? That is just jumping out of the frying pan into the fire.

[mark_l_watson]

I don’t disagree with you, but markets also get saturated. I have an old iPhone 11 Pro and I just bought my wife an iPhone 13 Pro. I could by a new phone for myself, but nothing that I see is worth my time of going to the store, setting up a new phone, etc. Piling on: buying new gear unnecessarily often is also really bad for the environment. If Apple wants to continue to thrive, I think they need alternative income streams.

You mentioned Google. I think they are also working hard to find additional income streams. Google has good products in GCP as well as entertainment media like YouTube, YouTube Music, Play books/movies. But they are still too reliant in advertising.

I think Apple will do better than Google in branching out, but to be honest I enjoy both companies products while taking full advantage of Google’s privacy settings, Apple’s Lockdown Mode, etc. if people use Google with default settings, well, that is their decision.

[stjohnswarts]

"Do markets not..." That's not my problem. Apple can't get busted up for all I care. I don't really have a whole lot of sympathy for one of the largest corporations in the world.

[zaroth]

Markets do not demand continual growth forever. Simply being the most reliably profitable company quarter and quarter is perfectly fine. But the revenue streams of a company must evolve with the changing tides.

For example, I like the idea that Apple remaining insanely profitable doesn’t necessarily mean I need to keep buying new iPhones every 2 years.

It’s much better for consumers (and our planet by the way) if these devices continue to have increasing average lifespan.

Obviously it would need to be in Apple’s best self-interest to invest literally billions of dollars of R&D in order to get these devices closer to a 10 year lifespan than a 2 year lifespan, it’s not going to happen in a capitalist system if it halves their revenue.

For that equation to work out, factoring in increased market share for making a phone so robust and software so un-bloated, I’d say they would need to earn roughly 3-4x the revenue of selling a new device from each user over that 10 year period from higher-margin services instead.