[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.