[rickdeckard]

Agree. But the company also pays a large chunk of its services R&D and operations by bundling it with the hardware and have people pay upfront for it.

New hardware would not be needed for most of it, but then Apple would have to make every iOS user a fixed yearly fee for a generic package of "some services at our disclosure". And that's quite impossible to achieve and stay competitive...

[kristianc]

Here’s the rub though: convincing customers to pay for something they used to think they got as part of the hardware package isn’t going to be easy.

People love the seamless integration of hardware, software, and services that Apple provides, but introducing a mandatory yearly fee would erode that goodwill pretty much instantly.

It would be more or less impossible to pull off.