“Apple is continuing to race ahead prior to its September 9 press event, where it’s expected to launch bigger versions of the iPhone and tease the iWatch,” Dana Blankenhorn writes for Seeking Alpha. “But shareholders should be focused on a different question, which is whether Apple can make it as a services company?”
“At some point, as markets saturate, Apple has to make this transition, and it’s clear the company has yet to do so. Results from iTunes music and app sales remain a tiny part of the whole,” Blankenhorn writes. “Most of the headlines regarding its cloud services, like relating to celebrity nudes, remain negative.”
“Apple is becoming a Michael Kors of mobility, the winner in the high-end segment but nowhere in the mass market,” Blankenhorn writes. “At some point that impacts developers’ willingness to divert resources to the platform. Where is the tipping point? And when does Apple service revenue become more than a pimple on the elephant?”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Give us a ring, Dana, when Michael Kors hits 42% U.S. market share. Apple’s iPhone currently owns 42% of the U.S. market and that figure is growing and will only accelerate with the launch of Apple’s next-gen iPhones.
I’d be embarrassed to write such dreck.
Another idiot. Where do they find them?
LMAO at the Michael Kors comparison. I am beginning to think that journalist Americans are becoming so stupid they can no longer understand what equivalency means!!!!
Apple’s services are strictly designed to support the hardware sales, just as its software is designed to add features to hardware.
Apple is a hardware company. It may make money off of services, but it makes the vast majority of its money off of hardware sales.
Transition to servility is what happens when you’re out of product ideas. For instance, Dell professional services will lick balls for the right dollar amount. It wasn’t always this way but that’s now essentially what their core business has been reduced to.
No, signing deals with fading IBM to push iPads and iPhones and emulating the very larger Android tablet (12.9′) and smartphone (4.7′ and 5.5′) form factors that Apple executives mocked and claimed were poor design when Android makers introduced them, plus making iterative products like HomeKit, HealthKit, iCloud, iWatch and Carplay major initiatives instead of Apple TV type hobbies are what happens when you’re out of product ideas.
And for those who are interested in the reality based world, A) Dell has always been in services and B) selling computers is still Dell’s biggest revenue generator. They sold 10 million PCs in 2nd quarter 2014, a 12.5% increase from 2nd quarter 2013. The idea that Dell is dead is simply wishful thinking from Apple fans. The reality is that as long as Windows retains 90% of the domestic PC market – and an even greater share of the global one – the manufacturers who make them are not going anywhere.
Your ignorance is staggering. HealthKit alone will be huge. Iterative my ass.
The story would not be whether Apple transitions into services, but that a hardware company like Apple would want or need to.
The fellow above falsely attempted to say this about Dell when it actually did happen with IBM. Where Dell is still a leading manufacturer and seller of PCs and servers – and if you ask me should probably look into making phones and tablets for the enterprise – IBM abandoned the PC market nearly 10 years ago (because former “clones” like Dell were making better PCs and doing them cheaper) and will similarly get out of the large systems and servers market in 2015 (for the same reason). But since IBM is Apple’s enterprise corporate partner now, I guess no bad things are allowed to be said about IBM … even when it is true.