“It was Jan Dawson of Jackdaw Research who several months ago came up with a word — ‘monthification’ — for what Apple management spent so much of last week’s earnings call talking about,” Philip Elmer-DeWitt reports for Fortune.
“The company had just passed a milestone — 1 billion devices in active use — and CEO Tim Cook and CFO Luca Maestri took turns encouraging analysts to imagine how much money those customers may someday spend each quarter to pay for Apple services and devices,” P.E.D. writes. “‘It’s an unbelievable asset for us,’ Cook gushed, happy to be discussing something other than slowing iPhone sales growth.”
“Of course, Apple already sells several services by the month, and starting last September it began selling iPhones that way too,” P.E.D. writes. “It’s not hard to imagine the company bundling these things together and selling a package of hardware, software, and cloud services for, say, $100 a month… The downside of the monthification of Apple, as Dawson points, is that these regular monthly payments could put Apple in the same boat as some of the companies consumers most love to hate.”
Read more in the full article here.
MacDailyNews Take: Yup.
Cobbling together whatever lineup of individually paid services and paying individually for each of them is a messy PITA. We’d like to see Apple offer a way to unify all of these apps (channels/networks) into one simple bill, at least. — MacDailyNews, December 10, 2015