“For the second year in a row, Apple held a developers conference that should frighten its competitors. Relying on a nearly maniacal obsession with the user experience, Apple is removing oxygen from every market that it plays in,” Neil Cybart writes for Above Avalon. “At the same time, the tech landscape is riddled with increasingly bad bets, indifference, and a lack of vision. Apple is pulling away from the competition to a degree that we haven’t ever seen before. Given how we are just now entering the wearables era, implications of this shift will be measured in the coming decades, not years.”
Consider the following trends:
• Apple hasn’t just held its own in the smartphone space but rather is continuing to take share from Android. Of all the smartphone manufacturers, Apple saw the largest sales share increase in the smartphone industry last quarter, and that was during a pandemic.
• Apple is adding approximately 20 million new iPad users per year despite the iPad being 10 years old and already having an installed base exceeding 300 million users.
• Apple’s oldest major product category, the Mac, is adding 10 million new users per year.
• Apple Watch and AirPods are quickly approaching 100 million user bases each.
• Apple users are paying for 518 million subscriptions across Apple’s platforms, which is up 126 million in just a year.
All of the preceding items amount to an Apple ecosystem gaining momentum… More worrying for competitors, Apple is still in the early stages of bringing its users deeper into the ecosystem. According to my estimate, approximately 50% of Apple users still own just one Apple device: an iPhone. This group serves as a prime market for products like the iPad, Apple Watch, AirPods, and various Apple services. In a few years, that percentage may decline to something more like 30%. Such a development will remove much of the remaining oxygen from the markets Apple plays in.
MacDailyNews Take: As long as misguided, confused, overzealous regulators don’t kill the golden goose, the world is Apple’s.