Apple Finds Its Next Big Business: Showing Ads on Your iPhone

Agree. But I believe Apple thinks they also need to move harder into "services" and, I suppose, now ads. I think Apple recognizes that the high-margin hardware business is not not sustainable. Especially as everyone who would want an iPhone already owns one. Apple needs to grow somewhere.

Everyone that owns an iPhone cycles them out every 2-3 years. It’s a perpetual cash cow.

That’s not true. A lot of people wait until their phone no longer works to upgrade.

And also, something being a cash cow at the moment does not mean that thing will continue to be one. Since the iPhone 6ish, iPhones have become “good enough”; there’s not much to differentiate each model from the previous as there was with, say, the iPhones 3GS and 4. The iPhone 13 just doesn’t have much going for it compared to the 12.

Apple is still selling a million iPhones a day.

That was the case, now its more like 4-5.

Then Apple is more blind than I assumed possible. Yes, their phone business is probably saturated, but their computer business is not. Apple produces the only ultra-book worthy of the name.

There is no reason for them not to own the premium-business market with all day battery, but still powerful machines. Mac runs the office suite, Mac runs your browser and Teams, Zoom or whatever your organization uses. It runs figma, it runs your IDE, etc.

There are definitely areas where they don't work, and they don't really have a meaningful desktop, and some companies will have speciality software that isn't browser based.

But in general the boss-and-above market has very little reason to not use an Apple Air.

I stopped cycling when they removed headphone jack. Back to the Android.

Likewise. I wonder if we'll ever see them restore the headphone jack on the SE models simply because there's a good 10-20% chunk of the market who won't buy a phone without one.

A Mini-chassis-based SE with a headphone jack and a touchID home button would be a day 0 buy for me -- I wouldn't even wait for reviews.

Unfortunately I think Apple's treating the headphone jack (on iOS devices) like USB-A, not like the SD card slot or the HDMI port (on the Mac) -- the backlash hasn't been strong enough for them to backtrack.

Of course, that leaves me trapped in the failed evolutionary path of my touchID, small-sized, headphone-jacked 2016 iPhone SE that's losing iOS support this fall. The Zenfone 9 has me intrigued as a modern SoC with solid cellular band coverage and most of the features I want. But it's still bigger than I'd like.

I want an iPhone but im not sacrificing my entire ecosystem of USB-C charger, batteries, car chargers, etc that i can share between my laptop and headphones to mix in lightning nonsense. When iPhone goes USB-C I'll buy.