Apple has found its golden goose, and it's not the iPhone

© Unsplash/Frederik Lipfert

Apple has just published its latest quarterly results. If, as expected, the figures are very good for the brand with the apple, they allow us to see the evolution of Apple's business model over the past 10 years.

Indeed, the Cupertino firm is no longer the same company it was in 2011, when Steve Jobs handed over to Tim Cook. Since then, it has of course launched new products, such as AirPods or the Apple Watch. But above all, it has developed a category in its own right: services.

This intangible entity represented 26% of Apple's revenues in the last quarter. That’s more than iPads, Macs and accessories (AirPods, Apple Watch, HomePod…) combined!

Apple has changed

Services, for those who are not familiar with the Apple ecosystem, are all the offers made to the general public by subscription. The best known are Apple Music and Apple TV+, two streaming platforms (respectively music and video).

But Apple's offer does not stop there and includes other paid services such as iCloud+, Apple Arcade for mobile games, Fitness+ to stay in shape and even News+ to stay informed (a service only available in the United States).

However, these services are only the tip of the iceberg, the one visible to the general public. Other sources of income fall into the “services” category. This is particularly the case with Google's monthly payments to be the default search engine in Safari. We can also count subscriptions to Apple Care+, Apple’s in-house insurance.

Endless growth

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Thanks to the emergence over the last 10 years of a large number of service offerings of all kinds, Apple has taken off economically. While its product sales follow a sinusoidal cycle, marked by the release of a new iPhone every Over the years, the services have never had a lull.

Over the last few years, they have experienced constant growth< /strong>, to the point of catching up with hardware sales today. In the graph above, we can clearly see that services could become a more important source of revenue than hardware in a few months.

The end of hardware

But does the rapid arrival of services actually signal the end of hardware at Apple ? Will the company, in the more or less distant future, stop selling iPhones ? Tim Cook began to answer this question, with his usual wooden language. He notably declared that the annual release of iPhones could no longer be de rigueur in a few years.

The smartphone market is reaching saturation. Everyone has a cutting-edge device, and the annual upgrades offered are not significant enough to trigger a massive buying cycle. Apple could nevertheless benefit from significant developments in 2025 and 2026 with the arrival of a “Slim iPhone” and a “Fold” model.

It remains to be seen whether these products will really interest the general public and trigger a new record sales cycle for Apple. Or, these devices could be technological “phenomena,” admired and admirable, but not interesting enough to be bought. This is the fate of Apple’s latest, the Vision Pro.

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