Imagining Apple’s Post-iPhone Future
The tech giant needs to do more to make its products compatible with competitors’.
No longer the cool kid on the block?
Photographer: Kevin Frayer/Getty Images
Apple’s reported plans to cut iPhone production by 10 percent in the first quarter of 2019 make increasingly clear that the company’s base of loyal users isn’t an inexhaustible resource from whom it can forever extract a rent through its services offerings. Apple needs to compete more vigorously in all the other markets in which it’s present, without relying on the network effects of its large installed base.
Whether you blame economic headwinds in key markets such as China (as Apple Chief Executive Officer Tim Cook did in a recent letter to investors) or the company’s own mistakes (as my Bloomberg Opinion colleague Shira Ovide has done), or any combination of these factors, Apple appears about to slide down the table of biggest smartphone suppliers by unit sales. It’s already the third-biggest supplier after Samsung and Huawei, having lost the second spot to the Chinese company earlier this year. And if it can’t sell as many phones as it once hoped at its super-premium prices, and if the pricing doesn’t change, other companies will pass it as they’ve already done in China.