Apple's Pivot into Services

After giving my Apple Talk, I do a Q&A with my group on their tour bus as we head to Apple Park. Some of their questions are light hearted, such as, "Why did the Apple logo used to be upside down on laptops?" or "Why does the Apple logo have a bite taken out of it?" But my latest group asked some deeper questions about the future of Apple.

My group, on Wednesday, asked me about Apple's It's Show Time event held a couple days earlier. Monday's event at Apple seems to be a pivot for the company in that no new offerings were revealed that are now available.

It's a pivot for Apple because the company is moving more and more toward services delivered via Apple products. We last saw Apple make a strategic pivot in 2007 when Steve Jobs announced the first iPhone. Near the end of his presentation, Steve Jobs said he was changing the name of the company from Apple Computer, Inc. to Apple Inc. to better reflect that Apple was moving away computers and into consumer electronics.

Now, once again, as the smartphone market becomes saturated, we see Apple staying relevant by increasing their services offerings. Of course Apple has a lot of potential offerings in R&D, but many never see the light of day if they're not up to Apple's standards. 

Friday's announcement that they were killing off its never-to-market AirPower charging mat is a rare premature misstep by Apple. Rumor has it that this product, after being announced more than a year and a half ago, was running too hot to provide a decent customer experience. And that's what Apple's all about. I describe the company's mantra as best possible customer experience. 

Future Apple Products

The groups I speak to frequently ask me about Apple's future offerings, so I speculate...

1. Car: Apple is working on a car (codename: Titan); or, perhaps, autonomous software for automakers. It's not a secret what they're working, but they don't yet know what will became of their research.

2. TV: Apple's Eddy Cue, senior vice president of Internet Software and Services, who reports directly to Tim Cook, has long wanted to unbundle TV channels from cable TV packages. In a nutshell, he wants to do for TV cable subscriptions what the iTunes Music Store did for music... unbundle content to give customers more options. 

3. Medical: This is a long term play that's clearly humming in the background. Apple was the first company to get FDA approval for a consumer EKG product via the Apple Watch. Earlier this month, when visiting my doctor for a cold, he asked to look at the recent data on my Apple Watch. Apple's foray in to healthcare will continue to become more important. Perhaps a future Apple Watch will allow noninvasive glucose monitoring.

Obviously, we never know what secrets Apple has under wraps, but I suspect that the best is yet to come.