Apple’s strange months. A catalogue of scattered attempts

For Apple, October was a strange month, perhaps even a revolutionary one. Since September, the company has officially had a new chief executive, John Ternus, and within thirty days it unveiled no fewer than three new products, all of which were a little bizarre, at least by Cupertino standards.

First came the iPhone Duo, the company’s first foldable smartphone, which within a few days had already proved to have a rather fragile screen. Then came HomeView, a sort of giant Apple Watch designed to be placed in the home to communicate with Siri and the company’s other services, followed by a MacBook with a touchscreen, whose full name is ‘MacBook Pro with PROLED XDR display’.

As many have noted, these are three things that would probably have driven Steve Jobs round the bend, but they are also three steps in a certain direction. Which direction, exactly, isn’t entirely clear: rather than a plan, in fact, when viewed together they seem more like a catalogue of scattered attempts. In the meantime, however, Apple continues to make a fortune: so it makes sense to start from there.

On Monday, the company presented its latest quarterly results: record revenue of around 114 billion dollars, up 12 per cent on last year. iPhone sales rose by 17.5 per cent, Mac sales by 23 per cent, and services by nearly 10 per cent. It is worth looking at how the pie is divided. Half of the revenue comes from iPhones, which is no surprise. Macs account for 9.4 per cent, whilst iPads and wearables together make up just over 10 per cent. A large part of the remainder – 27 per cent – consists of what are known as ‘Services’. 

But what exactly is meant by Apple’s ‘services’? One might think of Apple Music or Apple TV, which are both thriving businesses, but they pale in comparison to the App Store and, in particular, the ‘fee’ that Apple takes from every transaction (usually 30 per cent, though it can be lower depending on the circumstances), from extra lives bought on Candy Crush to any app downloaded. 

It is worth recalling this ‘hidden’ side of Apple’s business to understand just how much the company has changed since the halcyon days of Steve Jobs, when the company sold computers and services were a minor part of its business. Despite all this, however, October’s new releases mainly concern hardware, and seem to show that Apple is keen to experiment – or perhaps doesn’t know what it’s doing.

The iPhone Duo, HomeView and the Mac with a touchscreen are, in fact, bets on screens and everyday devices which, according to Apple, we will continue to use for a long time to come. Whilst Meta and other companies envisage a future in which a pendant, a pin or perhaps a chip in the brain will be enough to communicate with artificial intelligence, Apple is going its own way. It has never really focused on AI, and when it did try, with Apple Intelligence, it ended up in a bit of a mess. Instead, it is preparing for a world with even more screens.

Foldable screens that fit in your pocket, just as other manufacturers have been doing for years; screens in the kitchen and living room, with HomeView; touchscreen computers. All this is not exactly being rolled out with the order and consistency typically associated with Jobs, but with profits on the rise, whilst the rest of the sector, in both the US and China, is beginning to feel the weight of the enormous investments made in recent years in artificial intelligence. In China, the bubble seems to have already burst; in the US, some shares have taken a hit in recent days.

From this perspective, AI seems to matter relatively little to Apple. The company needs a Siri capable of understanding users’ requests and fulfilling most of them – and never mind if it had to turn to Google Gemini for help to achieve this. The company, however, seems to have a clear view on RAM – the memory used in devices – the price of which continues to rise precisely because of AI, or rather data centres, which are absorbing all available RAM. For the past year, Apple has chosen not to take any risks, buying up as much RAM as possible to ensure it does not run out: this quarter, its memory stocks have grown by 154 per cent compared with the previous year. 

In short, Apple isn’t quite sure what the devices of the future will look like – whether they’ll be iPhones, wearables or foldable gadgets – so in the meantime it’s trying a bit of everything to see what works. Meanwhile, its competitors are still working to develop the all-powerful AI they have been promising for years and to identify the ideal device for user interaction, while Apple continues to generate substantial revenue by selling devices and monetising services. The result is a less ‘sexy’ Apple than the one we grew up with, but one that is currently navigating an experimental phase that could prove entertaining. It has been some time since that was the case.