This all comes off as pretty insecure. As a way to say "look, you might think we're not up to anything, but look at all the incremental stuff we're doing. Look how big we are."
I can imagine Larry David pointing his finger up and saying "Big numbers. BIG numbers!"
Don't get me wrong, most people (including myself) love their hardware. The software's fine, except they've eroded a lot of trust in the past year.
And most of their services are "eh it's fine. it works" - iCloud, Photos, Music, all that stuff is fine, it meets the standard, it works, it provides privacy, all good, steady things. We're generally satisfied customers.
But the elephant in the room is that Apple has almost nothing to show 3 years into the biggest change in the tech world since the internet. And they could've spent this time deeply integrating it into iOS and truly making these devices feel magical again.
It's a weird trait of our current economic structure that "we made a lot of money and we expect that to continue" could be seen as anything but great news from a company.
There's something to be said for companies that just say "We're going to continue to milk our current cows for the foreseeable future" – yeah definitely, keep doing that. And they're printing money. But so was Microsoft under Ballmer.
And you can see how much Nadella changed everything. There is such a thing as stagnating, but isn't always related to printing money.
I can imagine Larry David pointing his finger up and saying "Big numbers. BIG numbers!"
Don't get me wrong, most people (including myself) love their hardware. The software's fine, except they've eroded a lot of trust in the past year.
And most of their services are "eh it's fine. it works" - iCloud, Photos, Music, all that stuff is fine, it meets the standard, it works, it provides privacy, all good, steady things. We're generally satisfied customers.
But the elephant in the room is that Apple has almost nothing to show 3 years into the biggest change in the tech world since the internet. And they could've spent this time deeply integrating it into iOS and truly making these devices feel magical again.