Apple is the most valuable company on Earth. It has unparalleled power and reach. Now what? We asked those in the know for their view on what’s next. This is how Apple can own the future and continue to think different.
Apple is still a hardware company. Despite the success of the App Store and iTunes, it’s always been driven by hardware, and our relationship with hardware. It’s had two significant waves – the computing wave, and the mobile wave.
Next, the combination of device miniaturisation and the improvement in user interface, both in terms of voice and gesture control, will take us to a point of ubiquitous, invisible computing.
You’re still going to access your computing resources, but you’re going to worry much less about the interface or form factor. You’re starting to see this with the Apple Watch and the HomePod. The Watch has sold more units than the Mac this year, and is closing in on the iPad.
It’s a natural extension of what Apple has done since the Apple II, the Mac and the iPhone, with multi-touch and Siri. It’s about giving you access to the beauty and power of computing, by pushing its engineering further and further away, and bringing its design and human factors closer.
With that in mind, the three obvious places for Apple to put itself are going to be transport, health, and this pervasive computing layer that lives within our homes. As personal computing becomes embedded in our environment, it’s hard to believe that Apple is going to sit on the sidelines.
Azeem Azhar, Curator, Exponential View; board of directors, Cronycle
Tim Cook can’t build and grow Apple the same way that Steve Jobs did.
Yes, the company should continue to work on new hardware, but it should also go all-in on media. Jobs had also been the CEO of Pixar, and so the media industry should have been Apple’s for the taking.
But Netflix and Amazon have destroyed them in the television space, Spotify has done better on music and the Roku box is, arguably, better than the Apple TV as a piece of living-room technology.
Apple has said that it is going to start spending on content to try and compete on streaming. One prediction has it spending as much as $4.2 billion (£3bn) a year on content by 2022, nearly twice as much as HBO spent in 2016, while others put the annual figure at a more modest $1 billion. But, Apple spent $3 billion on Beats in 2014, and that didn’t help it to win against Spotify.
At this point, Apple needs to seriously change its game plan. To keep growing, it should do what worked for Google and Facebook: it should grow by buying aggressively, and by buying the right things – and not another Beats.
Sarah Lacy, CEO of Chairman Mom; founder of Pando
Apple is looking for a big industry to disrupt, and it doesn’t get any bigger than healthcare.
It is already deep in the medical space with ResearchKit and HealthKit, two platforms for distributed digital healthcare and monitoring. These have been taken up by the research community in a big way, along with the Apple Watch.
Healthcare is moving much more towards prevention – and health monitoring is a big part of that. An ongoing pilot in the US allows people to download their medical history to their iPhones, and the Apple Watch is being used in a nationwide heart study conducted by Stanford University. The Apple Watch can already detect Parkinson’s tremors and dodgy heart rhythms. With the addition of more sensors, it could become a life-saving platform for remote health monitoring and disease prevention.
Last year, a 28-year-old man in New York had a pulmonary embolism – reaching the hospital in time to save his life due to his Apple Watch detecting that his heart was racing. It’s rumoured that the next Watch will have an electrocardiogram reader to give more detailed information about heart rhythms.
It’s obviously going to be very important to get the software right: it’s not going to be much fun if your Watch tells you that you’re about to have a heart attack and it turns out to be a glitch.
Next, Apple should put a non-invasive blood-sugar monitor in the Watch. Apple’s health-conscious CEO Tim Cook has been wearing a glucose monitor, and the company reportedly has a team devoted to developing ways of measuring it continuously without puncturing the skin.
It would be useful for diabetics, but it would also be a powerful tool for weight loss if, ten minutes after you ate a doughnut, you could see how your blood had been flooded with sugar.
Apple should use the Watch to give its wearers immediate feedback about what they eat and the impact of exercise. It would transform eating and dieting – and could potentially save lives.
Leander Kahney, Editor and publisher, cultofmac.com
We’re at a tipping point in the way large tech companies leverage user data, in terms of whether people feel that it’s something that is being done to them, or something they are actually part of. Apple can be the decisive voice, by giving its users control over their own data.
There are two good reasons why it can only be Apple that does this. Firstly, although it collects an enormous amount of valuable data about its users – on transactions, locations, health – its business model is not as heavily predicated on data as are Google and Facebook’s.
Secondly, it’s large enough to actually move a market. It could find ways to share the data it collects from each of its users, with its users, and then find ways for those users to get more value from that data if they want to.
Apple could enable new software, apps and spin-off companies as a data broker. Instead of companies profiting from the sale of personal data, it would be the users themselves. You could have a data-brokering service that you centralise all your data within, and then it can go off and negotiate the best deal for you according to a series of stipulations about how exactly you want your data to be shared.
It might even make commercial sense. This is a service that has value for customers. You use Apple, and on average you make, say, £500 a year by selling your data through “iData”, a service that Apple provides. It’s another selling point.
Apple giving its users data sovereignty could create a really powerful precedent, moving the market a bit further away from the surveillance capitalism model that is causing anxiety among a great many consumers, and further towards something that really puts the user in control.
Carl Miller, Research director, Centre for the Analysis of Social Media at Demos
Later this year, Apple is set to launch Business Chat, a way for companies to connect with consumers directly via Messages. It’s a development that clearly takes inspiration from WeChat, the app from Chinese web giant Tencent. WeChat started as a messaging service, but has grown into an “app for everything” that includes transportation and payment services.
If the western world continues to follow the same tech trends as Asia, then our future will be one where mobile is the new normal and the desktop experience becomes an afterthought. Already, developers are skipping websites altogether and only making apps – one day they could forego apps to make Messages apps.
However, messaging and communication is already fragmented in the west, so to help Business Chat take off, Apple should give Messages an “unfair” advantage, by allowing it to interact with other preloaded apps (such as Wallet, Calendar and Files) in a much deeper way.
Business Chat’s other major advantage is Apple Pay. In China, WeChat has shown that adding payments to a messaging platform can produce near-frictionless transactions and high efficiency. Business Chat might be the carrot that convinces offline merchants to promote Apple Pay.
Consumers are used to giving businesses their phone numbers or email addresses for loyalty points and discounts. Merchants could give promotions to users that pay for goods via Apple Pay – if they agree it also triggers a Business Chat.
Apple has been studying the success of WeChat and LINE, and it hasn’t given up on the consumer wallet opportunity. The messaging wars in the west are about to heat up.
Connie Chan, Partner, head of consumer sector, Andreessen Horowitz
This month at WIRED we're looking at how the world's most valuable company can own the future.
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This article was originally published by WIRED UK
