A few positive things to take away from Apple’s expected quarterly earnings report

Ignore the opening paragraph, which is a rant on “armchair CEOS” and “doom and gloom”, read the list itself. Some thoughtful points.

For me, this point stands out:

Installed base of active devices grew by more than 100 million units.

This demonstrates how Apple’s brand tends to keep users within the ecosystem, rather than losing more of them to competitors. Year over year growth for Apple’s services are largely dependent on increasing the overall active installed user base, so this bodes extremely well for Apple’s services sector going forward.

My 2 cents, perhaps uninformed, but it’s what I got:

The smartphone market is, like the PC market years before, growing saturated. The big win features for smartphones have arrived, new features are incremental, not revolutionary. Most people have what they need.

As has been pointed out by many biz bloggers, Apple is shifting their focus to Services. And this new business model grows relative to the installed base of active devices.

Short term, pricing issues and trade wars are bringing the pain. But as long as Apple continues to grow its installed base, I think they’ll turn this giant ship in that new business direction and the business model will find a new point of stability.