Samsung and Huawei both announced foldable smartphones last week and the tech word as been abuzz ever since. Beyond how these two early gen one offerings stack up against each other, one of the biggest topics since has been if or when Apple will enter the fray.
Apple held its public shareholder’s meeting at the Steve Jobs Theater Friday, giving major investors the opportunity to ask Tim Cook and the executive team some direct questions. While a resolution regarding the diversity of the board dominated the discussion and the headlines afterward, there were a few interesting notes regarding current and upcoming products and services that also came out of the event.
The tech press is going to spin-cycle this thing to death, but it doesn’t matter. All the hand-wringing over Apple getting left behind or their lack of innovation isn’t going to change the playbook that has made them one of the wealthiest companies in the world. They aren’t going to be coming out with a new foldable phone this year, no matter what anyone says. Next year? Maybe. You can probably put money on it by 2021.
If you are keeping up with the Apple news these days, then surely you’ve heard that services are the future growth area for the company. You’ve probably heard it everywhere and often, including right here. This is where the company projects to generate the additional revenue that the iPhone used to have covered before the smartphone market as a whole leveled off. Not even the mighty iPhone is immune to that, as we finally saw last quarter.
Photo Source: WCPO Cincinatti
The future of mobile payments is contactless and frictionless. There really isn’t any doubt about how things will play out at this point. It is slow in being realized here in the United States, but the end is inevitable. People are eventually going to use their smartphones for most purchases. The younger a person is, the more likely they will be to embrace using mobile payments now.
In case you aren’t aware, Marzipan is a program at Apple that is working to merge aspects of the iOS and macOS code bases over time, making life easier for developers. Bloomberg’s Mark Gurman first reported on this initiative in late 2017 and Apple unveiled the beginnings of the program at the 2018 edition of WWDC. Right now, Marzipan is still in its infancy and has only been used by Apple internally to port a few iOS apps over to macOS Mojave.
As we close in on Apple’s next event, there are tons of stories bouncing around about the company’s future growth being in services. Right now, everything is centered around their coming subscription services in video and news, but a smaller story from earlier this week points to another service that could dwarf all others. According to the Wall Street Journal, Apple and Goldman Sachs are getting ready to team up on a credit card.
Remember when Apple reshuffled some 200 employees that had been associated with Project Titan to other areas of the company back in January? Remember the chorus of “Project Titan is dead,” afterwards? If not, you can see Mashable getting their digs in here as a reminder. The fact is, this isn’t the first time that Apple has moved people away from Project Titan. I’m sure you could guess this, but the tech press got it wrong then, as well.
Yesterday, I posted about reports of an Apple event set for March 25th. It was already looking like a jam-packed show, with the iPad Mini, iPad, Air Power, the new AirPods and Apple’s new premium News service all supposedly on-tap. Today, Bloomberg shook things up, claiming that Apple’s new Video service will also be revealed on the 25th.
Yesterday, I posted on the latest iPad Mini rumors, saying that the more the reports pick up, the closer we are getting to an announcement event. Well today, BuzzFeed reported that Apple’s Spring Event will take place March 25th, which seems to line up with their dates for Spring events the last two years. This also syncs up with rumors that new hardware will be available on March 29th.
In one of the least surprising stories of the year, Reuters has reported that Apple is now working on developing its own 5G modems. Considering Apple’s ongoing and increasingly ugly legal showdowns with Qualcomm and their dramatic rise as a force in the world of chip design and optimization, this is an obvious and expected move.