Wow, Apple's services business (consumer focused) is $10 billion a quarter now.

To put that in perspective, Amazon's entire AWS cloud business, which is enterprise focused, is at around $7 billion a quarter.

Not to mention Apple has a much higher Operating Margin than AWS. And yet people are still not happy with it.

But what about Amazon's entire services business?

I have bought myself and many in my family Apple Watches - a fantastic product IMO.

As voice dictation gets better, answering email and messages on the watch lets me often just leave my phone at home.

I can imagine a future when many people only have a watch as their personal device but use other larger devices that are shared, instantly personalized by a watch.

In the Apple world, everyone owns their own devices. No sharing.

I'm still annoyed that a device like iPad doesn't support multiple user profiles, logons, etc. Yes, it does support this in a limited way for the education market, but that's not generally usable for others, and it relies a lot on iCloud to refresh one's own data instead of storing/caching as much as possible locally (I'm writing this based on what I remember when Apple introduced this feature a couple of years ago).

But if everything is powered by your watch, then all the external "devices" become essentially dumb monitors. If you could walk up to a monitor and your watch automatically paired with it through Bluetooth and all your stuff popped up ready to be browsed in full HD, desktop sized, wouldn't that be awesome? Of course the watch internals need to be capable of driving full-screen HD, but we're not too far from that.

My watch is more powerful than my smartphone was a few years ago. But my phone is also now more powerful than my desktop was just a few years ago. And my current desktop is just ridiculous.

Of course, my watch is good for mostly telling the time. My phone is good for browsing the web and playing games. And my desktop is good for software development.

I can't help but have the feeling that this was already being said when the iPhone went out and for several years. Yet today, iPhone and iPad are personal devices that is not really shared between users (still no multi user iPad for example). There were some initiatives by Microsoft trying to recreate a desktop experience by plugging your phone to a display and keyboard/mouse but it never really took off.

So IMHO, I don't think this is the future Apple wants to embrace yet even though it appears to be the next logical step in computing for a lot of us.

Edit : fixing typos

What about Mac, which supports multiple accounts probably better than Windows ever did (due to Unix underpinnings)?

Windows NT has been multi-user from the start. In fact, due to microsoft's heavy business focus, it's arguable that it even has better multiple account support (a concept separate from multiuser)

Both Mac OS X and Windows NT have pretty weak security protecting local users against each other.

Privilege escalation attacks that require access to the console are usually discounted as unlikely.

This is an unsubstantiated claim.

Certainly, there have been a fair amount, but not for lack of effort on the OS developers' parts.

It can always be better, and cutting edge, modern OS designs are superior, but it's not like the foundations of NT/Darwin are completely rotten.

Um, what?

Lolz, no it doesn't. The securetoken stuff means that directory service stuff is broken without doing stuff like storing plaintext passwords on the device. Windows has had much better multi user support for years.

Apple seems to fundamentally believe that Macs are single user systems, and it's shown in their past few major releases.

That is annoying. I really believe in a future tech world where you just use whatever device is near you (wall screen, screen on a table in a restaurant, devices in friends' and family's homes, etc. It gets old carrying around devices and chargers.

Maybe Apple won't be the vendor for this.

Every family I know has a "family iPad".

"I can imagine a future when many people only have a watch as their personal device but use other larger devices that are shared, instantly personalized by a watch."

This is a good idea succinctly put. Thank you. The building blocks are already there (e.g. Apple watch based unlocking for the Mac), and can be extended to spaces like the automobile (CarPlay, extending your definition of a "device" to cars).

Is there an open-standard way for an Apple Watch to unlock a Linux workstation or IoT device?

It's a generally bad idea (due to auth options for the watch itself). However it's a great 2nd factor.

As far as I know, there are no open APIs from Apple that’ll help. However, I think it might be possible to use Bluetooth Low Energy (BLE) ranging as a proxy for distance. Whether the Watch acts as a BLE beacon or the linux laptop or IoT does the same (or vice-versa) is something to tinker with.

> leave my phone at home.

Why is this important to you? Aside from going for a run I can't think of any situation where it bothers me to take my phone with.

Not OP, but I dislike having things in my pockets so much I keep my wallet and keys in my desk at work. Not having to carry anything around would be really nice.

Luckily Apple makes products for both use cases.

I personally would like to have left temptation to spend time browsing the news, reddit, or other social media. If I could replace my iPhone with an Apple Watch, that'd be great (at least for me)

I use the time I'm out alone to listen to audio books or music instead. If I'm with someone I'm present. It's a conscious effort and if you ask my wife she will tell you I've gotten better at it over the years. Overall I find it's a worthwhile investment. As with all my vices I have found that moderation makes them far more rewarding.

I listen to audio books and pod casts using my Apple Watch and Airpods - I am happy to report that this works great.

Consider using ScreenTime to block the most trafficked sites.

I hate carrying things in my pocket. I hate the distraction. I hate the lifestyle.

>I hate carrying things in my pocket.

Fair enough.

>I hate the distraction. I hate the lifestyle.

How does the watch change either of these? My phone is always on mute and I practice a pull behaviour pattern with it (I choose when to look, answer texts, calls etc) rather than a push (distracting) pattern.

You have greater self discipline than i!

With the watch, It is comfortable to check a notification and quickly respond to it but not much else.

Not self discipline. I just turned off all notifications apart from whatsapp. Notifications are a terrible dark pattern in most apps.

Not just screens, but augmented reality goggles. Coupled with AirPods, you are set for a completely new type of experience.

i don't think there's much mystery here. apple's strategy has been pretty consistent with their apparent mission--ubiquitous computing for regular (but not poor) folks--for years now, since the success of ipod revealed itself as a foothold for apple to launch the iphone and set it on this path.

the iphone is a huge stepping stone to that future, and it will still be relevant for a while (if no longer novel and sexy). carplay, home, airpods, watch, even icloud--all that stuff now wraps around the iphone to create pieces of a future personal computing cocoon. over time, the integrations between them will be more and more seamless until the iphone disappears, absorbed into those other devices.

apple's current services growth is part of this strategy, not the strategy itself. it has to build out that part of the business (particularly video content/entertainment) to set itself up to be competitive in that future market that the other faang companies are also vying for.

(as an aside, the movie her seems to be a neat extrapolation of apple into the future, minus the clunky ending)

They desperately need to port messages/facetime to windows and android. They could very easily charge a flat yearly fee with the promise of secure messaging. They're going to miss the boat just like blackberry before them if they don't move sooner rather than later.

EVENTUALLY Google will stop dropping the ball, and then it will be too late.

At this point Android is such a privacy hell hole that creating a secure messaging app will be doomed to fail. It matter little if the app and its protocols are secure if the device is rooted or otherwise exploited and typed conversations can be siphoned which would expose both the sender and the receiver. The receiver might be an iOS device, causing the communication security/privacy integrity of an iOS user to be at the mercy of any Android device.

iOS messaging apps need an option to warn the sender (or block delivery) when the receiver has non-iOS devices, e.g. in a specific group context with sensitive data.

This would have to be the case. You can't trust an Android device to not have anything between the keyboard app and the messaging app.

how is that different than exploiting security flaws in iOS ?

There is a difference between a security flaw and insecure by design as with Android. One simple example is how third party keyboards work on both platforms. First the user has to install the keyboard, then explicitly go to settings to use it and even then it doesn’t have network access by default. The user has to go back into settings to give it network access and iOS gives you a big scary warning.

Even then, iOS will switch back to the standard keyboard when you type into a password field.

You could just as easily argue that iOS is by nature insecure since absolutely exterior audits are impossible.

It isn’t “impossible.” People have been analyzing assembly language programs and hacking them since the dawn of personal computers. How do you think Google has been able to find exploits in iOS? I have no idea why people think that assembly language is the language of wizards.

Between the binary blob drivers that the OEMs don’t even have access to and Google Play Services, Android is equally hard to audit.

false equivalence

What makes you think that Google is the big competitor to Messages in the US, rather than FB Messenger? I know more (non-tech audience) people who use FB Messenger than any of the google products. Does Google default to Hangouts messages when using an android phone, if the recipient also has an Android (vs. straight MMS)?

Personally, I use Apple's Messages, but that's because it's installed by default and integrated with SMS. It's basically just enhanced MMS, so a really really easy transition.

> Does Google default to Hangouts messages when using an android phone, if the recipient also has an Android (vs. straight MMS)?

No. Google does not integrate their messaging solution with SMS. The real reason behind that is that Google doesn't want to piss off the carriers who still see messaging (iMessage excluded) as a source of revenue.

This is the reasoning for RCS, unfortunately. They could have implemented it everywhere a long time ago but wait for carrier support

Interesting. What is it about Google's position that makes them not want to piss off the carriers? Apple seems to take consumer friendly, anti-carrier positions -- no-lock SIM, iMessages the default.

What do you think makes Google different? Is it because they partner more closely on handsets?

In which countries is messaging still a revenue source? In the UK you usually get unlimited SMS mesages on even the cheapest plans... (and everyone is using whatsapp or facebook messenger anyway, which is probably why)

You realize hangouts supported SMS previously and they removed the functionality to try to get people to use Allo, right?

...and Allo is gone to make room for the carrier implemented RCS.

Agreed, in Australia facebook prety much has a 95% monopoly on messaging, with iMessage a distant second. I haven't even heard of anyone using a Google product for messaging, just a few isolated instances of someone using Viber or Whatsapp (but nothing like how popular it is in Europe).

The primary advantage Facebook has, I believe, other than that everyone is already using it, is that you can find someone on it later without having to ask them for contact details.

Nobody would pay for a messaging service. Even if you would, it wouldn't matter, your non-tech-industry friends wouldn't.

For a different data point from an Australian resident—most people I know use iMessage or Whatsapp. Few people seem to use Facebook Messenger, the only person I know who uses it does so to communicate with one other person.

Interestingly, I don't know a single person who uses FB Messenger. Plenty who use FB, just not messenger. It's SMS, iMessage or WhatsApp.

Apple has and advantage in that you cannot set default messaging app on iOS. For me at least, that is the only thing that keeps me on Messages/Maps/Mail.

I want my Mac's Time Machine to use my iCloud storage. Then I'll be fully migrated to the Apple ecosystem. What Scott Galloway calls a "monogamist relationship".

I also want to send iCal invites via Message.

PS- Oops. I forgot about my personal email. I'm still using gmail for my throwaway and official email addresses (eg specialist@specialist.com). Ya, I'll want to migrate that to Apple too, some day.

I think my MBP is pretty awesome and I love the Touch Bar.

I've heard people saying that they hate it, that they don't mind, or that the find it somewhat interesting. Never heard anyone say that love it. Can you give more details?

I love the touchbar as well, because it allows me to easily change volume (swiping a bar rather than tapping the same button) etc.

However, the ESC key is also on the touchbar, which makes using vim pretty annoying.

I haven’t heard anyone say that before either. As many others I know, I don’t mind it. But I have made it more useful using this neat utility called Energy Bar - https://github.com/billziss-gh/EnergyBar

I mostly use the function keys in RStudio for R programming and for everything else I use Energy Bar for quick app launches and volume controls.

My favorite thing about the touchbar is that I can easily use all the function key functionality without having to memorize what they do for every application. A lot of applications have programmed really useful integrations into the touchbar, and this is getting better over time. It replaces a lot of my track pad usage, and generally makes interacting with my computer faster. Touchid is also nice, but I think apple should consider putting faceid on the mbp.