Apple has made an announcement about a change to their Leadership that will be happening at the end of the year. Apple’s current Chief Financial Officer, Luca Maestri, will be stepping down as Chief Financial Officer effective January 1st, 2025. He will remain at the company but in a new role. This new role will be in charge of the Corporate Services teams, which includes information systems and technology, information security, and real estate and development. Maestri will still report to Apple CEO Tim Cook.
Apple's press release has this to say about Luca Maestri:
During his time as CFO, Maestri enabled essential investments and practiced robust financial discipline, which together helped the company more than double its revenue, with services revenue growing more than five times.
The press release by Apple provided a statement from Maestri about this change:
It is the greatest privilege of my professional life to serve the world’s most innovative and admired company, and to work side by side with a leader as inspirational as Tim Cook," said Maestri. "I’m looking forward to the next stage of my time at Apple…
Luca Maestri’s tenure as Apple’s Chief Financial Officer will be just over a decade. Luca Maestri became Apple’s Chief Financial Officer in September of 2014 when the previous Chief Financial Officer, Peter Oppenheimer retired.
Replacing Maestri is Apple’s current Vice President of Financial Planning and Analysis, Kevan Parekh. According to Apple’s press release announcing the transition:
Parekh has been at Apple for 11 years and currently leads Financial Planning and Analysis, G&A and Benefits Finance, Investor Relations, and Market Research. Prior to this role, Parekh led Worldwide Sales, Retail, and Marketing Finance. He began his tenure leading the financial support of Apple’s Product Marketing, Internet Sales and Services, and Engineering teams.
Today Apple sent out invitations to their September event entitled "It’s Glowtime". The "It’s Glowtime" event is scheduled for Monday, September 9th, 2024 at 10:00am Pacific Time.
Apple’s September event is typically where they announces new iPhones and it is expected that Apple will announce the iPhone 16 line at this event. Beyond this, Apple typically also uses this time to unveil a new Apple Watch, which is again, expected. It is also possible that Apple might announce some new products that work with the iPhone at this event.
Members of the press will be able to attend a screening at the Steve Jobs Theatre at Apple Park. For everyone else you can watch via the Apple TV app, or by going to the Apple Events page and watching it there.
Prior to the event I will have a post about what I suspect Apple might announce, so be on the look out for that.
It is well known that Apple has been trying to diversify their revenue. If you look back over the last 7 years, the percentage that Services made up of Apple's overall revenue has ranged from 9.15% in Q1 of 2017 to 28.23% in Q3 of 2024. At the same time, the percentage of revenue that was generated by the iPhone went from 69.40% in Q1 of 2017 to 45.81% in Q3 of 2024.
It should be noted that it has not been a steady decline, the revenue for each product category does differ each quarter. As an example, there are typically more sales in Q1 of a fiscal year, because this covers October through December, when iPhone sales are their highest.
In order to stave off any possible decline in iPhone sales, Apple has needed a means of increasing revenue. There are two ways of doing this, increase overall sales, and increasing the amount you get from each user. If you are just entering a market, the former may be possible, but in a situation where the market is matured, like the iPhone, you need to use the latter method. The way that they have been trying to do this is through subscriptions, and in particular services.
It should be mentioned that a bulk of Apple's yearly income comes from an agreement with Google, where Google pays Apple to be the default search engine on the iPhone. It is estimated that this agreement is valued up to $20 Billion per year, which is approximately 25% of all of Apple's services revenue.
The remaining 75% of Apple's services revenue comes from purchases, from the App Store, TV Shows, Movies, and Music. Much more of the services revenue comes from subscriptions like Apple Music Apple TV+, iCloud, Apple One, Apple Care+, and of course, app subscriptions and in-app purchases.
Within the last couple of months Apple has released a couple of new methods for expanding their services, web apps.
Recent Web apps
Apple has now released two brand new web apps in the last month, Maps in July and podcasts just this past Monday. The addition of these means that there are now four services that are available via the web. The other two items are Music and TV.
When Apple Music was announced in 2015, it was only available in iTunes and the Music app on iOS and macOS. It was not until June of 2019 when Apple Music was made available on the web. The rollout of Apple TV+ was slightly different. Apple TV+ was announced in March of 2019 and made available to the public in November of the same year. When Apple TV+ launched, it included a corresponding web version. This allowed users to watch Apple TV+ wherever they were, provided they had access a web browser. This also made it so the service could be made available to non-Apple device users, expanding the base for those who may want to watch Apple TV content.
I have been wondering why Apple is just now releasing web versions of Podcasts and Maps. These releases come many years after they these services have been available via an app. Ultimately, I think it is to help bolster their services revenue. Each of the services that are available on the web, excluding Maps, can generate income, specifically subscriptions. Some of the services will generate more revenue than others, but they all have a potential to create income.
I think that some groups within Apple have finally realized that only a certain percentage of Apple's existing customers who have purchased Apple hardware will subscribe. In order to help subscriptions they have turned to the "Sweet Solution", known as the web, can help generate revenue.
In case you are not aware, at Apple's World Wide Developer Conference in 2007 Apple provided a means of creating apps, and that "Sweet Solution" was to write web apps. Below is a video of that segment from WWDC 2007.
Having a web app can allow those who are not entirely ensconced in the Apple ecosystem to subscribe to Apple's services. As some have postulated, it could also be a way of easily enabling API endpoints for Apple's services for areas where Apple does not control the platform, possibly within cars, or any other internet connected device.
As an example, they could easily make apps that are effectively just wrappers for web pages. Taking this approach would absolutely minimize development costs. Furthermore, it could allow Apple to more easily create country-specific, or even area specific, app, and control it entirely on the server-side.
Lastly, it would also allow Apple to have feature parity for all platforms, because the web is available on a vast majority of new devices.
Closing Thoughts
Apple releasing web versions of their services makes complete sense from a financial standpoint. Being able to provide services to more users, particularly non-Apple users, only extends their possible revenue streams. Even if the services does not make direct revenue, in the case of Maps, it is still worthwhile to provide the service so others can use it, even if it's just within a web app.
With the recent release of both Maps and Podcasts, I would not be surprised to see additional services, like Weather, come to the web at some point in the not too distant future.
Earlier this week Apple made available the Apple Podcast service available via a web browser. You can access it by going to podcasts.apple.com. This will only work on a desktop. If you attempt to open the site on an iPhone or iPad, you will be prompted to open the Podcast app. Similarly, if you click on a link on macOS, the Podcasts app will open. However, you can type in the URL, or copy and paste it, and it should show.
Apple Podcasts on the web allows you to listen to any podcast within the Apple Podcasts directory. If you know the name of a podcast, you can search, but you can also browse a variety of categories like "New and Noteworthy", "Bingeworthy" ,"All-Time Favorites", "Daily News", "Comedy", "True Crime", and "Kids and Family", just to name a few.
Sometimes though, you want to see what’s popular, and this is where "Top Charts" can come in handy. Here you will see the Top Shows overall, "Top Episodes", "Top Subscribed", and "Top Subscriber Channels". You can also choose from any of the categories by click on the dropdown in the upper right corner.
What would be better is if you could easily listen to the podcasts you follow, and you can do this by signing on. Once you have signed in, you will see all of the podcasts you follow, just like on iOS, iPadOS, or macOS. At the same time your listen history and playback position will be saved.
While listening to a podcast, you can view episodes notes, see your queue, and adjust the volume, all while browsing the podcasts directory.
One limitation to the web version is that you cannot listen at faster than 1x speed, therefore if you are accustomed to listening at faster than 1x, you might be disappointed. Similarly, chapters are not supported with Apple Podcasts on the web.
This is a good addition for those users who may use an iPhone and a windows laptop, or just would like to be able to use a web version of podcasts.
Since 2012 I have been publishing a set of books each year for Apple's new operating systems. At first there were two separate books, one that focused on the iPhone and iPad, and another that focused on the Mac. Starting in 2021 this changed from two books, down to a single book that covers the new features for all of Apple's operating systems. I have written another book for this year and this year's book is macOS Sequoia, iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and watchOS 11 for Users.
Last year I made a slight change to the availability of the book, by making only one digital version available. This was from Apple. The same is true for this year as well. There is no digital right management (DRM) on the ePub from Apple, so you can use read the ePub on any compatible device. However, there is one other minor change to this year's book.
It is possible that you may not have noticed the subtle change in the title. The end now has the phrase "for Users". This is a switch from last year, where it was "for Users and Developers". This year's book does not have a developer section. There are a couple of reasons for this change. The first is because there has not been any feedback regarding the developr section. The second, and more important reason, is that developers typically do not use books to find example code. Instead they use sites like Apple's developer site, Stack Overflow, and Hacking with Swift in order to learn about the new features. So, this year there is no developer section.
Even without a developer section, there is still quite a bit of information within the book and here is the blurb describing the book.
Each year Apple releases new versions of its operating systems. This year’s releases of macOS Sequoia, iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and watchOS 11 are full of features including customization options, a new way to manage passwords, and some changes for messages.
On iOS 18 and iPadOS 18 there are new customization options for your Home Screens, including placing apps wherever you would like, a new dark mode for icons, and you even have the ability to tint all of your icons. Within Messages you can add some effects to your text, including adding bold, italics, underline, or strikethrough. But that is not all. You can also add motion effects that will give even more animation to your text. For those that communicate with those on another platform, RCS is now supported as well.
watchOS 11 adds some new features, like time and location-based widgets appearing on the Smart Stack. Along with this, there is now a Vitals app that you can use to get a quick glance at some overnight metrics like heart rate, blood oxygen, and sleep duration. Fitness is an import aspect of the Apple Watch, you can now pause your rings and maintain your streaks. This is a good addition for those times when life gets in the way and you want to keep your streaks going.
Apple has introduced their take on artificial intelligence and this can help you create your own emoji, rewrite text, and even generate images. For anything that needs to be sent to the cloud, it will go to Apple’s Private Cloud Compute platform.
These are just some of the topics covered in macOS Sequoia, iOS 18, iPadOS 18, and watchOS 11 for Users. There is bound to something for everyone, no matter what your level of expertise.
You can pre-order it from Apple. You can pre-order it today and it will be available when iOS 18 is released to the public. A paperback and hardcover version are forthcoming as well.
