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the ending, it's a long piece, ""Something Else
There are other possibilities. Lightshed’s Piecyk sees the potential for Apple to move its iPhone business to a subscription model, with a whole range of bundled services. Or maybe Apple can figure out a way to make a more substantial dent in the health and wellness market. Woodring thinks Apple could add enough features to the Watch—like noninvasive glucose monitoring—to make it a reimbursable medical device.
“They have to come up with a great new product, and it can’t be a $3,500 set of goggles,” says Walt Mossberg, the longtime Wall Street Journal tech columnist, who often spoke with Steve Jobs. He doesn’t think a car is the answer, either. “They have to think different,” Mossberg says. “That was the guiding principle in the second Jobs era.”
Mossberg thinks Apple could decide to take on Samsung Electronics in foldable phones, or create a version with a rollable screen. “Their heritage is that they’re a product company, not a services company.” And he says Apple might even be on the right track with a core element of the Vision Pro, mixing the real and virtual worlds. If the company can find a way to do that with a more appealing device, Mossberg says, “they just might have a world-beating product.”
Apple’s next great thing could even come out of left field and change everything, again, as the iPhone once did.
“You can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backward,” Jobs said in his 2005 Stanford University commencement speech. “So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something—your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down.”
For now, Apple investors are keeping that faith. But it has been a long time since Steve Jobs was creating the magic at Apple. At some point—and probably as soon as 2024—Wall Street will need to see results.
Write to Eric J. Savitz at eric.savitz@barrons.com""
