Does Apple have a "secret" strategy?
Maybe there's more to the Trust & Privacy thesis than meets the eye.
Go along with me for a few minutes. What I’m going to outline is a fantasy, which may be true or may not, but is so far purely based in my imagination. Let me know what you think when you get to the conclusion.
Apple increasingly is making my phone an intermediary to the rest of the world. The company is managing the annoying issues of daily life on my behalf: messaging, spam, credit cards, and customer service. It is adding more services and could cover more and more issues for its customers in the future. I’m going to hook all these services together into a grand fantasy
iMessage: iMessage is the service that comes with the Messages app from Apple. This is one of the first services Apple started providing that is synchronized across its devices and iCloud. Most people now know that the Blue bubble in Messages indicates a message from another Apple user; technically it is a message that is delivered over Apple’s proprietary messaging service, without ever hitting the SMS text service that is generic on all mobile phones. That was where Apple started, to design a more reliable messaging service for its own users. But someone decided to make iMessage messages blue and all others green. This turned into an amazing marketing message, completely apart from the technical issues; simply because a message is colored blue, you know you are texting with another Apple user (regardless of which Apple device they are using).
That simple feature turned iMessage into a club, an exclusive one, for Apple users. People whose text messages appear in green, the color implies, aren’t as good as “us Apple customers”. Apple introduced iMessage in 2012; it has taken them years to make it work truly properly (including getting the real-time sync to work properly on MacOS.
Most important, someone at Apple figured out that the basic idea, of synchronizing data across devices, can be applied to other tasks. And the company has been adding new services over time.
Wallet: The Wallet app was the next app to get introduced and then upgraded. Now, you can use your phone with any Apple Pay enabled terminal to charge your credit card or even as cash. But when you lose your plastic credit card, it still works in Apple Pay. I lost my Visa card earlier this year, so I started using my phone instead. I realized that I didn’t need my card, I’m lazy so I waited to get Chase to replace the card. By the time I went to New Zealand in February, I discovered that I never used my card since every seller has a terminal, even coffee shops and artists!
When I finally decided to replace my card, I discovered that I didn’t need to update my automatic payments. When you get the new card, the numbers get updated in the Wallet app; the card issuer notifies Apple, which connects the new the card to automatic payments. This is very convenient, but I also discovered that Apple Pay has a different number for its users than the credit card number. It associates its number with the credit card service, so that it can keep you connected to that service, even if the number changes. In other words, Apple stepped in between the card issuer and you.
Apple Pay now has 383M registered users worldwide, 56M in the U.S. Apple Pay was introduced in 2014, but I’d guess that I’m not unusual in just beginning to discover its advantages. Google Pay has about half the number of users, which is really interesting since the installed base of Android phones if three times that of iPhones. (I haven’t used an Android phone for a long time, so I don’t know how well integrated Google Pay is with Android. Google’s own Pixel only has 10M users worldwide.)
Hide My Email: I think “Hide My Email” is born out of the same desire Apple has to help its users deal with the outside world. In this case, it wants to help users tame spam (which is defined as unwanted commercial email). In this case, Apple hasn’t figured out how to be helpful. I personally hate Hide My Email, and haven’t figured out how to turn it off. In other words, once you choose Hide My Email, you are stuck with it. I’m sure I’m missing something (and feel free to tell me if you know how to turn it off!)
I think the problem is that Hide My Email conflicts with AutoFill, so you have to choose to control spam and give up AutoFill. Apple oftten gets new features slightly wrong and then takes years to hear from its users and fix the problem. I suspect this is true in this case; just search for “turn off hide my email” to see how users feel about it.
Apple Business Chat: You can only get this on the Messages app for Mac & IOS from companies that have signed up for it. I use it with Apple to chat with Apple’s own customer service reps. It’s by far the most convenient chat service (pre-GPT). If any other company uses it like Apple does, I’d love to see United Airlines, Marriott, and Hertz to help with real-time issues while I’m traveling. The last time I used it with Apple, I started the chat in an airport and concluded with the CSR scheduling an appt for me at the Genius Bar at an Apple store near my destination.
None of the companies I mentioned are listed as using Business Chat. I’m sure they are making a rationale decision not to adopt customer feature that only works for Apple customers. Personally, I don’t care about non-Apple customers, which is Apple’s problem.
Apple Cellular?: When I got my iPhone 14 Pro Max last fall, I discovered that I could have two different carriers and phone numbers in one phone, which is referred to as “dual e-sims”. The e-sim part refers to having the cellular service available in digital form, with no little SIM card. (SIM stands for Subscriber Identity Module, sort of like a credit card number for your cellular service.) It’s the way your cellular service identifies your phone number and connects your usage to the bill you get.
I now have a Verizon number and an AT&T number on one phone. I still have my Verizon phone number in the (415) area code, which I’ve had for so long I don’t remember when I got it. But now I have an AT&T number in the (505) area code, where I live now, on the same phone. For someone who started with dial phones growing up and then started using mobile phones before the iPhone, this is hard to understand: How the heck did they get two phones in one device?!
Dual e-sims is clearly an idea that hasn't been baked (or even put in the oven). As far as Apple has gone so far is to offer an option called “Allow Cellular Data Switching”; in theory, this allows the phone to use the best cellular signal for data access. But it doesn’t actually work, probably because it is really difficult to change data access in real time without interrupting whatever data stream you’re using. For instance, on the route from my house to town, Verizon doesn’t work for about two miles. AT&T sort of works, but I still lose access to data even though I have data switching turned on. If data switching worked, my phone would be able to keep data access all the way into town.
But Apple only introduced dual e-sims with the iPhone 14 last fall; give them some time, and I think they will figure out how to turn cellular service into something like iMessage. The company would probably have to create its own proprietary cellular service, which would only use the existing carriers as backup just like it did with iMessage. It will be interesting to see if the iPhone 15 or 16 introduces a major change to Cellular Data Switching or even a new service, perhaps called iCellular?
What’s more fun is to speculate where Apple could go with this: If it can disrupt SMS, credit cards, spammers, and even cellular carriers, where else could it go? The critical technology is actually real-time data synchronization, since Apple needs to assure its users that the data is always the same on all devices it sells, whether it’s a computer, a phone, a watch, or a streaming video device (not to mention a headset like Vision Pro).
Have you used Apple TV? We get all our streaming services through Apple TV, including Amazon Prime Video, Netflix, Max, Disney, Hulu, Paramount+, and others. When you use search on Apple TV, the results often point to Apple TV+ results first (Apple TV+ is the app that receives streaming service Apple TV and other devices), even if you can get what you want on another service for free. This isn’t very useful, but Apple will eventually figure out that it is better if they help customers get whatever they want.
At the beginning of this letter, I asked you to go along with me for a minute. I asked because the real point here is that you have to trust Apple to let it step in for you in so many aspects of daily life. What has Apple been focused on so publicly for so many years: trust & privacy. That’s not a secret! Tim Cook and his team emphasize how much they value the Apple customers’ privacy at every turn. That’s a big ask, when you see how far Apple wants to go in their road map. They have introduced Vision Pro as a productivity and streaming device. But they also pitch CarPlay as a way deal with data in your car and have been rumored for years, off and on, to be developing their own Apple Car.
If my little fantasy is true, it demonstrates an amazingly broad vision. Real-time data synchronization combined with broadband wireless networks, possibly including one from Apple itself (perhaps powered by satellite networks?), mean that all of the technology exists to fulfill my fantasy. It certainly has the cash and resources available to do whatever it chooses: $55B in cash, quarterly revenue of $94B, $24B of quarterly net profit and a market capitalization of $3T. Just how smart and aggressive is Tim Cook? Is it his fantasy too?
When I wrote this, I didn’t realize that several companies, now including Starlink, that are thinking about how to provide cellular services using satellite networks. That could, eventually include both Apple and Amazon. https://www.pcmag.com/news/spacex-debuts-new-website-for-cellular-starlink-service
excellent perspective—agree with all your points. In my case, my iphone is also a significant part of my Tesla experience, it is my virtual health and fitness coach, and it communicates the status of my mother’s well-being. It’s as close to a benevolent god as I’m likely to get.