There are the obvious things – continuing to roll out the iPhone 7 worldwide, a new MacBook at some point and apparently three new models of the iPad Pro early next year. They’ll be growing Apple Music to compete with Spotify. There’s also talk of a standalone Siri device, similar to the Amazon Echo, and CEO Tim Cook has talked about augmented reality being something he’s excited about.
Further into the future there’s the idea of an Apple Car, known as Project Titan. No one outside Apple is entirely sure but there has been talk that actually this would be less Apple actually manufacturing a car itself and more about software for future cars, which sounds very like something Apple already offers, CarPlay, the “iOS in the car”.
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More immediately, Apple’s going through a big shift, upping its emphasis on services as well as hardware, working on proactive technology that can predict what you want to do to make device functionality more seamless. Whereas Google has a sort of university mentality where its AI initiatives are research projects to show the power of data-mining, Apple is very focused on ensuring AI is consumer-facing, something that’s actually useful. A lot of other companies have fallen down by being in love with technology for the sake of technology but right from day one Apple was always about how these computers were going to improve your life; you weren’t just buying a music player, it was fundamentally shifting your universe.
In business terms, one of the focuses of Tim Cook’s tenure has been expanding into new markets; that will continue in China and now they’re making an enormous push into India. Finally, it’s worth remembering this is a company that has $200bn in the bank, which means it can buy pretty much any company out there. A few years ago they bought Beats and they’re constantly buying smaller companies but there’s nothing to say that in the next few years they won’t take over a Tesla or a Netflix or some other company that’s a big rival and which fits into their plans.