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Thursday, September 8, 2016

Apple Offers No Surprises

It gets harder and harder to keep a secret.  The more people that know it, the greater the chance it gets shared.  People love to gossip and it seems inside Apple, people love to share all the things that they are up to. So yesterday's announcement was news that had all been released in the rumor mill.  No surprises.

When Steve Jobs was alive, it seemed that Apple was able to surprise us with new technology, new products, and new features.  There was the "one more thing" that offered a big reveal.  But that has been missing since his death.  No surprises, no big reveal, no new product, no amazing new feature.  Apple continues to excel and consumers are buying.  They are a solid company with a huge user base buying cloud services and apps from the App Store.

And we learned that they have 17 million subscribers to the Apple Music streaming service.  Not a bad source of revenue each month.  With expectations that the service will grow, it is by itself a solid business.  Pandora and Spotify think so.  And that is just one small part of the Apple universe.

Still no surprises from the media conference.  No "one more thing" announcement.  Given how hard it is to keep a secret, it is hard to expect that Apple will ever surprise us.  Leaked pictures, insider scoop, will doom that possibility.  Without Jobs, one wonders if we will ever be surprised by Apple again.