Monday 3. June 2019 opened a new Apple World Wide Developers Conference

The whole introductory keynote can be found here:

These are my first takes and reflections after watching the keynote:

  • The Apple Watch with watchOS is getting continuously updated, increasingly independent on the app level from the iPhone and iOs. Soon you may be able to decide between buying and iPhone or an Apple Watch.
  • My hypothesis is that Apple prefers 80% of the smart watch market – where it meets weak competition- even if it has to sacrifice a substantial market share on iPhone in the long run – where the competition is increasingly strong and innovation is perceived as incremental. Remember, services and not hardware is the new holy word at Apple now.
  • The health apps of watchOS together with AI will make it easy for insurance companies to offer extra benefits for those that are open about their health data and suggest better lifestyle behaviors in order to offer even lower insurance fees for people that improve their lifestyle.
  • As a result, Apple may partner exclusively with an insurance company as it has done with Goldman Sachs bank on Apple Pay.
  • iOS is becoming very complex with many features that most users won’t touch.
  • iOS is including features that are commercialized as apps by other players and thus making them less valuable. The new version of Files includes sharing and thus competes with Dropbox. It also looks like iOs is including a feature in direct competition with WeTransfer and the likes, but it is still unclear to me. It may come anyway.
  • Apple Maps is getting better, and it may open the doors to virtual shopping, e-commerce and real paying – with Apple Pay and Apple Card- without leaving the Apple ecosystem.
  • The new Apple Photos displays an array of pictures and videos that resembles the ones from Instagram. Apple may eventually develop its own version of Instagram for Apple users. As Apple focuses more on services, it may launch some kind of social media too.

Latest posts:

  • The introduction of iPadOS, the new dedicated operating system for iPad with many useful capabilities for creation and productivity, and its link with MacOS, makes me think that Apple wants its customers to eventually transition from MacBook to iPad. The introduction of Catalyst, the new series of APIs that. make possible it possible for developers to transfer apps developed for iPad to Mac, makes me even more convinced of that.
  • The introduction of iMac Pro revealed a beast, making me even more convinced about the fact that Apple wants the MacBook to die in the long run for the benefit of the iPad, with Mac being the PC of choice for professionals.
  • Privacy is again being shown as a Unique Core Value Proposition vs. Google, facebook and others. You may now log in on third party apps by using “Sign in with Apple” vs. sign in with FB or Google. You may even log in with disguised email adresses created by Apple so that your real email address is not traceable. Everything is encrypted and Apple claims that they can’t read that information either.
  • Relying on the convenience of Apple privacy setups for privacy and log-in comes at a price: The user will be ever more dependent on staying within the walls of the Apple ecosystem.
  • Siri is revealing itself not as a stand alone assistant, but as a helping hand binding all apps in the Apple ecosystem of operating systems together. This is a very different path from the one taken by Google, where the assistant is embedded in exclusive apps as the core tool for execution, like Duplex.

In a nutshell:

The Apple strategy seems to be evolving towards privacy as Value Prop , including ever more apps as features in the Operative System in direct competition with equivalent services from other companies – so me of them listed-, migrating customers from iPhone and MacBook to Apple Watch and iPad and using Siri, AI and Apple Pay -soon Apple Insurance- to bind the whole ecosystem of Harware and Services together.

Interesting? Feel free to share!