Beyond the iPhone

Ahead of Apple’s special event planned for next Monday, the company unceremoniously announced updates to several major products by way of press releases this week. The iMac, iPad Air, iPad mini and AirPods were all treated to significant upgrades, but none of them seemed big enough to get stage time in Monday’s event, which will reportedly be all about services. Apple is rumored to unveil a video and a news subscription service on Monday, in a bid to further strengthen its thriving services business.

Apple’s services segment accounted for $37 billion in revenue in Apple's fiscal 2018 (which ended September 29, 2018), making it the second largest contributor to overall sales behind the company’s cash cow, the iPhone, which accounted for 63 percent of total sales.

With Apple Music, Apple Pay, iTunes and the App Store as well as iCloud and Apple Care, Apple’s services business has become a beast of its own in recent years, more than doubling from $16.1 billion in sales in 2013 to $37 billion in 2018. The company’s ambitions go much further than that though, as Apple executives have said they plan to hit a target of $50 billion in services revenue by 2021.