With so many rumors lately revealing the schedule for Apple’s iPhone releases in the coming years, it seems the company already knows its flagship product won’t last to see a 30th anniversary like the Mac. While we prepare for the upcoming iPhone 17 models and speculate about the iPhone Fold and iPhone 20, Apple already sees a world where the iPhone might lose its place as a central piece of our lives.
In a Google vs. DoJ antitrust case testimony, Apple’s services chief, Eddy Cue, said we might not need an iPhone 10 years from now. His exact words, according to a Bloomberg report, were: “You may not need an iPhone 10 years from now, as crazy as it sounds.” Apple’s top executive was talking about how AI will continue to evolve and play a crucial role in people’s routines.
Cue even teased that Apple plans to add AI search engines to Safari in a future update. However, his testimony is nothing new for Apple readers. After all, in a previous Bloomberg report, the publication already revealed that the company’s CEO, Tim Cook, doesn’t care about anything other than “lightweight spectacles that a customer could wear all day.”
As he anticipates the end of the iPhone, Cook focuses on a future where we’ll be using AR glasses. However, the best we can get now is the company’s heavy and expensive MR Apple Vision Pro gadget. Bloomberg says Cook has this “grand vision, which hasn’t changed in a decade.” With that in mind, the company knows that its iPhone revenue, which is currently 50% of its earnings every quarter, won’t last forever.
Of course, no company wants to kill a successful product. As current rumors suggest, OpenAI is developing a non-smartphone AI-companion gadget, which is being developed with Apple’s former design chief, Jony Ive. That said, the iPhone replacement might not come from Cupertino, but from somebody else in the Silicon Valley.
