Monday afternoon I watched the Apple event at my desk with a cold Stumptown next to the trackpad, waiting for the part where they hold up a thing. Two hours later Oprah had spoken, Steven Spielberg had spoken, Jennifer Aniston had walked out with the cast of a show nobody could watch yet, and nobody had held up a thing. A television subscription. A magazine bundle. A game bundle. A credit card. Then the lights came up.
I have watched a lot of these keynotes. The shape is always the same: a product on a rotating pedestal, a machined aluminum close-up, an aspirational number about the camera. That shape was gone.
What replaced it was four monthly bills.
When a company spends two hours describing what it will charge you every month for, it is not defending a hardware business, it is auditioning for a different one in public.
Repositioning does not happen in a press release. It happens in what you are willing to put on a stage, because the stage is the most expensive real estate a brand owns and nothing gets on it by accident. Apple gave that real estate to Oprah, to a card with no number printed on it, to a games catalog. The iPhone got mentioned the way a landlord gets mentioned.
We have seen this move before, and it is worth naming the pattern honestly. Netflix spent years telling people it was a DVD company that also streamed, until the day it stopped saying that. Adobe walked its customers off boxed software and onto a monthly charge and took years of loud complaints to do it. Microsoft moved the story from Windows to the cloud, and the stock story moved with it. In every case the repositioning was legible on stage before it was legible on the balance sheet.
Here is the part that gets lost. Repositioning is not a message change, it is a promise change, and promises have costs. If Apple is a services company, then a bad month of Apple News+ is now a bad month of Apple. The hardware promise was easy to keep because you only had to keep it once, at purchase. A subscription promise has to be kept in March, and again in April, and again the month after that.
Repositioning does not happen in a press release. It happens in what you are willing to put on a stage, because the stage is the most expensive real estate a brand owns and nothing gets on it by accident.
So the question I would ask in the room is not whether the services will be good. It is whether the company is prepared to be judged monthly by people who have spent twenty years judging it every three years.
Truffles walked across the keyboard during the Oprah segment and paused the stream. Honestly, fair.