Losses & profits. Like every year since 2012, and despite the pandemic, Tim Cook was at the rendezvous of his fall presentation. But this time, the austere boss of Apple was speaking in front of empty chairs. Alone in his huge head office in the form of a walled city, Tuesday, September 15, in Cupertino (California), but followed on the Web by the crowd of aficionados, he took out of his wallet new connected watches, new iPads … but not phone. Fans will have to wait another month to discover the future iPhone compatible with 5G broadband networks.
But the important thing was elsewhere. In these fragile times of repeated confinements, the group has taken another step towards consolidating the Apple system. He presented three forms of subscription to his services. The first, at 14.95 euros (19.95 euros in family version), offers the use of Apple Music, Apple TV, Apple Arcade (video games) and iCloud data storage. In premium version, for 30 dollars, are added Apple News (300 magazines and newspapers) and Apple Fitness to follow gym classes. In other words, information and entertainment fully labeled Apple.
Analysts have been pushing the Apple firm for some time to offer such a bundled subscription, which has demonstrated its effectiveness at Amazon. The Prime service of the first American online merchant offers fast delivery, music, movies, promotions … The result, more than 150 million subscribers worldwide and a strong loyalty of buyers.
A client trapped in a web of services
After the era of free, of individual purchase, then of subscription, therefore comes that of the bundled offer intended to enclose the customer in an increasingly complete web of services. If this development has finally given an economic model for the distribution of content on the Internet, this poses a serious problem of competition, since it is set up by dominant platforms like Amazon or Apple, both producers of content and distributors of those of their partners.
The first to react to this situation was the Swedish Spotify, which brought the case to the European Commission. How do you prevent Google, Apple, Facebook and other Amazon (GAFA) from using the power of their platform to stifle all future competition and eat away more services every day? In a stimulating book released on August 26 (GAFA. Let’s take back the power!, Odile Jacob, 192 pages, 19.90 euros), economist Joëlle Toledano proposes, rather than dismantling these overpowering companies, to regulate them by the economic model, a real machine to marginalize competition. And subscription is now at the heart of this model.
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