I'm the last guy to write apple off. I think they've evolved an environment that allows them to be surprisingly agile for such a large organization. But I think for the next little while at least, the money in tech will be recurrents.

Remember back when a stolen copy of Creative Suite was pretty much de rigeur? And it went along with your stolen copy of Office? Both of those are now on a recurrent monthly charge, and the people who used to steal them hand over fist are now paying a monthly rate. When freakin' Avid decides that recurrent is the way to structure you know there's gold in them thar hills.

And Apple has nothing that interests people on a monthly basis. I got out of the iPhone ecosystem 'cuz I couldn't stomach a thousand dollar phone. My wife is still rockin' a 5S and will be until it won't power up any longer. The article talks about "gotchaware" basically, where Apple needs to figure out new ways to trick people into upgrading into later and later versions of iOS, not because there are compelling reasons but because otherwise Apple can't sell phones.

And with Google, Yahoo and Amazon all sucking your photos up to the cloud for free, you don't need a 128GB iPhone anymore. Are people really going to pay for whatever they're calling Beats? When Google Music is free? Not to mention Spotify, Last.fm and all the rest?

My phone shoots 4k video at 60 frames/second. It's got an HD display. It's got 64GB of storage. And it cost me $350. People are paying for Apple's margins but I mean, I've got a half-dozen Apple computers in this house and I had my last straw. How long can Apple keep banking on the App gravy train?