Apple Services is now a giant

<p><em>The one thing Apple is losing on is Apple Music. </em></p><p> Really? Apple Music launched in June/2015. <strong>So in 2 years</strong> they grown from <strong>0 to 27M paid subscribers </strong>and probably at least another 10-15 M free subscriptions. That growth has come at the expense of many of the lesser known streaming services, and probably some Spotify customers. </p><p><br></p><p><em>&nbsp;…but their foot print is shrinking in many ways.</em></p><p>Exactly how is their footprint shrinking? They have had quarter over quarter growth in Apple Music since it was launched. For their other business I suggest you take a look a the Q3/17 quarterly results announced yesterday. </p><p><br></p><p><br></p>

<p><em>Apple cannot maintain their own infra for these things, despite all that money. I find that kind of interesting.</em></p><p><br></p><p>You seem to be implying they don't have the capability to do so. Obviously they have the financial deep pockets (256B cash on hand) to do so. They have already shown they know how with large and growing centers in Nevada and North Carolina. Couple points to consider: it takes takes time to build new centers. They have announced new ones coming both in Europe and I believe the far east. Their centers are typically with zero carbon footprint so solar/wind infrastructure needs to also be build for support. Approvals for projects of their scale can take years. Secondly, Apple takes security and privacy very seriously and using third parties like Azure/AWS is the weakest link in the security chain. When they bring it all in-house they will have full control. I think over the next 2-3 years you will see it all moving in-house with the only downside being a loss of revenue to MS. Apple has to be writing a pretty substantial check every month for those Azure services. </p>