Beyond the iPhone

When people think of Apple, they think of hardware first. The MacBook, the iPod and the iPhone in particular – those are the products that have made Apple what it is today: the most valuable company in the world.

Over the past few years however, another part of Apple’s business has quietly overtaken all but one of the above. Apple’s services segment accounted for $30 billion in revenue in Apple's fiscal 2017 (which ended September 30, 2017), making it the second largest contributor to overall sales behind the company’s cash cow, the iPhone, which accounted for 62 percent of total sales.

With Apple Music, Apple Pay, iTunes and the App Store as well as iCloud and Apple Care, Apple’s services business has become a beast of its own in recent years, nearly doubling from $16.1 billion in sales in 2013 to $30 billion last year. The company’s ambitions go much further than that though, as Apple executives have said they plan to hit a target of $50 billion in services revenue by 2021.