What could bring Apple down?

Trustbusters, platform shifts and geopolitics could all hurt the iPhone maker, which will report its latest quarterly earnings next week

- 

Tim Cook, boss of Apple, is having a rough start to 2024. In the past month his company has faced an unusual barrage of unpleasantness. A patent dispute forced it to remove features from two of its smartwatches. It found out that America’s Department of Justice (DoJ) would be suing it over antitrust transgressions. And it reported that it was losing market share in China, its second-biggest smartphone market. Adding insult to injury, a few Wall Street analysts said something unthinkable until recently—that Apple’s shares were overvalued. On January 11th Microsoft, a rival tech titan, duly dethroned the iPhone-maker, temporarily, as the world’s most valuable company.

The run of bad news may continue on February 1st, when Apple reports its latest quarterly earnings. Equity researchers estimate that its revenues barely grew in the last quarter of 2023, if at all. Then, on February 2nd, Apple will be tested once again. It will start shipping the Vision Pro, an augmented-reality (AR) headset that it has been working on—and talking up—for a few years. The high-end gadget, which will sell for $3,499, represents a big bet on a new technology “platform” that, Apple may be hoping, could one day replace the smartphone as the core of consumers’ digital experience—and the iPhone as the source of its maker’s riches. Early indications hint that Apple should worry about the device’s prospects. Netflix, Spotify and YouTube have announced that they will not make their popular streaming apps work on the headset. None said why. But it could be because they all compete with Apple’s own streaming services, and developing an AR app is likely to be costly.