Remember when you bought a big old hunk of hardware…and you owned it?
With cloud computing, significant portions of hardware were no longer owned by companies and people, but were instead provided as a service. And the companies moved from getting revenue from selling physical items to getting revenue from selling services.
From Apple Computer to Apple
Apple is one of those companies, as its formal name change from “Apple Computer” signifies.
Yet even as iTunes and “the” App Store become more prominent, Apple still made a mint out of selling new smartphone hardware to users as frequently as possible.
But Apple is making a change later in 2021, and Adrian Kingsley-Hughes noted the significance of that change.
The change?
So, it turns out that come the release of iOS 15 (and iPadOS 15) later this year, users will get a choice.
iPhone users can choose to hit the update button and go down the iOS 15 route, or play it safe and stick with iOS 14.
Why is Apple supporting older hardware?
So Apple is no longer encouraging users to dump their old phones to keep up with new operating systems like the forthcoming iOS 15?
There’s a reason.
By sticking with iOS 14, iPhone users will continue to get security updates, which keeps their devices safe, and Apple gets to keep those users in the ecosystem.
They can continue to buy content and apps and pay for services such as iCloud.
Although Kingsley-Hughes doesn’t explicitly say it, there is a real danger when you force users to abandon your current product and choose another. (Trust me; I know this can happen.)
In Apple’s case, the danger is that the users could instead adopt a SAMSUNG product.
And these days, that not only means that you lose the sale of the hardware, but you also lose the sale of the services.
It’s important for Apple to support old hardware and retain the service revenue, because not only is its services business growing, but services are more profitable than hardware.
In the fiscal year 2019, Apple’s services business posted gross margins of 63.7%, approaching double the 32.2% gross margin of the company’s product sector.
If current trends continue, Apple’s services (iCloud, Apple Music, AppleCare, Apple Card, Apple TV+, etc.) will continue to become relatively more important to the company.
The biometric identity industry is moving to a service model also
Incidentally, we’re seeing this in other industries, for example as the biometric identity industry also moves from an on-premise model to a software as a service (SaaS) model. One benefit of cloud-based hosting of biometric identity services is that both software and the underlying hardware can be easily upgraded without having to go to a site, deploying a brand new set of hardware, transferring the data from one set of hardware to the other, and hauling away the old hardware. Instead, all of those activities take place at Amazon, Microsoft, or other data centers with little or no on-premise fuss.
(And, as an added benefit, it’s easier for biometric vendors to keep their current customers because obsolescence becomes less of an issue.)
Is your biometric identity company ready to sell SaaS solutions?
But perhaps your company is just beginning to navigate from on-premise to SaaS. I’ve been through that myself, and can contract with you to provide advice and content. I can wear my biometric content marketing expert hat, or my biometric proposal writing expert hat as needed.
Obviously this involves more than just saying “we’re cloud-ready.” Customers don’t care if you’re cloud-ready. Customers only care about the benefits that being cloud-ready provides. And I can help communicate those benefits.
If I can help you communicate the benefits of a cloud-ready biometric identity system, contact me (email, phone message, online form, appointment for a content needs assessment, even snail mail).
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