Apple is quietly preparing for a future without the iPhone-or another big thing

Apple's services and ad push is a long-term hedge.

- DAN MOREN

Apple's at the top of the world-and from this standpoint, it's hard to see how the company could be anything other than the market leader and taste maker it's been in recent memories. I'm not about to suggest that its decline and fall are imminent, but those who (like me) remember the dark days of the 1990s know that success is never guaranteed.

In any case, it's unlikely that a company as massive and dominant as Apple would simply vanish into the ether-poof. But as the company's grown and matured, it's undeniable that its nature is changing.

Those changes aren't without precedent. Over the last several decades, there's been a pattern among dominant tech companies. Where once they might have ruled the world by producing the thing that everybody needed to have-whether it was a hardware product or a crucial piece of software-they seem to eventually evolve into a new form, one where they're focused less on delivering a key product and more on what service they provide.

TAKING CARE OF BUSINESS 

At the risk of dredging up ancient history, once upon a time the unquestionable leader in the computing market was IBM. That might be hard to imagine, given the company's current existence, but it employed an army of salespeople in suits and ties to sell the world's biggest companies on the idea of computers.

From its earliest days, Apple saw itself as the antithesis of IBM, not bound by tradition or the buttoned-down corporate ideology, but instead a collective of pirates and rebels, best summed up perhaps by the famous photo of co-founder Steve Jobs (fave.co/3DnAIKq) making a colorful gesture in front of one of the monolithic company's buildings.