Apple Has Inertia on Its Side

In the face of flagging iPhone sales, Apple unveiled a digital services plan last Monday — new TV programming, video games and news, as well as a credit card.

The announcement was heavy on big names. A cast of Hollywood stars announced the streaming service, its news offering included publishers like The New Yorker and The Wall Street Journal, and its credit card is backed by Goldman Sachs.

Beneath the gloss, questions lurked. There were no details about pricing of the TV service. It’s unclear how much content readers will have access to in the news service. The Journal is offering just a curated selection, for instance. And there were no details about credit limits or interest rates for the credit card.

Still, Apple has the inertia of its ecosystem to fall back on. It has more than 1.4 billion devices in use around the world, including more than 900 million iPhones. Users have bought 300 million in-app subscriptions to services belonging to Apple and third parties.

“If they are any indication of how Apple is leveraging their current iOS users, then they’ve been able to leverage them pretty well,” Annette Zimmermann of the research company Gartner said.

A Warning Sign for Tech

If a commodities slump indicates impending economic issues, tech may have a problem.

Samsung Electronics warned on Tuesday that its financial results for the first three months of this year would be disappointing. It pointed to its memory and display businesses, which account for 43 percent of its revenue.

Memory and displays appear in almost all electronic devices, but are sensitive to supply and demand — like a tech world equivalent of oil. There is currently excess inventory and weak demand for the components: See, for instance, a 7 percent decline in global smartphone shipments during the fourth quarter of 2018.