What's Next for Apple
I have no inside information or insight, but historically Apple's product improvements have strongly broadcasted where they're going in the future. Here are six things I think are inevitable for Apple to do over the next decade, from most to least obvious: maps, iCloud, payments, TVs, search, and cars.
Context & Ripple Effects
This is the third installment of a recurring genre in the corpus: Fortune put Jobs on the record about Apple's next moves back in October 2005, BusinessWeek read Apple's chip sourcing for clues in January 2008, and now Mullenweg works the same vein from the outside in. Unlike the earlier pieces, he explicitly disclaims any inside information — all six calls (maps, iCloud, payments, TVs, search, cars) are unconfirmed predictions, ranked from most to least obvious based purely on how strongly he thinks past product improvements have broadcast Apple's direction.
What makes the piece worth tracking is its method rather than its sources: it treats Apple's shipping cadence as a legible roadmap, which turns every incremental release into evidence for a decade-scale thesis about where the company expands next.
First-order effects
- The ranking makes maps the headline call, putting location at the front of the queue of categories where observers expect Apple to replace licensed functionality with its own — the suppliers behind iOS mapping become the first to feel that expectation.
- iCloud appears on the list not as a finished product but as a foundation to be expanded, setting the expectation that Apple's sync-and-storage layer will keep absorbing more of the device lineup.
Second-order effects
- Payments and TVs sit mid-list, giving incumbents in those categories a public benchmark: any Apple hire, patent filing, or component order now gets re-read as confirmation or refutation of Mullenweg's thesis.
- Because search and cars are flagged as the least obvious calls, incumbents there face a slower-burn watch rather than immediate competitive pressure — but the list primes the market to interpret small Apple moves in those spaces as leading indicators.
Third-order effects
- If the 'products broadcast strategy' heuristic holds, Apple's roadmap becomes partially legible from shipping behavior alone, letting partners and competitors plan years ahead of formal announcements.
- Each cycle of these prediction pieces — 2005, 2008, 2011 — hardens Apple-watching into a standing forecasting discipline, raising the reputational cost of wrong decade-scale calls and pushing analysts toward structural arguments over scoop-based ones.
The trend: Apple analysis is consolidating into a recurring forecasting genre in which each product cycle is mined for the company's next decade of platform expansions.