Cue says iphone could vanish in 10 years; apple marketing chief fires back
Eddy Cue, the man who has brokered every major Apple deal since the Clinton era, told a federal courtroom last week that the iPhone—source of more than half the company’s $385 billion revenue—might not matter by 2035. Two days later Greg Joswiak, the public face of the brand, swore the opposite: the iPhone will still exist in 2075. The trial was supposed to be about Google search defaults; instead it became a rare public fracture inside the world’s most valuable company.
Cue’s testimony lands like a grenade
On the stand in Washington, Cue tried to downplay Apple’s grip on mobile. His talking point: Technology moves on. “Maybe in ten years you won’t need an iPhone,” he said, citing AI as the next platform shift. The line was meant to blunt Justice Department claims that Apple locks users into a closed ecosystem. It did the opposite. Investors heard an admission that the cash cow has an expiration date, and the stock slipped 1.8 % before lunch.
Inside One Apple Park the quote ricocheted through Slack channels. Cue isn’t a random VP; he owns the App Store, Apple Music, and the $20 billion annual payment from Google that keeps Safari’s search bar glowing. If he sees a post-iPhone horizon, the business model trembles.
Joswiak grabs the mic
Enter Joswiak, stage left. In a Wired interview timed to the company’s 50th birthday, he called the iPhone “fundamental to everything we’re doing.” No ambiguity, no hedge. The subtext: Cue speaks for deals, I speak for the brand. Apple watchers noted the unusual public correction. When the two most powerful voices after Tim Cook contradict each other, the signal isn’t strategic nuance—it’s panic over narrative control.
The split mirrors a deeper dilemma. Apple’s silicon team is already baking AI cores into every A-series chip, yet the company still needs a glass rectangle to house them. Services revenue—now a record $23.9 billion per quarter—requires a device to bill from. Sever that link and the ecosystem unravels.
The numbers say don’t bury the iphone yet
Last quarter Apple sold 46.9 million iPhones, enough to buy Disney outright with the profit alone. The installed base just crossed 2.2 billion active devices, a moat any competitor would kill for. Meanwhile, generative AI startups are burning cash trying to invent screen-free interfaces that people will actually pay for. None have cracked the replacement riddle.
So why did Cue float the idea? Because antitrust judges love the word monopoly, and predicting your own obsolescence is a classic legal deflection. It’s the same trick Microsoft used in the ’90s when it claimed the browser could one day displace Windows. The gambit worked then; the market decides now.
Apple’s next decade will be defined by whichever vision wins inside its fortress walls. Cue bets on disruption eating the hardware. Joswiak bets on Apple swallowing the disruption whole. The rest of us just keep tapping glass, funding both futures one monthly subscription at a time.