Here’s a different tack:
The slow creep of improvements by others.
Nah. There are a few brands which, for whatever reason, manage to persist with premium pricing even as competitors ‘catch up’ in the product offering. Coke and Pepsi come to mind (even tho as a duopoly it doesn’t exactly fit) with their lock on distribution, control of the supermarket shelves/vending machine trades, and yes, great quality. But there are probably 20 look-alikes with far better pricing (Sam’s Cola, etc.) which barely make a dent, and that’s been true for a century.
Frito-Lay is another which controls distribution and marketing and keeps 80-90% of the shelf space even though there are dozens of regional competitors with similar, sometimes superior quality. In manufactured products you could point to long standing luxury lines like Mercedes, Tiffany, Nike, Levis, Rolex, Armani, etc. as examples where “slow creep” hasn’t harmed the leader.
Apple’s advantage isn’t distribution, of course, it’s perceived quality and so long as they don’t screw that up they’ll be good for a long while.
One thing unmentioned so far that I think could derail them is regulation. There’s a lot of chatter about anti-trust these days, particularly with regard to tech, and especially about Facebook, Google, Apple, and Amazon. Some of it is likely justified: there is no reason Facebook should also own Instagram and What’s App, for instance, except to make it harder for advertisers to price shop on reach and delivery of audience. I find no reasons those businesses couldn’t be severed without harmful effects for either consumers or advertisers.
Google has a bunch of intertwined businesses, but certainly reaches the threshold of what has traditionally been considered a monopoly. How and which it could discard I haven’t thought much about but I suspect many of the complaints of smaller companies are valid (scraping Yelp reviews makes it unnecessary for people to visit Yelp, making it harder/impossible for Yelp to monetize eyeballs, for instance).
Amazon may or may not be guilty of some practices; certainly “Prime” gives them an advantage over other online sellers, whether that is legally indefensible I don’t know. And Apple has, by its own admission, engaged in anticompetitive behavior (the no-poaching deal with Google) and may have other issues (the non-negotiable skim from the App Store, perhaps).
It is hard to envision the separation of some/many of Apple’s various ecosystem components without harming the parent, but I can see Apple getting swept up in the zeal over Facebook and Google, even if it doesn’t belong there (I am not taking a side here). Just noting that regulation is a risk.
A note: being a monopoly is not per se a violation of antitrust. It is the abuse of the monopoly, unwitting or not, which gives rise to the introduction of legalities into the economic system.
Anyway, I would put “China” as the most likely, whether it’s invasion of Taiwan, some Apple VP calls Xi a tyrant, or some sort of tariff or other issue. But I would put “regulation” as the second most likely cause to impair Apple and bring it to a slow griding deceleration.
One hopes that neither of those comes true, of course.
