# Apple Will Never Ship Another iPhone, and It Has Never Made More Money: Reading Apple: The First 50 Years

> A friend asked me whether Apple is still worth holding now that it has stopped surprising anyone. After reading David Pogue's fifty-year history of the company, I think that is the wrong question. The book records the market sentencing Apple to death four times, and today's Apple earns its money not from new products but from tolls. Every headwind hits the toll booth. Educational reading notes and reflections, not investment advice.

Published: 2026-09-09
Locale: en
Tags: book notes, Apple, business model, buybacks, antitrust, education

TL;DR: David Pogue spends six hundred pages on Apple's first fifty years and reaches his own verdict: without Jobs, Apple will not produce another iPhone-class product. Yet profits are at a record. The difference is that Apple stopped selling things and started collecting tolls: 75 percent margins on services, twenty billion dollars a year from Google, 0.15 percent on every Apple Pay transaction. What to watch is not the next product but who is coming for the toll booth. One thing the book never mentions, I filled in myself: 644 billion dollars of buybacks in eleven years, 92 percent of net income.


![Fauvist oil painting cover: a huge city gate serving as a toll booth fills the frame, a line of tiny figures queues to pay beneath it, a single bitten fruit sits on top of the gate tower, flat pure colors, burning orange against cobalt blue](/covers/apple-first-50-years-toll-booth.png)

> *When a thing reaches its limit, it changes; having changed, it goes through; going through, it endures.*<br/>
> —— *Book of Changes*, Great Commentary II (pre-Qin era); translation mine

## The question I brought to the book

Last month a friend asked me: Apple hasn't shipped anything surprising in years, it's behind on AI, is it still worth holding?

I didn't answer, because I had been asking myself the same thing. Then David Pogue's history of Apple's first fifty years came out. By the end of it I thought the question was pointed in the wrong direction.

A word on the book first. Pogue has written about Apple his whole career: thirteen years as a Macworld columnist, thirteen more as the New York Times tech columnist, then as a correspondent for CBS Sunday Morning, where he has won seven Emmys. *Apple: The First 50 Years* was published by Simon & Schuster on March 10, 2026. It runs 608 pages with 360 photographs, draws on 150 interviews, and goes from the 1976 garage to the company's fiftieth birthday in 2026.

I read the English edition ([books.com.tw](https://www.books.com.tw/products/F01b443582)). A Traditional Chinese translation from Commonwealth Publishing appeared on March 31 ([books.com.tw](https://www.books.com.tw/products/0011046566)). Quotations below are my own renderings.

## The author answers first

In chapter 49 Pogue asks my friend's question almost word for word: can Apple keep up that pattern without Jobs? His answer: "We now know the answer: No. Apple's post-Jobs hardware introductions haven't approached either the rate or the societal impact of the i-Products in those 12 years."

A man who has covered Apple for more than thirty years writes that sentence inside the company's semi-official fiftieth anniversary biography. From that page on, the book becomes useful to an investor.

Because the same book records Apple's profits at an all-time high. Revenue above 400 billion dollars a year, market value past four trillion. No next iPhone, and more money than in the years that had one. If both things are true at once, then what makes the money has changed.

## The market has sentenced Apple to death four times

The book tracks the stock price in detail across fifty years. I copied out the worst drops.

Late 1983, the personal computer market collapsed, fourth-quarter profit fell 80 percent, and the stock went from 63 dollars to 23. In 1996 the company lost 740 million dollars in a single quarter, was burning 50 million a month, and was less than six months from bankruptcy; the introduction puts it more harshly, "less than six weeks from bankruptcy, its executives desperately tried to sell Apple, offering this once-revered brand at flea market prices." In the 2000 dot-com bust, the stock fell from 53 to 14 in three months. In 2025, a tariff threat erased 773 billion dollars of market value in one day.

![Four downward bars of different depths hanging from one top line, for the 1983, 1996, 2000 and 2025 crashes, 1996 the deepest, with an upward arrow at the bottom of each](/figures/apple-four-death-sentences-en.svg)

What saved the company each time was never the thing the market was staring at. In 1977 it was a spreadsheet someone else wrote, VisiCalc; Jobs said it himself: "If VisiCalc had been written for some other computer, you'd be interviewing somebody else right now." Part of the rescue money in 1996 came from a three-million-dollar stake in ARM bought in 1990, worth 800 million six years later. In 1997 it was Microsoft buying 150 million dollars of non-voting stock, and the shares jumped 33 percent in a day.

What I took from this section: the market's death sentences have a poor hit rate, because the market can only see the product currently on sale.

## What Apple earns now is a toll

Chapter 43, on the services business, has the numbers that stopped me.

Services carry a profit margin as high as 75 percent; Pogue's explanation is that there are "no raw materials to buy, nothing to manufacture, nothing to ship. It's just software." Services bring in over 100 billion dollars a year, second only to the iPhone division, growing 12 percent annually. As a standalone company, services would rank fortieth in the Fortune 500, ahead of Target, Johnson & Johnson, and Disney.

Where the rent comes from is in the book too. Google pays Apple roughly 20 billion dollars a year to stay the default search engine in Safari. App Store commissions run about 27 billion a year. Apple Pay handles six trillion dollars of transactions a year and takes 0.15 percent of each; by 2022 three quarters of iPhone users had turned it on.

![Two horizontal bars of different lengths for App Store and Google annual rent, below them a very long grey bar for six trillion dollars of flow covered by only a thin blue line for the 0.15 percent cut](/figures/apple-three-toll-lanes-en.svg)

These revenues share one property: they arrive whether or not anyone buys a new phone. The book notes that the upgrade cycle has stretched from two years to four and that iPhone revenue is slipping. But as long as the old phone is still in someone's pocket, searches still pass through Safari and payments still pass through Apple Pay.

![Top row has one hardware revenue bar in year one and dashed empty slots for the next three years; bottom row has an equal rent bar in all four years](/figures/apple-sell-once-collect-four-years-en.svg)

Apple has gone from a company that sells hardware to a toll booth. The hardware is the gate; the money is collected behind it. The most candid line in the book comes in the final chapter: "Google sells more phones, Apple makes more money."

## Every headwind hits the toll booth

Once you see that, the headwinds in chapter 48 all look alike.

The U.S. Department of Justice and sixteen states sued Apple for antitrust violations over green bubbles, third-party watches, and NFC chip restrictions, all locks on the gate. The EU's Digital Markets Act forces Apple to allow sideloading and third-party payments, which goes after the 27 billion in App Store commissions. The Epic case forced Apple to let apps link to outside payment pages, and Spotify and Kindle no longer pay Apple's cut. The 20 billion dollars from Google is under review in an antitrust court.

Not one of these headwinds says "Apple can't build a good phone." Every one says "Apple can't charge like this anymore."

![Four headwind arrows pull from the left toward the lower right and land on three toll gates of different widths, two of them landing on the widest App Store gate](/figures/apple-headwinds-hit-the-toll-booth-en.svg)

So my friend's question should become: who can take a piece of this toll booth's rent, and how much? That is far more concrete than "is there a next iPhone," and it produces new data every quarter: court schedules, EU rulings, the renewal terms of the Google contract.

## The part the book leaves out

There is one thing Pogue does not write about, and I think it matters more to an investor than any chapter.

I searched the full text of the book: buybacks, share repurchases, not a single mention. Six hundred pages of corporate biography without a paragraph on it. This is a book about products and people, not capital allocation.

So I pulled Apple's annual figures from the SEC (data through fiscal 2025, which ended September 27, 2025, retrieved September 9, 2026). Across the eleven fiscal years from 2015 to 2025, Apple spent 643.9 billion dollars buying back its own stock, against cumulative net income of 702.7 billion. Buybacks equal 92 percent of net income. In fiscal 2025 alone, net income was 112.0 billion; buybacks of 90.7 billion plus dividends of 15.4 billion returned 95 percent of it to shareholders.

![Two equal-length percentage bars, the top one 92 percent filled by buybacks, the bottom one 95 percent filled by buybacks plus dividends, each leaving only a thin sliver of blank](/figures/apple-buyback-share-of-profit-en.svg)

The share count is even more direct. After the 2020 split there were 16.98 billion shares; by 2025 there were 14.77 billion, down 13 percent in five years. Restated to the same basis back to 2015, the count is down 34 percent in ten years.

What that means: a portion of Apple's per-share earnings growth over the past decade came not from earning more but from a shrinking denominator. The toll revenue comes in and, for the most part, goes straight back out to shareholders rather than into building new things. That explains how the stock kept rising without a new product, and it also explains why Pogue can say Apple is "focusing on software, services, and AI" while the money never piles into data centers the way Google's does.

![On the left a line sloping down to the right shows the share count shrinking 34 percent in ten years; on the right a fraction where the numerator bar is unchanged and the denominator bar is clearly shorter, with the result arrow pointing up](/figures/apple-shrinking-denominator-en.svg)

A company that hands you 95 percent of what it earns is also telling you something: it cannot find a better investment than itself. Good news if you hold it. Not good news if you are waiting for the next iPhone.

## Where this belief comes from

The idea that new technology destroys old industries was laid out a century ago by Joseph Schumpeter, who called it creative destruction. He was right at the time, and Apple is the best example: in 1996 it was the one being destroyed, six weeks from bankruptcy.

The difference is that Apple's money today is not the money of technical leadership. Toll revenue comes from habit, from users locked into an ecosystem, from a contract signed with Google. Dismantling that takes not a better phone but courts and regulators. Thinking about Apple in terms of "will it be disrupted" keeps you looking in the wrong place. The right place is the docket.

## One thing to take with you

How a company makes its money determines what you should watch more than whether it has a new product.

Something I have tried: the next time you see a "they've stopped innovating" headline about a stock you own, don't react to the headline. Open the company's latest annual report, find the segment with the highest gross margin, and type one line in your phone's notes: what the segment is called, what share of revenue it brings in, and who could take it away. If the third part stays blank, you don't yet know what you're watching, and that stock stays untouched for the day.