Apple could be the first of FAMGA to die. Die, in the same way Nokia and Blackberry are dead. The one thing Apple does is sell personal computing devices (and accessories to them), the unique and most valuable part of which is the OS.
There has been a continuous abstraction of things by the cloud, beginning with files.That, and the fact of cloud storage becoming a commodity has resulted in reasonable prediction by some people of the impending death of companies offering personal cloud storage as a service.
Video gaming is already being experimented on. Cc Google Stadia.
I think at some point in the near future, mobile OSes too will either be abstracted away — with apps streamed in real-time, like we currently stream music on Spotify or TV on Netflix — or completely die, giving way to the web (which we already 'stream' in real-time) as the only platform.
If mobile OSes die, then Apple probably dies. Everything else Apple does is appended to personal computing. Other tech coys have lock-in with some of their products and services. Apple is a big company; a bureaucracy like any other. When the change happens, no one who will be at the company will have enough consolidated power to perform a re-founding of the company. Reed Hastings' founder re-founding of Netflix is a famous success. There is no Reed Hastings at Apple.
If mobile OSes are only abstracted away to the cloud, then Apple's OS would be in competition with the web, which has more 'content'. Accessing the web on Apple's devices would require an additional level: Physical device —> Cloud mobile OS —> Web browser in the cloud. Compared to the web as the platform, in which things only move from Physical device --> Web.
Aside the difficulty of the specific problems of founding and re-founding, there are also other related, general systemic reasons to be pessimistic about their chances of surviving this inflection point:
(i) The fact that functional institutions are the exception.
(ii) Success is really really difficult to achieve; a ton of things have to go exactly right.
Love it. But I'm convinced it is closer to: everything that does not survive, dies for a reason.
— Joe Norman (@normonics) February 16, 2018
Survival demands a multitudinous harmony; ruin, only one sour note.
Success is never due to one thing, but failure can be.
— James Clear (@JamesClear) November 4, 2019
Sleeping well won’t make you successful, but not sleeping enough will hold you back.
Hard work is rarely enough without good strategy, but even the best strategy is useless without hard work.
Necessary, but not sufficient.
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Notes -
Like everyone here, my feels also say you're wrong. But let's take a look at some reals.
Here's the top 20 from the Fortune 500 in 1955.
GM - still around
Exxon - still around
US Steel - still around
GE - still around
Esmark - conglomerate (purchased by other owners - its brands such as Peter Pan and Butterball turkey are still around)
Chrysler - still around (went bankrupt once)
Armour - sold to ConAgra in 1983
Gulf Oil - merged and rebranded as Chevron
Mobile - bought by Exxon
Dupont - still around
Amoco - bought by BP
Bethlehem Steel - defunct in 2003
CBS - division of Paramount global
Texaco - part of Chevron
AT&T - still around
Shell Oil - still around
Kraft - Merged with Heinz
ChevronTexaco - Not sure why this is here
Goodyear Tire - still around
Boeing still around
Of the top 20 companies from 68 years ago, 19 are still around in some way shape or form.
Barring a singularity or global catastrophe, Apple isn't going anywhere anytime soon. High confidence.
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