During its quarterly report on Tuesday night, Apple announced that it currently has 700 million customers who pay for the company’s subscription services, which is an increase of 150 million since last year and a quadrupling of numbers compared to four years ago.
This is excellent news for Apple, which has been aggressively pursuing a strategy away from a company that relies heavily on selling iPhones to one that sells services into the large (and growing) iPhone user base.
But one slight worry is that we do not know exactly what the distribution between the different services looks like. In all probability it will be iCloud, Apple Music and AppleCare that are attracting the majority of paying customers. Those are proven performers that Apple knows it can depend on.
Apple’s more recently launched services (namely Apple Arcade, TV+ and News+), however, remain unproven as revenue drivers. TV+ in particular has had trouble competing with more established streaming services, or in the case of Disney Plus, with a service that has a much larger back catalogue of films and TV shows.
Apple decided to focus on creating original content rather than buying in a library of existing material (and unlike Disney, didn’t have a library of its own to lean on), but this backfired when the pandemic closed down production and TV+ was left with a tiny offering at a time when users were crying out for things to watch.
Still, the bottom line for services as a whole certainly looks healthy right now. In the most recent quarter, sales for Apple’s services were $17.5bn, an increase of 33% compared to the corresponding period in 2020.
According to Apple’s CFO, Luca Maestri, this is a double-digit increase in all geographical regions, reports MacRumors.
This article originally appeared on Macworld Sweden. Translation and additional reporting by David Price.