Benedict Evans, on iPhone as a subscription service:

One can certainly argue that selling smartphones is a subscription business, and though Google does not itself sell phones (to any significant degree), Apple certainly does. You pay an average of $700 or so every two years (i.e. $30/month) and Apple gives you a phone. Buy an Android instead and you lose access to the (hypothetical) great Apple television service.

On the idea of buying Netflix:

From a pure M&A perspective, buying Netflix and immediately limiting its business to Apple devices would halve its value – why buy a business and fire half the customers? Buying it without such a restriction would have no strategic value – Apple would just be buying marketing and revenue. But as Amazon has shown, you don’t have to buy Netflix – they’re not the only people who can buy and commission great TV shows.

And on Apple taking on the business of producing hit shows to enhance its content:

Perhaps a deeper question, setting aside the purely strategic calculations, is that Apple has always preferred a very asset-light approach to things that are outside its core skills. It didn’t create a record label, or an MVNO, and it didn’t create a credit card for Apple Pay – it works with partners on the existing rails as much as possible (even the upcoming Apple Pay P2P service uses a partner bank). So, Apple has hired some star producers and will presumably be commissioning some shows, with what counts as play money when you have a few hundred billion of cash. But I’m not sure Apple would want to take on what it would mean to have a complete bouquet of hundreds of its own shows. That would be a different company.

The whole piece is thoughtful and well written. It’s all about the ecosystem. What serves the ecosystem serves Apple.