Apple’s Eddy Cue: ‘You may not need an iPhone 10 years from now’

Eddy Cue, Apple’s senior vice president of services, gave an ominous warning today that the iPhone could go the way of the iPod 10 years from now. And the reason, as one might guess, is artificial intelligence.

Incumbents have a hard time … we’re not an oil company, we’re not toothpaste — these are things that are going to last forever … you may not need an iPhone 10 years from now.

Cue went on to say that the best thing Apple did was kill the iPod, a move he said was bold. “Why would you kill the golden goose,” he added.

That may seem like a silly thing for Apple to say, given that more than half of its revenue is iPhone sales. But Cue calls AI a “huge technological shift,” and suggests that such shifts can humble companies that once seemed unassailable. “When I got to Silicon Valley,” he said, “all the best companies or the most successful companies” — he mentioned HP, Sun Microsystems, and Intel — “either don’t exist today or are significantly smaller and much less impactful.”