If you ask almost anyone in Silicon Valley, they’ll tell you that services are the future of the tech industry, and it’s not hard to see that they truly believe that. Subscription services are everywhere today, they’re behind the way we watch tv, listen to music, edit photos, and even do our work. Tons of companies have found financial success through this business model, as it practically guarantees recurring revenue, the thing that investors want to see most, but despite this, Apple continues to see diminishing returns and subcscriber numbers with their own services. But why is this? How come one of the biggest tech companies in the world that has built an empire off of making great products failing where countless others have found great amounts of success? Well, the answer is simple. To understand why Apple is failing at services, one first must understand why they have succeeded in all of their other ventures. From the very beginning, Apple has succeeded by doing things differently. They were willing to take risks in the name of innovation and furthering the user experience, risks that allowed them to find success in innovative new products like the iPod, iPhone, and iPad. But when in comes to services, Apple’s don’t stand out all that much when compared to say Netflix’s, Spotify’s, or Hulu’s. They don’t offer any improvement on these services, only iterations, iterations that are frankly worse than the services they are iterating on. If Apple wants to succeed at services, they have to make Apple services, not HBO with an Apple skin on it, or Spotify with Siri support and a genuinely terrible user interface, they need to make the iPod’s and iPad’s of services, innovative new products that offer better user experiences than and genuine improvements on their competitors’ offerings. To put it simply, Apple needs to think different.