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Apple has manufactured its ain line of AirPort cards and routers for 17 years, dating back to the introduction of the original Airdrome Base of operations Station in 1999. Now, the company is apparently planning to kill its support for the AirPort division, not long after announcing it would as well exit the display markets. It's been more than three years since Apple announced a new base station (its last update, in 2022, added support for the 802.11ac standard), so this move isn't entirely surprising — only it's as well a further sign that Apple is consolidating its product lines.

This new report comes courtesy of Bloomberg, which notes that router revenue is a tiny slice of Apple'south total sales. These products, along with its displays, Apple tree Watches, and Apple Television receiver are all gathered in "other products," and that partitioning only accounts for about v% of Apple's sales, for a total financial 2022 estimated revenue of $11.1 billion. In and of itself, this isn't likely to have much touch on the company'south bottom line, especially since there are cheaper, faster routers available these days from many other companies, and for less coin.

A potential longer-term issue, notwithstanding, is the overall stickiness of Apple tree's product family unit. 1 of the things Apple has historically washed extremely well is create an ecosystem of products that necktie together. Most manufacturers make just a passing endeavor to do this, merely Apple focuses on it (or at least, focused on information technology) as a core competency. AirPort routers with Time Capsule offered backup capabilities that technically worked with both Windows and Mac PCs, simply were integrated and supported better under OS Ten than their PC counterparts. At least in theory, you lot could buy your smartphone, tablet, laptop, desktop, router, display, and peripherals all from the aforementioned company, with an Apple Watch thrown in to boot, were you lot so inclined.

2013 Apple Airport Extreme, disassembled by iFixit

An 802.11ac Apple Airport Extreme, disassembled by iFixit

It'southward not surprising to see Apple cancelling older production lines that aren't contributing to the visitor's bottom line, just Cook has nevertheless to articulate where or how he'll supersede these products with new hardware (and new revenue opportunities). It'south possible that the advent of deject computing has Apple putting less emphasis on physical equipment and more than on creating an ecosystem of products it can sell people equally part of an Apple-centric cloud services standard. Certainly the company'due south push into music streaming could be argued to support this tendency, though Apple tree hasn't really unveiled the kind of pervasive cloud ecosystem that companies like Google, Microsoft, and Amazon take been focused on developing. For now, Apple has simply replaced its one-time dedicated product lines with third-party hardware sold through its own sites, and we know the company sharply pulled back on its self-driving car investments earlier this year.

A cynic might conclude that Apple is battening down the hatches. Dongles can help heighten margins, and killing underperforming products improves the bottom line, every bit does cancelling uncertain hardware. With the iPhone viii rumored to adopt OLED screens and potentially a larger display, Apple seems to be putting more emphasis on making the kinds of moves Wall Street likely wants to run across, as opposed to trying to push the envelope with new products. Then again, trying to anticipate fundamentally new technologies is extremely difficult, and ane could argue that Jobs' tremendous success owed much more to being in the right identify at the right fourth dimension than to any item skill. Either way, Apple is trimming its product lines and investments — whether to gear upwards for something new or to protect its profits as smartphone growth slows remains to be seen.