It helps Apple by driving the tolerable purchase price (and therefore tolerable profit margins) up.

Put another way, they capture the same share of your computing budget and of the App Store market but build fewer laptops and phones.

Also, Apple is highly diffentiated at the high end (walk in repairs and support, long software compatibility timespans). Driving up expected lifespans makes their offering cheaper than the low end in the long term, allowing them to capture increasing percentages of the total market.

They just need to execute better on the software and industrial design side than they did in 2017. Laptops without usable keyboards, the new busted gesture based iPhone UI, and iOS 11.0 are all bad enough to force long term users to other ecosystems.

My own anecdotal experience here: I have been using iOS 11 on my iPhone 6 Plus, and subsequently my iPhone X and now an iPad Pro (from which I type this) and the only severe issue I’ve encountered was my iPhone X entering some kind of weird state (possibly related to accidentally triggering the screen magnifier feature) and the display became mostly unresponsive, except for the emergency sos which triggered and dialed 911 while trying to reboot the device. Fortunately the phone part worked and I was able to explain what happened to the operator. After a successful force shutdown I turned off the automatic dial option.

I was thinking of changing from my old Android phone to the iPhone 8... Is now not a good time?

FWIW, the iPhone 8 and X are awesome phones. There have been a few software issues with iOS but nothing major. For example, there was recently a crash caused by a very specific set of unicode characters. People could crash your phone by sending it to you via a text for a whole 2 days. Now that the novelty has worn off and Apple has patched it, it's not an issue.

From a business perspective, I would expect Apple to continue introducing satellite/companion products in their ecosystem that customers see as valuable. I think they've long seen the "peak iPhone" moment coming (it would seem we have at least arrived at "plateau iPhone" now [0]), and have been executing a broad, multiyear strategy to leverage the fact that there are over a billion of their devices in active use. That strategy includes: offering compelling services, new products to enhance their ecosystem (AirPods, Apple Watch, etc), and eventually products to cannibalize the iPhone.

I expect there to be a lot of noise from Wall Street now that the iPhone growth rocket ship has stagnated. But as others have pointed out, in a world of smartphone saturation Apple is well-poised to continue being quite successful[1], and viewing the world purely through a "number of units sold" lens is foolish.

[0] - https://www.aboveavalon.com/notes/2018/2/21/the-goldilocks-e... [1] - https://appleinsider.com/articles/18/02/24/the-smartphone-en...