Do you consider Apple to be a vulnerable company?

The technology juggernaut carries the largest market capitalization in history $1.6 trillion.

Its App Store alone creates nearly three times the revenue of Visa, and roughly the same amount as Target.

It owns 20% of the global smartphone market, yet banks 92% of the entire markets profits.

Its products are nicely diversified across smartphones, tablets, watches, desktops, laptops, wearables and subscription services.

It has over $100 billion in cash on its balance sheet.

It spends $17 billion on research and development each year five times the annual sales of Dominos Pizza, of which Americans eat a ton.

Pre COVID-19, Apple stores were attracting a million vistors per day, whereas Disneys Magic Kingdom draws only 20 million in an entire year.

Its easier to get into an Ivy League college than get a job at Apple.

Forbes ranks Apple as the worlds most valuable brand.

Apples iconic logo was once valued at $154 billion more than the entire net worth of Netflix.

Apple ranks first among brands with the strongest bond to users Amazon and Disney run second and third.

For 13 years in a row, Apple has sat atop Fortunes list of most admired companies in the world.

Yet my original question still stands.

Can a company with such a pristine resume deep experience a revolutionary level of engineering and an impressive history of imagining the future actually be vulnerable?

The obvious answer is (drumroll, please)

YES!

For starters, over 80% of Americans now own a smartphone, which is quite significant because an 80% adoption rate typically means that a market is fully mature. Based on that fact alone, you might even call smartphones a commodity (yikes).

Apple knows this, of course.

Secondly, sales of the iPhone are slumping even on a COVID-19-adjusted basis. When you consider that iPhone accounts for half of Apples sales, its a worrisome metric. No wonder Apple stopped reporting unit sales for its iPhone two years ago.

The only thing standing between Apple and irrelevance is a scenario where another company radically reinvents the telephone designs it in spectacular fashion commercializes it on a massive scale builds an entire ecosystem of other products around the phone and underpins the entire ecosystem with a single operating system.

As far-fetched as that scenario may seem, history tells that such a phone will eventually exist.

Apple knows this, as well.

Thats why its preparing to strategically kill off its own iPhone in the 2020s.

In fact, Apples painful, exhaustive, relentless, capital-intensive process of creative destruction has already begun.

The product set to replace iPhone is (second drumroll, please) iGlass.

Below is an excerpt from the latest issue of my premium publication, Future Wealth which is devoted entirely to the launch of Apples iGlass...

By the middle of the decade, iGlass will have integrated voice and phone capabilities, thus marking the beginning of the end of the iPhone era Apple's senior managers are looking at iGlass to become an iPhone replacement in roughly a decade.

The first generation of iGlass could hit as early as March 2021, making this upcoming issue of Future Wealth scheduled to publish next week a must-read for all investors.

Onward and upward,

Robert Williams