Is Apple consciously promoting this as a differentiator, or is it a side effect of their hardware/software ecosystem? How will this affect their sales numbers long term, either positively (by promoting their platform overall) or negatively (by reducing in-ecosystem churn)?
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.
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...