Apple rolled out a small but meaningful update to senior executive Eddy Cue’s job title on Thursday that features an area of interest the company has long been focused on: services (via 9to5Mac). Eddy Cue is a longstanding veteran at Apple who helped build iTunes and the App Store, but his new title of “Senior Vice President, Services” reflects the company’s increasingly important side hustle, if not outright transformation into a media business and subscription peddler.
Prior to Thursday, Eddy Cue was senior vice president of internet software and services, with responsibilities that included overseeing the iTunes Store, Apple Music, Apple Pay, Maps, Search Ads, iCloud, and iWork. His new job description emphasizes Apple’s subscription darlings:
Eddy oversees the full range of Apple’s services, including Apple Music, Apple News, Apple Podcasts, the Apple TV app, and Apple TV Plus, as well as Apple Pay, Apple Card, Maps, Search Ads, Apple’s iCloud services, and Apple’s productivity and creativity apps.
Apple still makes a ton of money selling hardware and software — earning a total of $81.43 billion during the third quarter of 2021 — but its services business has specifically been growing as of late, earning an all-time revenue high of $17.5 billion during the same quarter. Apple’s found major success in streaming hits like Ted Lasso that may have helped, and seems primed to take even bigger, more Game of Thrones-sized swings with shows like Foundation later this fall.
Cue’s had a hand in many pies over his time at Apple, including managing Siri for a period before Apple began to actively compete with Google Assistant. He’s also now infamously known as one of the few executives who pushed for Apple to bring iMessage to Android, thanks to an email exchange between Cue and senior vice president of software engineering Craig Federighi that was dug up as part of the Epic v. Apple antitrust lawsuit.
A title change might not mean that much in terms of what Cue does day to day, but it is yet more evidence that Apple’s services business is here to stay.
