That's an interesting perspective. Theoretically, the best way to get rid of hardware is to move as much as possible to "the cloud"[1], yet Apple isn't very good at cloud. (At least, not as good as Google and Amazon.)
So let's say we're headed to a future where the only physical electronics anyone owns are wearables: watch, glasses, ear buds. No phones, tablets, laptops, or desktops. Just wearables.
In that scenario, who wins? Apple is best suited for making that hardware (by a long mile), but Google and/or Amazon are better suited for handling the software in the cloud.
I'd place my bets on Apple catching up on cloud faster than Google or Amazon catching up on hardware.
However, if we took it a step further and went full Mana[2], tapping right into the nervous system, my bet would be on Google winning that one. They have the cloud capabilities and expertise, but Alphabet also has some experience in health and biology (if I'm not mistaken).
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[1] I know, I know. "Cloud" is just someone else's computer. It's also more than that.
Rather, I'm saying they're nowhere near as good at it as Amazon or Google, and I anticipate that this gap is only going to grow.
That's an interesting perspective
It's Steve Jobs' perspective. He talked repeatedly about technology disappearing into the background, and one day we would have technology so good that we wouldn't even see it. It would disappear into the walls.
To me, it's the ultimate expression of making computers work for us, not the other way around, which is mostly what we have now.
An alternative view is that Apple’s biggest product puts enough compute in your pocket to make “cloud” unnecessary in a lot of cases. My phone is somewhere between a t3.medium and a t3.2xlarge (based on ram and cpu cores respectively). That can provide a lot of local compute for my wearables. And those wearables are gonna need network anyway, so either that all end up with 5G cellular radios (and 4/3G fallback) and enough battery to run that, or one device provides the network hub and the tiny things in your ears and the glasses sitting on your nose can have lower power radios and smaller batteries.
I reckon watches/glasses/earbuds(/cars/tvs/etc) all relying on a phone is a reasonably sensible model, rather than each of those devices having completely stand alone capabilities.
(And, the idea of Google tapping into my nervous system??? No thanks... I’ll proudly be a data center smashing neo-Luddite before that happens to me...)
Apple isn't very fond of cloud, which a lot of people appreciate.
For example, if I am playing music on my Airpods from my iPhone and my phone is in my pocket, turning the crown on my apple watch is a really neat and intuitive way to change the volume. The first time I did it and it worked it felt like magic.
Similarly walking down a street and getting audio directions on AirPods almost works - but if that's combined with a small map on my watch it works much better - better than a phone.
But at the same time, neither a watch or Airpods are going to be the right way to send a private text message on a quiet bus, and because a giant new unifying technology isn't with us yet, I suspect a hybrid approach is going to be with us for a while.