2024 may be a year of reckoning for Apple’s $85 billion services business

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Apple faces a legal reckoning in 2024, with a series of regulatory decisions by US and EU authorities over the coming months set to determine the future of its $85 billion-a-year services business.

The biggest hit to the iPhone maker could come from a US antitrust trial against Google, where it emerged that the fellow tech giant had paid more than $26 billion in 2021 to make its search engine the default on Apple devices and other smartphones and browsers.

Should Google lose the case, it could be forced to stop making regular payments to Apple, which Eric Seufert, an independent analyst, estimates as being worth a quarter of annual revenues earned by Apple’s services arm.