One of the phrases that Apple's executives repeat regularly is that they are focused on "making the world's best products and enriching people's lives." However, its latest quarterly earnings seems to be signaling that this business model of creating great products might be reaching its ceiling. Of course, China's slowdown surely seems significant enough to have impacted Apple's sales. But, Tim Cook also alluded to the fact that consumers are beginning to upgrade their smartphones more slowly. If this sounds familiar, it's exactly what happened to PCs and TVs: as product innovations become less significant, consumers don't feel compelled to upgrade their devices so often. Given this backdrop, it's not surprising that Apple is shifting its rhetoric and even company disclosures to emphasize its service business. Companies generally want to show numbers that will help them look good (i.e. Amazon's disclosures around AWS sent its stock flying...