Scott Kirby doesn’t just want to run a good airline. He wants to run a technology company that happens to fly planes.
That ambition — audacious, expensive, and deliberately modeled on the world’s most valuable consumer brand — sits at the center of United Airlines’ strategy for the next decade. The carrier has been explicit about the comparison. Not hiding behind euphemism. Not dressing it up in corporate-speak. United wants to be the Apple of the skies, and it’s reorganizing its entire operation around that idea.
The analogy isn’t new in corporate America. Every company with a loyalty program and a mobile app has, at some point, invoked Cupertino. But United’s version of the pitch is more specific — and more capital-intensive — than most. As TechRadar reported after attending the airline’s recent technology showcase, United is pouring resources into proprietary hardware, custom software, AI-driven operations, and a vertically integrated passenger experience that echoes Apple’s obsessive control over every touchpoint.
The question for investors, competitors, and the 170 million passengers United carries each year is whether an airline — an industry defined by thin margins, weather delays, and union negotiations — can actually pull off a strategy that has worked for exactly one consumer electronics company in history.
The Hardware Play: Screens, Seats, and Starlink
Start with what passengers will see first. United has committed to installing seatback screens on every aircraft in its fleet. That sounds incremental until you consider the specifications: large, high-resolution displays running United’s own entertainment platform, not a third-party system licensed from Panasonic or Thales. The airline wants to own the software stack from the interface layer down to content delivery.
According to TechRadar, United demonstrated Bluetooth connectivity for every seat, allowing passengers to pair personal headphones with seatback screens — eliminating the need for those flimsy wired earbuds airlines have distributed for decades. The airline is also rolling out Starlink satellite Wi-Fi across its fleet, a move it announced in partnership with SpaceX. The promise: fast, free internet at every altitude on every route.
Free is the operative word. Most U.S. carriers still charge for Wi-Fi, and even those offering complimentary access often throttle speeds to the point of uselessness. United is betting that absorbing the cost of connectivity — and making it genuinely functional — will become a competitive moat. The same logic Apple applied to iMessage. Give away the service. Lock in the user.
But the hardware ambitions extend beyond entertainment. United has been investing in new cabin interiors, redesigned boarding processes, and what the airline calls a “connected” airport experience. Think real-time rebooking through the app during irregular operations, dynamic wayfinding in terminals, and push notifications that actually help rather than annoy. The airline’s app already handles much of this, but United wants to close every remaining gap where a passenger might need to talk to an agent or visit a kiosk.
The goal is control. Total, end-to-end control over the passenger’s interaction with the brand, from booking to baggage claim. That’s the Apple playbook: own the hardware, own the software, own the experience.
It’s also extraordinarily expensive.
United’s capital expenditure plans reflect the scale of this bet. The airline has outlined billions in spending on new aircraft — including large orders for Boeing 787s and Airbus A321XLRs — and billions more on cabin retrofits, technology infrastructure, and airport facility upgrades. The company spent approximately $9 billion in capital expenditures in 2024 alone, a figure that dwarfs what most airlines allocate to anything beyond fleet renewal.
And here’s where the Apple comparison starts to strain. Apple earns gross margins above 45%. United’s operating margins hover in the low-to-mid teens in good years. Apple controls its supply chain with a precision that borders on the fanatical. United depends on Boeing, which can’t deliver planes on time, and on air traffic control systems built in the 1960s. The environments could not be more different.
AI, Operations, and the Invisible Infrastructure
The most interesting part of United’s technology push isn’t what passengers see. It’s what they don’t.
The airline has been aggressively deploying artificial intelligence and machine learning across its operations — crew scheduling, maintenance prediction, weather modeling, and irregular operations management. When a thunderstorm shuts down Newark, the decisions about which flights to cancel, which to delay, and how to rebook 40,000 passengers are increasingly made by algorithms rather than harried operations controllers staring at whiteboards.
This matters more than seatback screens. Airlines that recover faster from disruptions keep customers. Period. United’s ConnectionSaver tool, which holds departing flights for passengers on inbound connections when the math works out, has already prevented hundreds of thousands of missed connections since its deployment. The airline claims its AI tools have meaningfully reduced the cascading failures that turn a single weather event into three days of chaos.
TechRadar noted that United demonstrated several AI-powered tools at its showcase, including systems that generate personalized travel recommendations and customer service responses. The airline is also experimenting with computer vision at airports and predictive models for baggage handling. None of this is unique to United — Delta has made similar investments, and even budget carriers are adopting machine learning for revenue management — but United’s argument is that the integration of all these systems under one roof creates something greater than the sum of its parts.
Sound familiar? That’s literally Apple’s pitch for why you should buy an iPhone, a Mac, an Apple Watch, and AirPods from the same company.
The MileagePlus loyalty program is another piece of this architecture. United has transformed MileagePlus from a frequent flyer program into a financial engine, with its co-branded Chase credit card generating billions in annual revenue. The program’s economics are staggeringly good: United sells miles to Chase at a significant markup over the cost of redemption, creating a high-margin revenue stream that subsidizes everything else. In 2024, loyalty revenue continued to grow faster than passenger revenue, a trend visible across all major U.S. carriers but one United has been particularly aggressive in exploiting.
The loyalty program also generates data. Enormous quantities of data about spending patterns, travel preferences, price sensitivity, and brand affinity. United wants to use that data the way Apple uses its knowledge of how you interact with your devices — to personalize offerings, predict behavior, and increase switching costs.
But there’s a tension embedded in this strategy that United hasn’t fully resolved. Apple’s premium positioning works because customers choose to pay more for Apple products. They walk into the store voluntarily. Airline passengers, by contrast, are often captive — flying United because it dominates their home hub, because their employer mandates it, or because it’s the only nonstop option on a given route. Building an Apple-like brand experience on a foundation of geographic monopoly is a different proposition than building one on genuine consumer preference.
United’s leadership would argue the investment is precisely about earning that preference — making the product so good that even passengers with alternatives choose United. And there’s evidence the strategy is working. The airline’s premium revenue has been growing significantly, with demand for Polaris business class, first class, and Economy Plus consistently outpacing basic economy. United has added premium seats to its fleet faster than any competitor, and load factors in premium cabins remain strong even as the broader economy softens.
The Competitive Reality
Delta, of course, has its own version of this story. Ed Bastian has been talking about Delta as a premium brand for years, and the Atlanta-based carrier consistently leads the industry in customer satisfaction and operational reliability. Delta’s partnership with American Express mirrors United’s Chase relationship, and Delta’s investment in airport facilities — particularly its new terminals at LaGuardia and Los Angeles — rivals anything United has built.
So the race isn’t United versus legacy thinking. It’s United versus Delta, with American Airlines trailing in the premium strategy but still commanding enormous market share, and Southwest navigating its own identity crisis after abandoning open seating.
The Apple analogy also raises a question about exclusivity. Apple’s brand power comes partly from its willingness to say no — to features, to price points, to market segments it considers beneath its standards. Airlines can’t really do that. United still sells basic economy tickets. It still flies regional jets with no entertainment and minimal legroom. It still operates out of Newark, which is — let’s be honest — not exactly an Apple Store experience regardless of how many billions United spends on Terminal C.
The hybrid nature of the airline business means United will always be selling a premium product and a commodity product simultaneously, to passengers sitting inches apart on the same aircraft. Apple doesn’t have that problem. When you buy an iPhone, everyone in the room has roughly the same object. When you fly United, the person in Polaris is having a fundamentally different experience than the person in a middle seat in row 37 who paid $89 on a fare sale.
Managing that duality — charging premium prices at the front while remaining competitive at the back — is the central challenge of United’s strategy. And it’s one that no amount of AI or Starlink Wi-Fi can fully resolve.
Still, the direction is clear. United is betting that technology, vertical integration, and brand control will differentiate it in an industry where most carriers have historically competed on price and schedule alone. The airline’s recent financial performance supports the thesis: United posted strong earnings in 2024, guided confidently for 2025 despite macroeconomic uncertainty, and has seen its stock price outperform most peers over the past two years.
Whether United can sustain this — through the next recession, the next Boeing delivery delay, the next operational meltdown — will determine whether the Apple comparison is aspirational or prophetic. The ambition is real. The spending is real. The execution, so far, has been impressive.
But airlines have a way of humbling even the best-laid strategies. Ask anyone who’s ever been stuck overnight in Denver.
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