00:00:00 ◼ ► So it's a little early to really give much information on this front, but basically I'm in kind of a bad mood because I've been doing a low-carb diet for about almost a year now.
00:00:14 ◼ ► So we had our annual physical for the first time now, and it turns out that this diet has made me eat way too much meat and cheese, and my cholesterol is crazy high.
00:00:31 ◼ ► Oh, okay. Because I went to my doctor for the first time in five years, and I had, I think my regular, like my overall cholesterol, I don't really understand this quite obviously, but my overall cholesterol was like a few points higher than 200, which I guess is the threshold between good and bad.
00:00:48 ◼ ► But my bad cholesterols were definitely considerably higher than they should have been. I don't know if it was to the tune of 40%, but it was a lot.
00:00:56 ◼ ► And so I have been avoiding red meat like the plague, and I know that there's cholesterol in plenty of other things, don't get me wrong, but I've been avoiding red meat like the plague, eating considerably more salads than I usually do, because I have to get my blood drawn in a few weeks, which is basically a month after I went.
00:01:15 ◼ ► You got to get in on some of this purebred Mediterranean genetics, guys, because I eat terribly. My cholesterol is lower than both of you.
00:01:26 ◼ ► Yeah, I think I'm a quarter or something like that, but clearly that ain't enough either.
00:01:37 ◼ ► Well, he recommends something that I think is a marvelous rebranding. He recommends something called a 100% plant-based diet.
00:01:47 ◼ ► And he said this a few times, and about halfway through, he had a lot to say about it, and about halfway through, I'm like, "So just to clarify, basically you mean vegan, right?"
00:01:57 ◼ ► And he's like, "Yeah, basically vegan. It's 100% plant-based diet." And then he never said the word vegan again.
00:02:08 ◼ ► I haven't been able to eat avocados, to be honest, for about 10 years without getting a massive stomach ache, so we'll see.
00:02:11 ◼ ► That sucks, because both of those, I personally think that both of those are quite tasty fruits. I genuinely feel bad for them.
00:02:25 ◼ ► I love he didn't want to say that, because no one who's not a vegan thinks that's a good word.
00:02:46 ◼ ► Because I've been the keto chef of the family. I've been in charge of all shopping and all cooking for the whole diet, and it's gone fine.
00:03:08 ◼ ► And we were eating lots of vegetables before, but I wasn't relying on them to be the main core, so the primary part of the filling-ness of the meal.
00:03:15 ◼ ► So I just have so much more to learn, and I have to now totally cook a whole new cuisine that I've never cooked before, that I've barely even eaten before.
00:03:24 ◼ ► And I like it all. I like all of the foods that go into it. I don't mind all the various meat substitute things.
00:03:30 ◼ ► I like pretty much all vegetables and pretty much all grains and everything, nuts, legumes. I like them all.
00:03:36 ◼ ► I don't think I'm going to have a problem finding things I like. My main concerns are how the heck do I shop for this, how the heck do I cook for this, and how do I make things that are filling without going so carb-heavy that I gain all the weight back.
00:03:51 ◼ ► But the good thing is, A, I've learned through the low-carb diet, I've become more comfortable at a restaurant just asking for exceptions to things.
00:04:02 ◼ ► To be like, "Oh, I'll have the burger but without the bun." I used to just never feel comfortable asking for things like that.
00:04:08 ◼ ► I've had to develop that to do this diet all this time. So now I can say, "Yeah, I'll have the salad, just don't have the cheese, please." That's fine.
00:04:15 ◼ ► I was always so terrified to even ask, and it turns out every single restaurant hears so many exceptions every day that not a single person ever batted an eye.
00:04:22 ◼ ► They were just like, "All right, you're making me sad thinking about this, Mark. Can I pitch you on my diet plan?"
00:04:32 ◼ ► My super secret diet plan is you basically eat whatever you want but less of it than you normally would, and that's how you lose weight.
00:04:41 ◼ ► Well, at this point, I've lost most of the weight I want to lose. At this point, I just want to maintain...
00:04:47 ◼ ► Right, so just have a healthy diet that has a reasonable balance of stuff in it because you went to one extreme...
00:04:54 ◼ ► You went to one extreme where it was like, "Get out all the carbs in your place." It was like proteins and fatty things, and that wasn't bad.
00:05:00 ◼ ► And now you're going to go to another extreme. Just have a basic, regular, balanced diet with a reasonable balance of all the different kinds of food, just slightly less, enough that you maintain whatever weight it is you want to maintain.
00:05:13 ◼ ► But you look good. You got that going for you. Your outsides look good even if your insides look like carbs.
00:05:22 ◼ ► ATP will be recording a live episode at WWDC. The tickets will go on sale this coming Friday the 29th at either noon ATP time or 3 ATP time. We're not entirely sure yet. There's been a little bit of confusion.
00:05:38 ◼ ► Most likely noon Eastern, but it might end up being noon Pacific, depending on what the logistics of it is getting inside of it.
00:05:46 ◼ ► There's a countdown on the page, so you just go to the page, you'll see a countdown timer.
00:05:56 ◼ ► Again, tickets on sale this coming Friday somewhere between noon and 3 p.m. ATP time, which is American Eastern time.
00:06:04 ◼ ► Tickets will be $29 apiece. It will be at the Hammer Theatre, which you may know from last year's Relay Show.
00:06:15 ◼ ► No WWDC ticket is required for entry. This is coincident, coincident at the same time as WWDC festivities, but it is not an officially sanctioned event.
00:06:27 ◼ ► Doors will open at 5 on Monday, June 3rd. The show will be at 6, again that first Monday of WWDC in San Jose.
00:06:34 ◼ ► If you're there, if you're nearby, we'd love to see you, and we appreciate it if you even consider throwing a few bucks our way to come see the three of us do our thing.
00:06:50 ◼ ► That was me. I just put in one of those little notes to remind myself of one of the things we forgot to talk about last week, where all the new iPads came out.
00:06:57 ◼ ► We talked about the new iPad Mini, and how the line is separated into the Pro ones with the flat sides, and the new pencils and Face ID, and the non-Pro ones that have their own weird names, and how the lines made sense based on the ages of those technologies.
00:07:11 ◼ ► Setting aside the super cheap iPad, which we didn't really talk much about, but continues to exist at $329 or whatever it is, there's one thing that still doesn't quite make sense.
00:07:23 ◼ ► The nice uniform line that it could be, and that is the fact that the Mini only comes in one style. There is no Pro Mini. There is no iPad Pro style Mini.
00:07:34 ◼ ► Now maybe there's no market for that, and it makes sense, but it is a non-uniformity, and so I'm sure fans of the Mini are just overjoyed to have a new modern Mini at all.
00:07:43 ◼ ► But if someone wants to spend an obscene amount of money on a very powerful USB-C sporting Face ID Apple Pencil 2 powered iPad Mini, that doesn't exist.
00:07:55 ◼ ► And I'm wondering, I mean, right now probably no one cares, but if Apple wants to keep this up and actually is going to update the Mini, I think there might be a market for a Pro Mini. I don't know, maybe I'm wrong.
00:08:08 ◼ ► Julian Heatherbell writes, "It's hard to overstate how not even close AMD is in GPUs right now. Ever since Kepler in 2013, NVIDIA has generally had the absolute fastest offering, but if you look at performance per watt, AMD hasn't been close in six years.
00:08:23 ◼ ► The disparity is worse today than it's ever been. The new AMD Radeon VII is on a smaller process, which is 7nm, than NVIDIA's offerings, yet it's slower than NVIDIA's card at the same price point, which is the RTX 2080, apparently.
00:08:35 ◼ ► It's also louder, hotter, less efficient, and less forward-looking, for example, no ray tracing support."
00:08:40 ◼ ► Yeah, that's what we were getting at before, the Radeon was, AMD's like, they got to 7nm first, and the card they put out just barely matched some of the existing NVIDIA cards on larger processes, so it's not only are they the slowest, but they're also less power efficient, so it's not a good look.
00:08:55 ◼ ► Apple's basically making do with second-best GPUs on the top end of its desktop offerings.
00:09:04 ◼ ► As we said in past shows, they could solve this in theory by making their own amazing GPUs, like they do for their iPads and phones, sort of, but I haven't even heard any rumors about that, so I assume it's not anywhere in our near future.
00:09:20 ◼ ► Anthony, Ross Bach writes, with regard to iMacs with spinning disks, some interesting stuff about how schools work with this. I don't really understand some of the things that are being said. Can you decode this for me, John?
00:09:33 ◼ ► Yeah, so I'm like, why do iMacs exist with spinning disks? Who would want such a thing? It's such a terrible experience, yada yada, and what Anthony was bringing up is the idea that SSDs can't, that SSDs wear out after a certain number of writes.
00:09:47 ◼ ► You're like, oh, sure, fine, they wear it after a certain number of writes, but what kind of application is going to put that kind of write volume on an SSD? Like, it shouldn't be a concern, right?
00:09:56 ◼ ► And the context where you might get a huge amount of writes is having Macs in a situation where the user's profiles are on a server somewhere, and every time someone logs in, it brings, apparently, multiple gigabytes of data down to the local machine.
00:10:15 ◼ ► So it's like you log in, and the example it gives is, if the SSD wear rating is 50% fail rate at 5 gigabytes of writes per day for 5 years, if you have a shared system with network users over Apple server that writes 20 gigabytes per day of user data, you can burn through all that in a year.
00:10:31 ◼ ► So you can buy this SSD system and just put it in a school and have people using it for a year and get to a 50% fail rate because you've just done 20 gigabytes of writes per day, which is an incredible amount of writes, an unexpected amount of writes for a system, you know, even a system in constant use, because normal people, you don't just generate that much data, or if you do, you're putting in an external disk or something like that.
00:10:54 ◼ ► So I can understand why, and by the way, fusion drives won't really help here because you'll just wear through the SSD part of the fusion drive with all the writes.
00:11:03 ◼ ► I think the solution here, though, is not spinning disks. The solution here is a system that doesn't require multiple gigabytes to be written to disk every time a user logs in.
00:11:12 ◼ ► I mean, that kind of goes without saying, but there aren't many alternatives and Apple is slow to evolve this aspect of their system. There are many possible technical solutions that can exist and have existed on other systems and on Unix systems in the past, but the brute force technique of just taking all the user's data and pulling it down over the network and writing it to the local disk temporarily can work because of fast SSDs and fast networks, but it seems like a terrible system.
00:11:39 ◼ ► I mean, the other obvious solution is SSDs that are more highly over-provisioned so that they can support more writes before wearing through, like they have more spare storage or whatever.
00:11:50 ◼ ► So I still think that iMac with just a plain spinning hard drive is pretty terrible because who cares if it can support the writes if the act of using that iMac day after day is miserable for all the students, but something's got to give here.
00:12:04 ◼ ► It just seems like there's no good solution given the current mixes of technology and I think the thing that should change is the system for dealing with the multiple uses on a Mac, not the storage mechanism.
00:12:17 ◼ ► And I have some follow up about my HDMI CEC problem from last week's AfterShow. Twitter users Joe Chrysler and Scott Schuchardt both recommended that I turn off a feature called QuickStart Plus. I did, and the problem is mostly solved.
00:12:34 ◼ ► There was one case where I got into a loop where the Apple TV and Nintendo Switch kept stealing the input back and forth every two seconds between themselves. I don't know how or why that happened, but I somehow got it to stop and it hasn't happened since, and otherwise it's been solid.
00:12:50 ◼ ► Also Ivan Sakulik recommended a factory reinstall of the TV, basically the TV version of format and reinstall. I haven't tried that yet, but if I continue to have problems with QuickStart Plus disabled, I will try that next.
00:13:05 ◼ ► But reinstalling your TV is unpleasant and I have to redo all my settings. I don't want to do that.
00:13:10 ◼ ► Do you remember when the TV was just a TV man? I'm forgiven for sounding so old, but it's wild to me how complex everything has become these days. And in some ways it's great, in some ways it's not.
00:13:22 ◼ ► Speaking of resetting stuff, I was having some problems with my HomePod the other day where every time I would ask it to do something, it would do whatever I asked it to do, but then it would recite a message about "Something has gone wrong. We're sorry. Please try again later."
00:13:34 ◼ ► It had some canned message that it would read every time, despite the fact that it would do what I asked.
00:13:40 ◼ ► I suppose. That's right. It's kind of circular logic there. Anyway, I said to it, "Hey Dingus, reboot yourself." And the voice helpfully said, "Sorry, I can't restart your HomePod."
00:13:52 ◼ ► It's like, "You know what I want." And someone wrote a message to tell me that it can't do it. Just do it.
00:13:58 ◼ ► And so I went over and I was like, "How do you restart your HomePod?" I just wanted to reboot it because I'm like, "Well, something's messed up, so let me just reboot it."
00:14:12 ◼ ► That's the answer, which is a little bit terrifying because if you're trained, don't do that to computers. It's bad.
00:14:18 ◼ ► And we all know what's inside the HomePod. It's not some magic pixie dust. This is a little iOS computer in there, right? Or whatever it is, Audio OS.
00:14:27 ◼ ► But yeah, even from the Home thing doesn't have a way to reset it. There's no way to reset it from your phone or anything like that.
00:14:34 ◼ ► And I Googled and it came up with an Apple page that was talking about how to do a fairly large reset.
00:14:40 ◼ ► But yeah, if you want to reboot it, it recommends you pull the plug and plug it back in, which is barbaric, which is what I did.
00:14:49 ◼ ► Voice control should reboot the thing. I can even reboot the Apple TV. The Apple TV has a way to reboot without unplugging it, so should the HomePod.
00:14:59 ◼ ► I have too much empathy. I don't want to yank the cord out. Who knows what it's in the middle of doing.
00:15:02 ◼ ► Does it even – I guess it has APFS now. What if it's in the middle of some HFS+ thing and I corrupt my disk?
00:15:07 ◼ ► Oh, my word. All right, and then finally, I wanted to call attention to – I'm sure most people have seen this,
00:15:15 ◼ ► but Joanna Stern wrote an absolutely tremendous essay, I guess you could call it, or a post about the butterfly keyboard.
00:15:32 ◼ ► The way this was done was that by default, the article does not include any instances of the letter E,
00:15:41 ◼ ► because apparently her E key on her keyboard has broken, or any instances of the letter R.
00:15:47 ◼ ► Now, you can toggle them on to make it readable, but by default, you will look at this article the way it would come off of her broken-ass keyboard.
00:15:55 ◼ ► So it is absolutely worth looking at, and the video is like five minutes or less, and it's also very good.
00:16:20 ◼ ► Listeners of our show are – this is not news to you, but the good thing is that A, this is news to a lot of people,
00:16:28 ◼ ► and B, an Apple spokesperson actually gave a comment on this that included the words, "We're sorry."
00:16:40 ◼ ► Think of the most obscure hardware problem you could possibly have, like, "Oh, there's a dead pixel on my iPhone screen."
00:16:46 ◼ ► You can get a statement from Apple that says, "If anyone is having trouble with their iPhone screen with dead pixels,
00:16:51 ◼ ► we're sorry, bring it to Apple, and we'll repair it under warranty," or whatever, which is exactly what they said about the keyboard.
00:17:01 ◼ ► It doesn't really address the systemic issue, but I think the reason we're mentioning this at all,
00:17:04 ◼ ► is obviously not to inform ATP listeners that there's a problem with the keyboard, which ATP listeners well know.
00:17:14 ◼ ► This issue has crept up from people like us complaining about it on an obscure tech podcast for years and years,
00:17:20 ◼ ► to people complaining about it on websites that are not strictly related to tech but tangentially related to tech,
00:17:29 ◼ ► It's gone all the way up to the highest level of the non-tech sphere, to the point where it does get a canned response from Apple PR,
00:17:42 ◼ ► And the 2018 keyboards, again, if you're listening to tech podcasts like us, you know the 2018s didn't solve the problem.
00:17:48 ◼ ► But perhaps the last time this story bubbled up, the world was convinced the 2018s fixed the issue.
00:17:54 ◼ ► And speaking of that, finally, and we mentioned this back when the keyboard repair extension program came out,
00:18:00 ◼ ► the repair extension program, whatever the hell it was called, does not include the 2018 keyboards.
00:18:05 ◼ ► At the time they came out with that, they were like, well, maybe the 2018s fixed the problem so they don't need to include it into this repair program.
00:18:10 ◼ ► But now we well know, as we've discussed on past episodes, that the 2018 keyboards do not definitively solve this problem,
00:18:19 ◼ ► But in theory they're still all under their first year warranty because it's still 2018.
00:18:24 ◼ ► Well, here we are in 2019, and I forget what month those July keyboards came out in, so I guess we're still within the first year, so there's something to watch for.
00:18:32 ◼ ► By the end of this year, I would hope that the 2018 keyboards are included in this fairly expansive repair extension program,
00:18:42 ◼ ► Because if they don't, it actually makes them the worst keyboards to get, worse than the 2016s or 2015 MacBook or 2017s,
00:18:51 ◼ ► because at least there's a repair extension program for those, but the 2018s, it's like you're on your own with your regular warranty.
00:18:58 ◼ ► So we'll revisit that story, I suppose, in late summer to see if Apple actually has expanded the umbrella of repair extension and annoyance to encompass the 2018 keyboards.
00:19:10 ◼ ► We are sponsored this week by Backblaze, unlimited cloud backup for Macs and PCs for just $5 a month.
00:19:17 ◼ ► And this is really, truly unlimited. $5 a month per computer, and they will back up all of the space in that computer,
00:19:23 ◼ ► the entire hard drive, no matter how big it is, any external hard drives that you have connected to it, they will also back those up.
00:19:30 ◼ ► All your data is back up to Backblaze. It's no gimmicks, no additional charges, $5 a month per computer, that's it.
00:19:37 ◼ ► Restoring is super easy too. You can of course restore from their website, you can download a giant zip file,
00:19:43 ◼ ► or if you have to do a really big restore and it's more efficient to just have a hard drive, they will send you a hard drive in the mail,
00:19:49 ◼ ► overnighted via FedEx, and if you return it, you get a refund on the price of the hard drive.
00:19:54 ◼ ► People trust Backblaze because it's a really good service. They have over 500 petabytes of data under their management.
00:20:00 ◼ ► They've restored over 28 billion files because it's just a really great service. It's easy to use, unlimited, un-throttled,
00:20:08 ◼ ► and you really need cloud backup because, you know, and look, I've tried them all and Backblaze is by far my favorite.
00:20:13 ◼ ► I've been a Backblaze user since long before they were a sponsor because it's just the best for me,
00:20:17 ◼ ► and I suggest you give it a shot today because there's lots of risks that can happen if you just have your files on various hard drives
00:20:27 ◼ ► You could have problems like fires or floods or theft or power surges that could knock out your whole office,
00:20:37 ◼ ► Backblaze is constantly backing up to the cloud and you have it, you know it's there, it's reliable,
00:20:44 ◼ ► Once again, backblaze.com/atp. You can get a 15-day free trial. See for yourself how great it is.
00:20:52 ◼ ► And don't forget about business backup. Tell your assistant minute of work to go to backblaze.com/atp.
00:20:56 ◼ ► Hit the business backup link at the top of the page. It's the same awesome service with more admin tools using Backblaze groups.
00:21:02 ◼ ► So once again, backblaze.com/atp for a 15-day free trial. I love this service and I bet you will too.
00:21:17 ◼ ► Yeah, we do have a couple things to talk about. I would like to talk about something that's gone wrong for me.
00:21:22 ◼ ► I upgraded to 10.14.4 on my Mac and on my laptop because I was having an issue with a Swift CLI app and I didn't realize the reason why.
00:21:33 ◼ ► And so I thought, oh, I'll just upgrade and that'll fix it. And it did and I can explain what happened if anyone cares, but nobody does. However...
00:21:38 ◼ ► I love all the people who are listening to this episode who just can't wait for us to get to the event and we're making them sit through all this other stuff first.
00:21:51 ◼ ► Yeah, so 10.14.4, I upgraded, everything was going well. And then Mail said, we need you to log into Gmail again because I use Google Apps for my domain from forever ago as my email service of choice.
00:22:08 ◼ ► And so it said, you need to open Safari or basically the Mail app will open Safari and you need to log in again. So I did that.
00:22:15 ◼ ► And then I went back to Mail and Mail said, yes, thank you. Can you please open Safari and log in again?
00:22:21 ◼ ► Okay, so I did that. And then the same dance happened again and I realized, uh-oh, something's broken.
00:22:26 ◼ ► I tried this, I think it happened first on my laptop because it was what I happened to be using at the time. Then it happened again on my iMac.
00:22:34 ◼ ► And now neither of my desktop computers can actually use the Mail app with my email, with my particular email server, which is just a little annoying.
00:22:46 ◼ ► Apparently this is a known thing. There's a MacRumors thread we'll put in the show notes about it.
00:22:51 ◼ ► I am so annoyed by this. And I know people that work in Apple QA and they take their jobs very seriously.
00:23:00 ◼ ► But guys, what are you doing? Does nobody think about these sorts of things ever? How does this happen?
00:23:07 ◼ ► Now maybe it's something on the Google side, I don't know. But I can tell you that this whole login flow looks different in 10.14.4 than it did in 10.14.3 or whatever came before.
00:23:16 ◼ ► I'm going to guess it's Apple's problem. What's going on guys? How do you let this out?
00:23:23 ◼ ► Functional high ground, ring a bell? Oh, sorry, too soon. Anyway, how do you let this out? What's going on here?
00:23:33 ◼ ► I'm trying to figure out your whole description of G Suite. Do you use something different than what I use? Do you have like Google for your domain or whatever?
00:23:40 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah. So it's an old term for it. I think it is just G Suite. But way back when, way, way, way back when, probably 10 plus years ago,
00:23:48 ◼ ► when Gmail's whole infrastructure was extended such that you can use Gmail on a different domain, so instead of @gmail.com, it could be say, I don't know, @caseylist.com.
00:23:59 ◼ ► At the time it was called Google Apps for Your Domain and at the time if you were not a business, you could get it for free.
00:24:06 ◼ ► I don't think it's called Google Apps for Your Domain anymore. I think it's called G Suite to your point. And I don't think it's free anymore.
00:24:13 ◼ ► I'm not sure about that though. But anyways, basically I'm using the whole Google Cloud offering on caseylist.com and so my email is gmail, but it's not gmail.com, it's caseylist.com.
00:24:27 ◼ ► And I was using it with MailApp. A lot of people say that that's ridiculous. I don't care. It's what I like. I think MailApp is fine on both iOS and the Mac.
00:24:37 ◼ ► It works for me. If it doesn't work for you, that's fine. But you're not me. And right now, it doesn't work for me, so the joke's on me.
00:24:54 ◼ ► Because if it is, that would explain why it would pass QA because they surely QA it with Gmail, but they'd be like, well, who pays for that weird thing where you get to have your own domain for Google services?
00:25:02 ◼ ► I mean, I'm just trying to find a tiny, tiny fraction of people and they probably didn't even test this at all and were just as surprised as you are and they'll fix it in another point update.
00:25:12 ◼ ► That's what you get for using obscure stuff. Just be glad it's not so obscure that they are going to fix it. Let's say you use like Fastmail or something and it didn't work. They would never fix that. Fastmail would have to fix it.
00:25:23 ◼ ► That's true. But, I mean, consider that the same mechanism that I used to use at work, which was all G Suite, is the same mechanism I used for my personal email.
00:25:37 ◼ ► No, it was all Microsoft for email, so it's all Outlook and Exchange and all that other crap.
00:25:41 ◼ ► So, yeah, I would assume that a lot of people that have G Suite at work, which is, from what I gather, a lot of people, I would think that this would apply to them as well or maybe I just got unlucky twice. I don't know.
00:25:54 ◼ ► But IT departments won't allow the update to happen if they know there's incompatibilities.
00:26:01 ◼ ► We had a thing at work with the upgrade to, whatever, I think it was the upgrade to Mojave or maybe some point release of Mojave that they released after doing all this testing. It's like, okay, go forth and update.
00:26:16 ◼ ► And the way they pulled it is if you launch the updater or the installer, they would kill minus nine the process.
00:26:23 ◼ ► Not even a nice kill. People were saying, this isn't a console log that says this thing was killed signal nine. What's going on here? It's like, yeah, that's us. We're stopping you from upgrading. But I thought you said we can upgrade. Yeah, we did say that, but we changed our mind.
00:26:33 ◼ ► Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right. So if you happen to work at Apple or know somebody that does that may be able to fix this, I'd appreciate it. Tom Casey sent you.
00:26:42 ◼ ► Then I'd like to turn this frown upside down and do a quick Chippods review because my new AirPods came in earlier today.
00:26:51 ◼ ► I've only been able to use them very, very briefly, but I love them. They are tremendous. I love that I can just use the Qi charger for them.
00:27:01 ◼ ► I can't say that I really had a problem with plugging in the lightning cord, but as with all things, I am of the opinion that fewer wires is better.
00:27:09 ◼ ► Now, one thing I wanted to specifically call out is that I've been trying to get into this whole HomeKit thing, which is both bliss and a total dumpster fire, depending on which particular part of HomeKit you're working with.
00:27:22 ◼ ► I don't really want to get into a HomeKit rant right now. Maybe I'll do that another day. But as part of the bedtime process for Michaela, I need to tell her lamp in her room to turn off.
00:27:33 ◼ ► Previously, if I was listening to a podcast as I was just rocking her to sleep or something like that, what I found myself doing was using Hey Dingus with my watch.
00:27:44 ◼ ► Because if I tried to do it with my phone, after a while, it just refused to listen to me when my AirPods were connected.
00:27:52 ◼ ► It may be a hardware issue with my particular AirPods. I'm not sure what was going on. But there was a problem where it just wouldn't hear me on my phone.
00:27:59 ◼ ► So I would use Hey Dingus on my watch, and it would work, although it would take a little while.
00:28:03 ◼ ► Today, as I was putting her to sleep, I thought, "Oh, these new AirPods are supposed to use Hey Dingus as well."
00:28:11 ◼ ► So I said, "Hey Dingus, turn off Michaela's lamp." And sure enough, it worked no problem.
00:28:21 ◼ ► I didn't have any of that awful thing where it falls from the high-quality audio back to headset audio, and then forgets to go back to high-quality audio.
00:28:44 ◼ ► Just for that one moment each day, I don't think I'll use it that often other than that, but just that one moment, I'm really excited.
00:28:56 ◼ ► Yeah, I was supposed to get them delivered today, but I forgot that you would have to sign for everything that comes from Apple.
00:29:00 ◼ ► So they bounced off my house, but I'll get them as soon as I can be here to sign for them, I will get them.
00:29:08 ◼ ► Yeah, I didn't, but are we glossing over something? Do you listen to podcasts while you're putting your daughter to bed?
00:29:18 ◼ ► I need to use, I need, hey, let's just leave that alone for now. I don't feel like getting into it.
00:29:28 ◼ ► There will come a time that she's going to know what's going on, and that's not going to work anymore.
00:29:35 ◼ ► And I also have quite a lot of smart home ramblings, but I'm going to save those for another day because we should probably get to the Apple event.
00:29:58 ◼ ► Have you ever tried a Buckwheat Pillow? It is totally different than the kind of fluffy, soft pillows that most of us are used to.
00:30:05 ◼ ► It's kind of similar to a bean bag, so you can position it however you want, and then it stays there.
00:30:11 ◼ ► So however you want to set it up to support your head and neck, it will support it like that as long as you want it to.
00:30:25 ◼ ► You know, whatever you're laying your head on at night, maybe it's like a bag of bird feathers or some kind of petroleum-based foam.
00:30:46 ◼ ► You can add or remove how much fill is in it, because there's a zipper on the side and you can open it up, you can empty it out, you can add more, you can replace it over time.
00:31:04 ◼ ► You can see for yourself on their site and it's been extensively used in Japan for a long time.
00:31:30 ◼ ► If you don't like it after that time, just send it back. They will give you a full refund.
00:31:44 ◼ ► If you try more than one, you can get a discount of the $20 per pillow as well depending on the size.
00:31:49 ◼ ► Every order comes with fast, free shipping and 1% of all profits are donated to the Nature Conservancy.
00:32:12 ◼ ► So I feel like I would like to summarize my thoughts on this by kind of sort of quoting two different people.
00:32:20 ◼ ► First of all, something that friend of the show, Mike Hurley, has been saying a lot lately,
00:32:24 ◼ ► or at least I'm pretty sure it's been Mike, he's not the only one of course, but especially Mike,
00:32:32 ◼ ► And I think something that's been interesting for me to come to a little bit of terms with,
00:32:44 ◼ ► is that the apple that I, if you'll permit me, grew up on, which isn't actually true, but you get the idea,
00:32:56 ◼ ► And that isn't necessarily bad, but it's different, and it's something we have to get used to.
00:33:03 ◼ ► And so Mike has been saying, you know, for a long time, this ain't the same apple anymore,
00:33:08 ◼ ► And I think there's a lot of truth to that, and we'll talk a lot more about that in a minute.
00:33:21 ◼ ► "Apple at its best is a company that announces something that you want right now and can get in a short time."
00:33:32 ◼ ► And I think that that was really, really astute, because anything that they've announced that I've been really, really amped about,
00:33:39 ◼ ► AirPods being a great example, they were announced, well, the new ones, anyway, were announced as available now.
00:33:49 ◼ ► And phones typically work that way, with the, of course, exception of the original iPhone.
00:33:57 ◼ ► New Macs and MacBooks, with the exception of the MacBook Pro, or, excuse me, the Mac Pro,
00:34:15 ◼ ► So that's kind of my opening statement. Any other openings, thoughts, or do we just want to kind of crawl through this whole thing?
00:34:23 ◼ ► We'll crawl through it, but let me comment on what you said, or your ageist comments about how it's going to be the most upsetting for me for Apple to have changed.
00:34:31 ◼ ► You got that exactly backwards. Anyone who has been following the company for as long as I have is so used to Apple transforming and reinventing itself, like Madonna,
00:34:42 ◼ ► that there is no change that we find particularly jarring. You have no idea how different the older Apples were from the Apple today.
00:34:50 ◼ ► Short time Apple fans have their definitive Apple that they think, whether it's the iPod era, or like the iMac era, or the iPhone era,
00:34:59 ◼ ► and then they have like a short time with that that's cemented in their minds, the one and only Apple,
00:35:05 ◼ ► then there's this weird time where it's different, and then there's the current Apple that is different still, and they're like, "Why can't it just be that one Apple?"
00:35:10 ◼ ► But the longer you spend with the company, the more you realize there is never one Apple. It's just a series of them.
00:35:15 ◼ ► So I don't find this change jarring at all. That said, you can debate the merits of the change, because there's such a thing as good change and bad change,
00:35:24 ◼ ► and we'll talk about each of those in each of the services we do in turn, but people shouldn't fear change. People should expect it,
00:35:30 ◼ ► and I think the older you are when it comes to Apple fandom, the more accustomed you are to this kind of dramatic change.
00:35:37 ◼ ► That's an interesting point. I definitely did not think of it that way, but I totally get what you're saying, and I'm proud of you, Jon. That's a good way of looking at it.
00:35:45 ◼ ► And I think what Mike calls it out like, and all the younger people call it out, is because they feel it a little bit themselves,
00:35:52 ◼ ► but realize that it's an instinct they have to fight against. Like, "Oh, it's not just always going to be the Apple of the iPhone, or the Apple of the iMac, or whatever. It's going to change."
00:35:59 ◼ ► And they get called out on it, but they see people who are yelling about how Apple is changing in a bad way, and they're like,
00:36:07 ◼ ► "No, I have that feeling briefly too, but I thought better of it, and you should be." So I feel like it's more of a conversation among younger people
00:36:15 ◼ ► than the old-timers who are grizzled veterans of the transforming Apple. Anyway, that's my comment on your opening statement.
00:36:29 ◼ ► I think my summary of this event is, we're bringing together artists and storytellers to tell stories about artists bringing us together with storytelling.
00:36:42 ◼ ► Oh my god, they could not have been more heavy-handed with all that language. But the technology industry is very big.
00:36:50 ◼ ► And it's always growing even bigger. And there's a whole bunch of stuff that we just don't cover.
00:36:56 ◼ ► Because it's either out of our expertise, or we don't care that much about it, or we just don't have time to cover it with three opinionated people talking for two hours every week.
00:37:08 ◼ ► You can't cover everything that way. And you know, there's things like, we hardly cover Android at all.
00:37:14 ◼ ► There's important issues going on in tech that we often just don't have time to cover or haven't covered yet. Things like the new EU copyright directive, we haven't covered that at all.
00:37:22 ◼ ► We haven't talked about Elizabeth Warren's proposal to break up all the tech companies at all.
00:37:38 ◼ ► And I think part of the discomfort here, for me at least, and I think for a lot of people like us, is that Apple's starting to do a lot more stuff that we just don't care about.
00:37:49 ◼ ► You know, Apple's a big company searching for all sorts of new ways to make billions of dollars that they haven't made before.
00:37:55 ◼ ► They're just doing billions of dollars. And so they're going to do a lot of boring big company stuff.
00:38:00 ◼ ► And part of the, I think, discomfort that I have with it is Apple's doing a bunch of stuff now that I either don't care at all about.
00:38:11 ◼ ► And/or that I think is actually really kind of un-Apple-like in my own definition of what that means.
00:38:24 ◼ ► And the reality is that, you know, my version of it, it's kind of like when people complain about every generation of BMWs that came after the one they bought first.
00:38:34 ◼ ► Right? Like it's like, oh, after that it ruined, they ruined it, but that was the best one.
00:38:40 ◼ ► It's like, whenever you came to Apple, that's like what you view as, like, that's what's Apple like.
00:38:50 ◼ ► And so I think we're feeling a lot of that as they do a lot of things here and they tell a lot of stories with artists and storytelling and stories that just are not at all things we care about.
00:39:00 ◼ ► All right, so let's go through this. I will try to hurry us along as quickly as possible.
00:39:10 ◼ ► Plus is a theme throughout this event, which at first I was kind of like, really? But I actually think it's okay.
00:39:17 ◼ ► It saves them from the naming problems. We were like, oh, what are they going to call this stuff?
00:39:21 ◼ ► And by the way, no bundle, spoilers. But you're like, what are they going to call these things? What are they going to call their video service?
00:39:26 ◼ ► They're going to call Apple Video and they came up with a novel solution similar to the eye in front of all their old products, which is we'll just put a plus on the end.
00:39:35 ◼ ► You just take an existing product name and you add a plus to it and it's a whole new product name and they can add additional pluses.
00:39:45 ◼ ► And I think they didn't announce a bundle today, but I think that's partly because the stuff is super early.
00:39:55 ◼ ► Right, exactly. Probably because most of these things aren't even available for purchase for the next six months.
00:40:00 ◼ ► And didn't even announce pricing for a lot of them. So I think a bundle can still come.
00:40:05 ◼ ► And I think when and if the bundle does come, and I still think it really should, the obvious name for it is Apple+.
00:40:11 ◼ ► I still don't think they're going to do that. I think if they put a plus on it, they'll have to...
00:40:18 ◼ ► Here's the thing about the plus. If you have an existing product name, you have to add the plus to differentiate the plus version from the non-plus version.
00:40:31 ◼ ► Because Apple Card, who the hell wants the Apple Card? It doesn't even have a plus after it. What the hell is that?
00:40:38 ◼ ► Apple News is the one thing that is available now. We all have it on our phones and Macs if we updated Foolishly by Casey.
00:40:44 ◼ ► Breaking our email. The fact that we have it on our computing device doesn't mean that it works.
00:40:52 ◼ ► I have the new Apple News app on my Mac at work, which is updated to the latest version of Mac OS.
00:41:05 ◼ ► Yeah, if you look, Steve Trout and Smith have been doing a lot of sleuthing on Apple News and discovering a lot of problems with the way it's implemented.
00:41:12 ◼ ► Including that apparently there's some bad data being fed from the servers that's causing some index out of bounds exception or something like that.
00:41:21 ◼ ► And it's like, that's not great. A, it's not great that you've got like poison data in your CDNs and you should find a way to fix that.
00:41:30 ◼ ► That happens to the best of us. But I think, I mean, so out of curiosity, like have either of you subscribed to News Plus? Because I have and I have some thoughts.
00:41:39 ◼ ► Yep, I subscribe because it's got a one-month free trial. So just put a reminder in your calendar to cancel because you can't cancel as soon as you subscribe because the cancellation happens immediately.
00:41:48 ◼ ► And there's a month to try it out. And I totally tried it out despite the fact that I really despise Apple News. I'm like, I'll try a free trial.
00:41:55 ◼ ► Yeah, I didn't try the Apple News Plus yet, but I will say, and this is only tangentially related, that I have found myself in the evenings, like as I'm getting ready to go to sleep, popping open Apple News, particularly on my iPad, and just checking out like what's being talked about, which I really like as a kind of brief way to see what the rest of the world seems to think is important.
00:42:19 ◼ ► And so I probably will at some point try Apple News Plus, but I haven't had the chance to yet.
00:42:25 ◼ ► Yeah, I've tried it and I actually, so I was, I had to renew my driver's license this week. And so right before I went to the DMV, which I knew would be a long, boring wait in a building with very poor cell reception, I downloaded a bunch of magazines to read in Apple News Plus.
00:42:41 ◼ ► So the way that this is implemented, I think is smart. A lot of people are saying, isn't this just the new News Stand, like what Apple previously launched as News Stand in, I believe, iOS 5, and it kind of flopped and didn't really go anywhere.
00:42:55 ◼ ► News Stand was challenging, and I know this as somebody who published a magazine briefly in News Stand. It was the epitome of the idea of, Apple's old idea of like, just let people build apps.
00:43:06 ◼ ► Let every company who wants to be in this new store build their own app. And you can see a lot of parallels to the way they did TV later.
00:43:13 ◼ ► And the result was similar with News Stand. The result was some companies made good apps, but most companies didn't.
00:43:21 ◼ ► And so you had really like, you know, must read important big name content, mostly being served in a really terrible collection of apps.
00:43:30 ◼ ► Like, they were inconsistent, every app worked differently, they were almost all bad, they all had their own separate subscriptions that you had to do and everything.
00:43:39 ◼ ► And even though the app store made it somewhat easy to manage subscriptions, it was still nowhere near as nice as like having a built-in business model of everyone just pays, you know, people just pay once and get everything.
00:43:48 ◼ ► So this, the new way of doing this is, Apple writes the app. The publishers simply provide the content feed, whatever that is, whether it's the Apple News format or the weirdo PDF ones.
00:43:59 ◼ ► Whatever it is, that's fine, because that's all publishers know how to do. Publishers can't and shouldn't write their own apps, you know, every time.
00:44:09 ◼ ► So having one app that you can see all the content in, Apple can make that one app really good in a few ways they haven't, but they can make that app really good.
00:44:17 ◼ ► And it can be, you know, consistently formatted, consistently navigated, and to have the built-in business model of you just pay once and Apple splits it up among the publishers.
00:44:28 ◼ ► However they do it while taking a giant cut, that solves a lot of problems that Newsstand had.
00:44:34 ◼ ► And so I think this is way better for publishers in general, maybe not for certain ones, but in general way better for publishers and way better for users than what Newsstand was.
00:44:44 ◼ ► Because it just, it makes everything consistent and easier and it lets publishers specialize in what they should be specializing in, which is the content, and not trying to build a good app every single time.
00:44:56 ◼ ► So from that point of view, I like the way they're doing News Plus. I think it's good. I think $10 a month is a great price for what you're getting here.
00:45:04 ◼ ► And that's why I signed up. So I was going to go, you know, I was going to go sit for a while somewhere offline, so I thought, alright, let me download some magazines.
00:45:13 ◼ ► It's not, I'm not an Apple news expert, I haven't usually used Apple news, so most of the UI was new to me. You can browse magazines literally just alphabetically, like A through N, or A through M, and N through Z is the two sections.
00:45:29 ◼ ► So you go through and you gotta find the ones you want and you can hit the little cloud download icon on the ones that you want to download.
00:45:36 ◼ ► So I went through, I downloaded like six or seven magazines, figuring I'll check these all out and see how they are and everything, I'll find something to read.
00:45:43 ◼ ► And I also wanted, I also want to download the newspapers, like the Wall Street Journal, the LA Times, like those are big newspapers, I want to see how those are, I want to download those.
00:45:52 ◼ ► Could not figure out how to do that. And maybe I just missed it, but it was not obvious, not an obvious place.
00:45:58 ◼ ► Anyway, so I get to the DMV and I sit there for about an hour as I expected, and I go back to news and I could not for the life of me find a list of the ones I had downloaded.
00:46:11 ◼ ► The only way I could navigate these was to go back into those giant A through M, N through Z sections and just scroll, scroll, scroll, and find them just by looking at which ones were downloaded by their cloud icon.
00:46:24 ◼ ► And as far as I can tell, there is no apparent way, at least no way I could find to say like these are my magazines, like I want to subscribe, quote, to these six magazines and always be notified when they have new issues and have them always be downloaded.
00:46:43 ◼ ► There's a favorites feature, it's very hard to find, but there is a favorites feature. I spent a while trying to find it because I did see the heart at one point, I'm like, oh, that's your favorite things, great. It was for magazines, not for newspapers. But then I'm like, okay, so I can favorite things.
00:46:55 ◼ ► And at some point I lost that screen, I'm like, how do you favorite things again? So I did that iOS thing that we all do, which is basically like the equivalent of right clicking or searching through the menus on a Mac.
00:47:04 ◼ ► It's like I'm presented with an interface, I'm pretty sure the functionality is there, but I don't know where it is. Let me just hold my finger down on this thing for a really long time or maybe try force pressing it.
00:47:13 ◼ ► Believe it or not, what it popped up was one of those, I don't know what this is called, Marco, you would know the, you know the thing that pops up that has like cut and copy on it and like look up or define like that black pop up segmented control?
00:47:25 ◼ ► I think it's just called UI menu controller. Yeah, great name for it. Anyway, that thing popped up and one of the little black bar segments was favorite. I'm like, are you kidding me?
00:47:35 ◼ ► But yeah, there is a way to favorite is just not particularly obvious. All right. Yeah. So I didn't find it. So thank you. I'll try that. But anyway, so you know, so it was fine.
00:47:46 ◼ ► So I, I eventually scrolled through the giant list and found the magazines I had downloaded and you know, read some articles and it was indeed a really good experience reading the articles. It was, I think all the ones I read were Apple news format because they were all perfectly formatted for my phone instead of being the PDF type.
00:48:01 ◼ ► So I read like, you know, some things in the Atlantic and the New Yorker and stuff like that and, and it was fine. They were mostly fine. I love there's no ads.
00:48:10 ◼ ► I had no issues with, you know, any formatting or content or something like that. So I realized like I just hate magazines. It turns out I don't like reading the news because most of what I was able to find was like, turns out kind of interesting stuff or it was like modern political stuff, which I don't.
00:48:30 ◼ ► I just don't want to read all that. And, and so it was all stuff that's either going to like make me sad or angry or like not very deep articles and things I actually cared about. So it turns out I just don't like the news.
00:48:41 ◼ ► And then I earlier today when the aforementioned Joanna Stern article on the Wall Street Journal about the keyboard was released, I, I first hit the link and hit the Wall Street Journal paywall somewhere like in some little web browser.
00:48:56 ◼ ► So I thought, okay, let me go to Apple news and search for this title, which I did yesterday to read a Wall Street Journal article and it worked fine. Let me go to the, I mean, and granted, keep in mind, like we have universal links.
00:49:09 ◼ ► We, I don't know why I can't just say like open in news from a webpage and have it open in my paid for news subscription in the news app, but okay, we'll set that aside for now. The, the complete lack of the news app interacting with the web and URLs set that aside for the moment.
00:49:28 ◼ ► And so anyway, so I decided to look for the Joanna Stern thing so I could read it and it's not there. And, and I think I saw her tell somebody on Twitter like earlier today like, oh yeah, it isn't there cause it's part of some dynamic thing and some, it's some section of the Wall Street Journal that isn't being made available.
00:49:44 ◼ ► So it's just like, I don't, I, I'm trying so hard to like news plus, but I think it's just not for me. I think it's, it's given me access to a bunch of content I don't want. It turns out and a bunch of, and, and the news and stuff that I actually do want is really hard to navigate.
00:50:03 ◼ ► It's, and there's, and there were actually a lot of publications that I wanted to be in it that weren't like the first thing I looked for that wasn't there was The Economist, Harper's isn't there, New York Times isn't there.
00:50:15 ◼ ► Like these are, these are pretty big names that, and yes, they all have their own subscription things, but like I would have liked if those were there and they're not.
00:50:22 ◼ ► And the interface for browsing the actual newspapers is seemingly non-existent and barely there. So I, yeah, I think, I think it's a really nice looking implementation of something that I don't actually want and has some functional problems.
00:50:39 ◼ ► I think that Joanna Stearns article brings up a good point. I'm not sure what reason she gave for it not being there. And there was some debate about what parts of the Wall Street Journal are visible in, in Apple news plus versus the ones that are only available through search in Apple news plus or whatever.
00:50:52 ◼ ► But practically speaking, if you've seen, if you've seen that Wall Street Journal article, which by the way, it's behind a paywall, but if you search for the headline in Google, like a Google search results, it'll let you see the whole thing.
00:51:02 ◼ ► As Casey described, it has these little iOS style title switches on the page that lets you turn on and off the letter E's and the letter R's and stuff. It's part of the gag, right?
00:51:11 ◼ ► That's, that's a webpage and it's got a bunch of these custom, you know, little widgets powered by JavaScript in the article. Cause it's kind of like a one-off fun, interesting thing to do in an article.
00:51:22 ◼ ► On the web, that's something you can do. You can have a CMS and have a system for publishing articles, but you can have the one-off and like, oh, we're going to put these cool little controls in here and write some JavaScript and have some people do that.
00:51:31 ◼ ► Right. In anything like Apple news or magazines where there's like, whatever the A and F Apple news format, whatever thing. And then you can also publish magazines in PDF, which is kind of gross, but a lot of people do it because it's easy because they already have to make something like that for their print editions.
00:51:47 ◼ ► It's not the web. You touched on it with the, the, the, the linking structure, the fact that you can't send these things to Instapaper and limited control over font sizes and other things that you would have in web browsers.
00:51:59 ◼ ► Apple news is not the web. Much of that content is on the web. There is a Washington post website. There is a New York times website, and you can look at them in web browsers on your phone and have a separate description being not the web.
00:52:11 ◼ ► As far as I'm concerned is a big downside to this service. Now, is it a downside to the success of this service? Like maybe it'll be super successful because it's not the web, right? I don't know.
00:52:21 ◼ ► All I know is that I don't like the fact that it's not the web because the web has an entire ecosystem of tools and you know, software surrounding it that lets people navigate and read the web.
00:52:31 ◼ ► Same kind of thing with like RSS readers where RSS, I felt like is part of the web. It doesn't dictate how you read the content. In fact, it usually sends you to a web browser or uses a web view, but you have the option to do either. And either way, they're all URLs, right?
00:52:44 ◼ ► I like the idea of content being on the web. Call me crazy. Newspaper, newspaper, magazines, like all these things exist on the web. Lots of magazines that I read in paper edition have websites and so do newspapers and some of those websites and newspapers have paywalls and ways to pay for them and so on and so forth.
00:53:01 ◼ ► So very often I look at Apple news and I'm like, is this solving a problem for me? I mean, $10 a month for tons of content? Yeah, that's solving a problem. It's letting me get more content for less money. Okay, good. But it introduces its own set of problems. You get less content for more money.
00:53:15 ◼ ► Reverse of that. So watch that. You get more content for less money. But on the downside, it's no longer on the web really. And all the things that you might want to do with content on the web or the ways you want to read it or experience it or save it or whatever, most of that's not going to be available for you.
00:53:32 ◼ ► Even just sharing it with other people and being able to give people links. Like for years now, when I've seen an Apple news link in someone's tweet, I have frowned. I don't click it. If I can possibly avoid it, I don't click it. If I hit one accidentally because it was gone through some other link shortener or something, I didn't notice it was an Apple user's URL. I get pissed off when it launches Apple news. Like if you link me something, link it on the web.
00:53:54 ◼ ► So as far as I'm concerned, the only function of Apple news that is a net win for me is the ability to read lots of magazines for a lower price. And by the way, Margot Karndriver is in there, which I know you don't subscribe to, but I think it's a really good magazine.
00:54:09 ◼ ► Despite some of the strange political pains you will find in there. You should check it out because it's part of your subscription. And so is Wired, which I stopped subscribing to years ago. And it was very difficult to make that happen. But now it's back on my phone.
00:54:23 ◼ ► I actually did download Wire, but I had to scroll down to W and so I forgot to do it when I was trying to actually read.
00:54:29 ◼ ► Yeah. By the way, the phone, I was just looking at the favoriting thing. The phone interface seems like subtly different than the iPad one. The iPad one has the sidebar or whatever. Anyway, if you want to favorite something, either one of them, you have to make sure the title of the publication is visible in like a little banner at the top.
00:54:42 ◼ ► Right. So if you scroll, it goes away. But if you go up to the top, there's a title tap on the title, which will bring you to the page of the publication itself, not just the issue. And then there'll be hearts. It's not a great interface. Anyway, I'm not a fan of Apple News because it's not part of the web. But if you want to get some magazines for cheap on your phone or iPad, it's not terrible.
00:54:59 ◼ ► And apparently they really are taking a 50% cut, which seems insane to me. But I mean, you can't tell if it's taking a 50% cut because this is the hilarious part. I think of the LA Times and the Wall Street Journal both had stories about the cut that Apple's taking. Both of them know the cut that Apple's taking. But like the sort of the wall between editorial and business is such that the articles have to be written from the perspective of, you know, sources familiar with the matter.
00:55:23 ◼ ► Like reporters in the paper where the executives of the paper know what the deal is, but maybe the reporters don't like leak to their very it's it's a silly game. But yeah, that in terms of the economics of how this is helping or hurting journalism, it seems like a thing that many publications may find themselves having to do because it is in the end advantageous to them money wise, just because there are so many people.
00:55:46 ◼ ► But it doesn't seem like that's not the way they would really want it to happen. As I don't think that's the way any of us really wanted to happen. But I mean, it's like they bragged about on stage. Did you know that Apple News is the most new used news application on the iPhone? Did you guys know that?
00:56:01 ◼ ► You don't say it's installed by default people like it doesn't mean it's the best news application. It doesn't mean it's the most satisfying doesn't mean it's the most conducive to the to the future health of the news industry in this country. All it means is that it's installed by default. And I feel like bragging about it on a slide is rubbing salt in people's wounds because anyway, I get some magazines for cheap. Go for it. Apple News Plus.
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00:58:28 ◼ ► Then we go to Apple Card which will be available this summer in America. And Apple Card I kid you not is a Apple branded MasterCard that is backed by Goldman Sachs. I guess the sell of it is is that it's designed by Apple both a physical card that's made of titanium that is designed by Apple and you know the entire experience is designed by Apple.
00:58:53 ◼ ► So it's integrated with Apple Wallet of course. It's supposed to be a much better experience for you to manage. It's supposed to surface where you're spending your money and how you're spending your money in slightly clever and interesting ways.
00:59:08 ◼ ► It's supposed to help you with your financial health in the sense that it is it is very clear about what if you only pay you know the minimum payment this is how long it will take you to pay off the credit card and we really recommend you pay more and you know you there's like a little circular wheel where you can kind of fine tune how much you want to pay etc etc.
00:59:27 ◼ ► And then the arguably most interesting piece of it is that there's a cashback structure. So if you buy something at Apple including it seems things in the App Store you get 3% back.
00:59:42 ◼ ► For everything else in the world you get 2% back and then you only get 1% if you use that fancy pants physical titanium card that they will eventually send you.
00:59:52 ◼ ► Now they pitched the card and said there's no fees and the interest rate is really really good and that seems to maybe be some really good marketing spin because the APR the interest rate seems to be about the same as any other credit card which is not good.
01:00:14 ◼ ► And I've heard very conflicting reports as to whether or not there will be say like foreign transaction fees and stuff like that. In fact somebody pointed out I don't have the tweet handy but somebody pointed out that in their own slide they one of their own slides they made mention of a foreign transaction fee but that that may have been taken out of context or wrong or something I'm not sure but I'm I'm not sure what to think of this I don't think I have a problem with it I think it's weird for Apple to be a bank but I mean they're already kind of halfway there as it is.
01:00:42 ◼ ► I should mention that the cash back stuff rides via Apple Pay Cash which is to say they're kind of debit card within Apple Pay that you can use for person to person transfers so this cash back it comes every single day that was the other thing it comes every single day rather than like once every quarter or something like that.
01:01:01 ◼ ► So every evening or morning or what have you you'll get your three two or one percent put back but instead of being put back onto the card it's put back into your Apple Pay Cash virtual debit card.
01:01:13 ◼ ► So I think the idea is that you're just kind of sucked or your money anyway is kind of sucked within Apple's ecosystem forevermore.
01:01:20 ◼ ► I think that's kind of my executive summary. I don't know Marco what do you think about this?
01:01:26 ◼ ► Well just for a quick clarification you can get Apple cash out of that into your bank just by linking a debit card or anything so it isn't trapped in there forever but clearly Apple you know wants you to.
01:01:38 ◼ ► You know this is one of those things where again like Apple's doing some boring big company thing they're trying to make this sound like they're doing you a favor by keeping your data private and everything else but look this is Apple trying to get more of your money in a pretty bland and kind of shameless way.
01:01:57 ◼ ► This is still a credit card and Apple pays a certain percent of their transaction volume to credit card processors that aren't them and they want to capture that so that they can keep it instead of instead of the other credit card processors.
01:02:10 ◼ ► I think it's simple as that. This is a way for them to get more money in this kind of boring big company way.
01:02:17 ◼ ► They are not the first unrelated to credit cards company to launch a credit card almost every major retailer has one. Amazon has one another big tech company and you can and it has actually has better rewards if you buy lots of an Amazon.
01:02:32 ◼ ► So this is not like you know totally uncharted waters here this is like you know a big company doing boring big company thing and it does look really nice. I don't know if I have much of a use for it my I have enough credit cards and that is two.
01:02:49 ◼ ► I consider that enough as a quick summary of my strategy as a result of a vacation a couple years ago where both my one credit card and my debit card to my bank were locked and compromised within the time I was on the trip such that I had no more credit cards or way to get cash on while on vacation.
01:03:14 ◼ ► To alleviate that I now have a separate policy where my debit card only ever goes into an ATM by my bank. It never goes into anything else but that does never use online for any purchases ever and my credit card I basically had to get a second credit card because my first credit card was an American Express.
01:03:35 ◼ ► And not everyone takes American Express so I wanted something else to cover the gap where I would be accepted everywhere and so I got a second credit card that was a visa and so now everything gets charged to one of those two things and my debit card is used for nothing except ATMs of my bank.
01:03:52 ◼ ► And so for the Apple you know for Apple's card to be another credit card doesn't really solve any problems I personally have and it's a MasterCard and while I don't I can't think of any time that I saw something that accepted visa but not MasterCard.
01:04:10 ◼ ► I know that visa is the most widely accepted one of all these things so if I was going to just have one or have one be like my maybe not accepted everywhere card I want to be visa and a MasterCard anyway all that is to say this looks fine for you it looks like it's more for a world in which Apple pays everywhere.
01:04:31 ◼ ► But in my world that's not the case and maybe that's true for more people you know in my world Apple pay is not everywhere it's actually still a fairly like novel thing that oh you take Apple pay how nice and so the benefits of this card when you're not using Apple pay are significantly reduced and less competitive compared to other cards.
01:04:54 ◼ ► And so I just don't think that this is going to be that compelling of an option for me and for a lot of people but you know it's still it's really nice and if you don't object to having more credit cards and you might need it might be a nice option to get that those rewards on Apple purchase and I don't and I might eventually get it just for that 3% back on Apple purchases.
01:05:14 ◼ ► Yeah I feel the same way yeah but ultimately like you know the interest rates are just like everyone else's interest rates there's still the ability to get into financial trouble with it they're making certain things nicer and that's great I'm proud of them but it's still at the end of the day a credit card and my concern with it is that Apple now has a strong financial incentive to make using other credit cards worse on their platforms to push this credit card.
01:05:43 ◼ ► Push this credit card heavily and and to to provide it abilities that other credit cards don't get or to add speed bumps to the use of other credit cards to push more people into theirs and Apple already like plays fast and loose with the rule against promoting stuff by push notifications things like that with their own apps like they and so I just see a future in which Apple keeps building more and more.
01:06:09 ◼ ► Incentives for them to be a little bit crappy to us to make themselves more money and it's you know the company already can't prevent like Apple music from spamming people with notifications to extend their free trial or whatever like they already can't keep that under control.
01:06:26 ◼ ► This is going to be worse they're going to be sending us push notifications for marketing their stupid credit card like and and that's that's I don't I don't love that at all that I think we're heading into a period of of this kind of like just shameless corporate mediocrity here that's going to annoy us with spam ultimately and I don't like seeing Apple build systems that will incentivize this but that's what they're doing.
01:06:50 ◼ ► I think a credit card is an interesting vaguely Apple like area to get into this if you think about a couple of their recent big product introductions and obviously they're their their biggest most recent one.
01:07:04 ◼ ► The background behind it is basically like there's a thing vaguely related to the skill set of Apple that most people don't like and a while back that was smartphones yeah there are phones out there but most people don't really like their cell phones like it ask around the room a bunch of Apple executives who really loves their phone we were like I love a Blackberry it's awesome like yeah but isn't really great or just love what it does for you and then other people like I don't really like my phone at all because I'm not into Blackberry.
01:07:33 ◼ ► I'm not into Blackberry and it's just an annoying like find an area of find a product area where everybody has one and some of them are OK but for the most part people don't love them and can we can we go there can we make a big difference that can we make a phone that people will absolutely be head over heels for and that was the iPhone right credit cards very similar.
01:07:53 ◼ ► A lot of people have them almost everybody in the US probably who really loves their credit card like maybe you have one that you like more than the other maybe you enjoy whatever cash back or airline miles that you get but there's always annoying stuff with cards so it's like an opportunity for Apple to enter a very crowded field where it where this hundred percent market saturation like cell phones or you know personal computers for that matter.
01:08:17 ◼ ► Depending on what area you decide to put that starting poll in and make it better in all the Apple ways now I was not the first company to do this lots of other companies that I think simple as one or this couple other companies with similar names I can't remember they tried to say banking is annoying.
01:08:32 ◼ ► Here is a less annoying bank but it's difficult to do because there are large companies and large barriers to entry and you can't even the cell phone thing Apple thought about but couldn't become its own cell carrier right so it had to partner with singular and AT&T and like it's just it's always a little bit harder than you think even if you have something as amazing as the iPhone so here comes Apple credit card trying to make a credit card that is better slightly less annoying than existing credit cards maybe a credit card that's a little bit harder than you think.
01:08:56 ◼ ► And it has some innovation like the innovation that have these slides with the checkmarks that they they tattered all the things they're going to do for it and a bunch of them were focused on privacy and security and sort of modernization and convenience so like you didn't really lean on this too heavily but the big selling point of this card is like it's essentially a virtual card I know we said there's a physical card but they didn't even get to the physical card until later in the presentation.
01:09:19 ◼ ► It's like how do I get this card through your iPhone you can ask for this card and we can give it to you if we decide to on your iPhone and again but that point presentation they haven't even mentioned a physical card like you use it with Apple Pay and it's magic and it integrates with Apple wallet so here we have a platform advantage and easy use advantage.
01:09:34 ◼ ► A bundling advantage like Apple news it'll come on your iPhone like you know other credit card let's you sign up for it from the home screen of your iPhone that comes straight out of the box and it's got the security of Apple Pay and we have this cool application to let you know you're spending your money and unlike those other credit cards that you have on your iPhone.
01:09:57 ◼ ► And it's got the security of Apple Pay and we have this cool application to let you know you're spending your money and unlike those other credit cards that are annoying and have obscure bills with hard to read transactions on them we're going to do that thing where we figure out what the actual store is and put a nice little icon and show you what your budget is and like a nicer credit card and even the physical card doesn't have a card number on it.
01:10:18 ◼ ► Which seems inconvenient if you have to enter a card number somewhere but of course Apple wants all the websites to use Apple Pay and realistically speaking when websites do use Apple Pay I think Apple fans like it because it's easier than having to enter all your info but anyway it's more secure because it'll have one time use card numbers and do all this other stuff like it is trying to be a better credit card through the power of technology and Apple's platforms.
01:10:41 ◼ ► But like kind of like a cell phone is probably even worse at the end of the day it's a MasterCard it's not like Apple is you know having its own payment network.
01:10:49 ◼ ► They're partnering with Goldman Sachs which is not a fuzzy teddy bear of a company that we all love.
01:10:55 ◼ ► The cash back deals are not as good as the cash back deals for other particular vendors Amazon gives 5% back on its card when you buy from Amazon other companies give even more valuable things back if you do some specific thing whether it's going on a certain airline or buying from a certain store like if you're a super duper bargain hunter this is not the greatest card for you it punishes you for using the physical card which will probably be annoying because there is no actual you know number on it and no CVV code on the back like it's it's a little bit weird.
01:11:24 ◼ ► It's a little bit weird to use you probably need a regular credit card the interest rates maybe go down a little bit lower than other people but otherwise are about the same.
01:11:31 ◼ ► And so I feel like it's this kind of it makes sense that Apple's doing this and I think there is room for them to innovate and they are innovating and I like the idea of them pushing the industry forward to the idea of mostly virtual credit cards without fixed numbers on them because that's all kind of archaic right.
01:11:48 ◼ ► But there's only so much you can push because you know just as it was not a cell phone carrier it's not it's not a bank and Apple is not a you know a payment network.
01:11:56 ◼ ► It has to partner and why is it MasterCard not Visa despite the fact Visa is bigger presumably because MasterCard gave them a better deal.
01:12:03 ◼ ► It's you know I'm it's probably actually surprisingly one of the announcements that I'm the most excited about just because I like the idea of getting 3% back on my Mac Pro.
01:12:12 ◼ ► Which which by the way is you that is it's not tremendously higher than you get back like if I if I you know pay on any other credit card you'll probably get like 2% back.
01:12:23 ◼ ► And you can also compound this I assume with like the whatever the business discount you get from Apple business reps plus the 3% for the direct purchase with this card right.
01:12:32 ◼ ► So this is a question a lot of you what I think I'm going to get this card I think Marco will get this card in case we'll probably get this car just because it'll be so easy to do from our stupid phones.
01:12:39 ◼ ► And we'll use it for Apple purchases to get 3% back but I don't know how much it's going to change our lives because if you can't use it everywhere and the world hasn't converted to Apple pay it just becomes another you know.
01:12:53 ◼ ► Another tool in your tool belt and your financial tool belt and I have way more credit cards than Marco does and I feel like at each opportunity.
01:13:00 ◼ ► Part of the knowing how to navigate the world financially is knowing which card is the best use in which context to give you the most benefits or protection or cash back or whatever.
01:13:10 ◼ ► And this just adds one more item to the list but I think it's a welcome item I'm happy to have a cool looking card I'm happy to have a little titanium thing I'm happy to have a virtual card that with better security things.
01:13:20 ◼ ► I don't care about their literal financial planning thing but it's it's an area for them to innovate and you know I'm ready to get 3% back on my Mac Pro.
01:13:30 ◼ ► If it ever ships. The other thing I was a little disappointed by was there was no discussion I didn't really expect there to be but even after the event I haven't heard any mention of any idea of like a joint accounts or having another user that has permission to use the account.
01:13:50 ◼ ► So what I mean by that is Aaron and I share one credit card you know there's it's issued in both our names and 80 to 90 maybe even damn near 100% of the purchases we make outside of like bills we do against this one credit card.
01:14:10 ◼ ► And so if let's say I wanted to ditch that credit card and switch to Apple card that wouldn't be the case anymore it would now be that Aaron has her card and I have my card which is that a big deal no but it's a big enough deal to me that I don't I don't think I would ever be able to go all in on this until there was some mechanism for having a family account which is funny because so much of this this entire presentation was about how families can share all of these things and in this case.
01:14:38 ◼ ► That's not true now maybe it will be in the future or maybe we just haven't heard about it.
01:14:42 ◼ ► Yeah they didn't say one way or the other like and I would imagine because it's not Apple I mean Apple's doing part of this but in the end it's MasterCard and you can't have a joint MasterCard I believe that I'm not ruling it out but on the other hand look how long it took them to add family support to literally any of their other products.
01:14:57 ◼ ► Right exactly also we should note that there was a really good Twitter thread by a gentleman by the name of Peter Berg who kind of went through a lot of the motivations from this that he expected from Apple side and it's worth reading that it kind of went around our circle a few days ago but if you haven't seen it it's worth reading we'll put a link in the show notes.
01:15:18 ◼ ► Apple Arcade this was something that I really didn't expect to be that impressed by and ended up really impressed by so this is coming in the fall.
01:15:28 ◼ ► Price was not even alluded to and the idea here is that Apple is becoming I guess kind of a publisher I'm not big enough into arcade or really any games to be able to know where the lines are.
01:15:42 ◼ ► But basically Apple seems to be kind of sort of bank rolling the creation of some of these somewhat more indie titles by a bunch of developers that seem to really know what they're doing.
01:15:53 ◼ ► I thought this portion of the entire keynote went the best I don't recall the presenter's name and I apologize but she did a great job I thought that it was really tight I thought they showed more than told which is a problem that they ran into later in the event.
01:16:11 ◼ ► I'm actually kind of excited for this even though I almost never play games really anywhere but particularly on my iOS devices.
01:16:19 ◼ ► I think this looks real good and I think it's interesting that you should be able to use these same games on your Apple TV and even God forbid your Mac.
01:16:30 ◼ ► So Marco you are maybe a little bit more into games than me maybe but I think we probably are close.
01:16:40 ◼ ► I'm actually really excited about it. I look forward to paying 10 bucks a month for games that I tell myself I will play and then never will.
01:16:49 ◼ ► But it looks really nice because you know Apple has some challenges here in the game market because they want to make good stuff or they want good stuff to be on their platforms.
01:17:01 ◼ ► And of course they want more service revenue but set that aside they want good stuff to be on their platforms but the economics of the App Store really favor free to play games that have these weird psychological tricks and gambling mechanics to basically pump money out of people in kind of not that comfortable kind of sleazy ways.
01:17:24 ◼ ► Then there's all these wonderful indie games that don't do that that actually just try to compete on quality but the market for those is really hard.
01:17:33 ◼ ► You know some people make it and they do okay but most people who try to just make a high quality game like never get found never get seen or if they do get found they get ripped off immediately by a bunch of clones and they undercut them on price and everything.
01:17:49 ◼ ► So it's just a hard market. It's a very risky market and it's a market that doesn't easily reward investing in quality.
01:17:58 ◼ ► And so what Apple is doing here I think is very smart on a number of fronts. So number one this is a service that they can include in a bundle that will make them money.
01:18:07 ◼ ► Number two by taking an actual publisher relationship they are fronting money to the game studio or to the game makers and picking the games they want to do this for and supporting them both with money and then with visibility down the road presumably as part of the service.
01:18:26 ◼ ► So Apple is helping them succeed. They're also enforcing standards. So anything involved in Apple Arcade they said as you mentioned it's going to run on all their platforms which is awesome.
01:18:38 ◼ ► Like all the games that are part of this to have running on iPhone, iPad, Mac and Apple TV all be what sounded like a requirement with seamless iCloud switching between them so you can like progress through the game and pick up where you left off on a different device.
01:18:56 ◼ ► That sounded like it was also a requirement they were enforcing. No in app purchases. You get everything up front. No ads. No data collection without consent so it sounds like no data collection without using Apple's built in system.
01:19:08 ◼ ► So that's great. And family sharing included which is kind of a theme of all these services which is also great. This sounds really awesome.
01:19:17 ◼ ► This is a great way to fix the problem of the iOS game market kind of just being crappy in kind of uncomfortable ways.
01:19:28 ◼ ► And you just get really great games made that I'm very excited about in addition to boosting Apple's platforms. Especially boosting the Apple TV and the Mac which really needed.
01:19:39 ◼ ► I mean heck even the iPad. A lot of great games never really make good iPad versions. So this is going to help all these platforms and I think this makes it clearer than ever.
01:19:49 ◼ ► When you look at both Apple News Plus, the new TV app which we'll get to and especially looking at Apple Arcade and this cross platform stuff.
01:19:59 ◼ ► I think we're seeing why Marzipan is made. Marzipan was not made to make it easier for me to make overcast for the Mac. Marzipan I think was made because it's going to make it easier for Apple to do all their stuff.
01:20:11 ◼ ► And for things like games to be more easily ported and things like that and for them to be able to write one TV app and have it run everywhere.
01:20:19 ◼ ► Whatever the reason, the result of this is that they appear to be treating the Mac like a first class citizen. For the first time in a long time.
01:20:29 ◼ ► I wouldn't go that far. Still a second class citizen but it's no longer a ninth class citizen.
01:20:34 ◼ ► All these things that are launching in the fall, it's because they need new OS's and the new OS's are going to be announced at WWDC and they're going to ship in the fall.
01:20:41 ◼ ► So it needs the thing that lets iOS games be easily ported to the Mac which isn't going to be released until the new OS which hasn't been announced.
01:20:48 ◼ ► So all the fall ones when you see fall, just think Marzipan. And it's not the Marzipan that we know today at Mojave, it's the new improved Marzipan that they'll announce at WWDC and give an official name to and tell developers to write for and everything like that.
01:21:04 ◼ ► But that's kind of the whole Marzipan strategy. You said it's not for overcast to be on the Mac but it is.
01:21:10 ◼ ► It's for everything that is on iOS to be more easily ported to the Mac and there are other races and of course that includes Apple's own applications and their services that rely on it.
01:21:21 ◼ ► But they could have just said it works on all of the platforms we care about but not the Mac.
01:21:26 ◼ ► They could have done that but they didn't because they've got this thing that lets them not do that anymore basically by letting iOS stuff run on the Mac.
01:21:33 ◼ ► And by the way everything you just described, I agree that this Apple Arcade is actually a good thing.
01:21:40 ◼ ► But what you just described is like the budding springtime sprout of what console makers have been doing forever.
01:21:51 ◼ ► Having a curated collection of games partially funded where there are standards where you have to conform to, you have to use cloud syncing, you have to be available on this, you have to do that.
01:22:00 ◼ ► The rules for what you have to do for console games, it varies from console to console and from year to year depending on what the manufacturer does.
01:22:07 ◼ ► But that's the point of console games. You have to support cloud sync, you have to support downloadable things, you have to support these resolutions, you have to have this minimum frame rate, you have to have this minimum quality.
01:22:17 ◼ ► And that's why when Apple would get into games and thinking like we're the biggest game maker or whatever, the two slams are always, Apple's not that into games and Apple doesn't really get games.
01:22:28 ◼ ► I think those two slams still apply but less because they're learning. They're saying what works to make high quality games?
01:22:37 ◼ ► It's not like it's a mystery. Apple's out here like we sell more games than anything but people don't like our games because they're like little mini casinos for kids.
01:22:43 ◼ ► What games do people like? It's not a mystery. Consoles have existed forever and people love them.
01:22:48 ◼ ► Like why do people love Nintendo? When is Apple going to buy Nintendo? We were saying for years Nintendo was the most Apple like of console makers.
01:22:56 ◼ ► What's the difference between Nintendo and the iOS app store? And it doesn't take a genius to look at it like how are they different?
01:23:02 ◼ ► Oh well, not anybody can make a game for insert your favorite console here and their games are really high quality and that's how they get to charge 60 bucks for them and people are happy to pay it because the games are amazing.
01:23:12 ◼ ► How is that not the same as Angry Birds? What's the difference between Angry Birds and Zelda?
01:23:16 ◼ ► Like study it for a couple years and say you know what? We could pay for people to make games and we could forbid them from doing casino like things and we can forbid in app purchases entirely and just say like you buy the game and you get the game.
01:23:30 ◼ ► And we can do it as a subscription service and they get on the service revenue and blah blah blah. So they go off in their own direction but they've learned a little bit.
01:23:36 ◼ ► They've learned a little bit from the whole rest of the gaming industry and they're trying to take some of those lessons and incorporate it into their plan.
01:23:44 ◼ ► Now all that said there's a lot of questions about whether this is going to work because they're not eliminating the kitty casino right? That's still going to be there.
01:23:53 ◼ ► They are paying for a bunch of content to be made but as we're going to talk about if we ever have time in the show a little bit later.
01:24:00 ◼ ► Game and as console makers know paying for games to be made is not a thing where money just buys you success because it's a creative process and you can throw money at the wrong people or the wrong ideas or the development process and go wrong.
01:24:15 ◼ ► It is a creative endeavor like making movies or music or whatever. There is an aspect of it like sort of talent cultivation knowing a good game when you see it.
01:24:26 ◼ ► I am entirely not convinced that the people controlling the money for funding games at Apple are as good at picking good games as people with more experience in this area like the console makers.
01:24:39 ◼ ► Everyone has hits and misses and you're lucky when you get some amazing game that just turns out way better than you thought it would but there's a certain amount of both judgment and patience that goes into this.
01:24:52 ◼ ► One of my favorite games that I talk about all the time is Journey which Sony funded. It's a small group of people. Sony funds lots of people all the time. You never know which games are going to be good, which games are going to be crap, which games are going to ship.
01:25:03 ◼ ► Journey took way longer than Sony wanted. It was way over budget and I think if Apple was funding it would they have had the wherewithal to say, "Okay, you can have an extra six months. Okay, we'll put more money in."
01:25:18 ◼ ► Because by all aspects until the game ships, it looks like an abject failure. They said they were going to bring us game. It's crap. They don't have a game finished. You're already over your budget. The time is up. How much more time do you need? We've given you three extensions already.
01:25:29 ◼ ► It takes someone with the experience of a Sony to say, "This is how this business works sometimes. Sometimes the production of the movie is disaster and all our stars are drowning and there are injuries on set."
01:25:40 ◼ ► It goes way over budget and takes way too long, but sometimes at the end you get Titanic. It takes experience to know, "Is this going to be Titanic or is this going to be a water world?"
01:25:51 ◼ ► I don't think Apple... That was about the production of Titanic when I switched from Journey, but the same thing with Journey. It's hard to tell when you're in the midst of it whether you are throwing money down a pit.
01:26:03 ◼ ► Because sometimes you are. Sometimes you're throwing money down a pit and you don't find out until the game ships and everyone hates it and it costs you tons of money.
01:26:10 ◼ ► All I'm saying is that this is a difficult skill that Apple has thus far not had experience in doing in the games industry.
01:26:16 ◼ ► So they're just spreading the money around. To be fair, all the games I saw on their page, they look amazing. Lots of games look amazing in the trailers. It's difficult to tell which is going to be a great game, which will resonate with people.
01:26:28 ◼ ► Especially with these types of games, the idea is not to be super addictive like Candy Crush. The idea is to be entertaining and enjoyable in the way that Nintendo games are.
01:26:40 ◼ ► Where they don't rely on energy mechanics or time limiting or manipulative things. They rely on the fact that they're fun and they're manipulative in a different way, but hopefully in a nicer way.
01:26:50 ◼ ► So I hope Apple is successful with this endeavor. Successful enough that the money they put in to make these games, they make back in subscriptions.
01:27:00 ◼ ► Successful enough that the studios that made the games, their cut of that subscription revenue is enough to fund their next game.
01:27:08 ◼ ► And the game industry as a whole, it's very difficult. Very often a studio that makes an amazing game like Journey that's critically acclaimed will still end up going practically bankrupt.
01:27:16 ◼ ► Because they did go over budget and people did work for a certain period of time and they don't have a next game and it's exclusive to Sony for a certain number of years and they have to regroup.
01:27:24 ◼ ► It's a difficult business. But Apple is finally doing some things that look from the outside more like what everybody else is doing.
01:27:34 ◼ ► And if they do them reasonably well and/or they are very patient and willing to throw lots of money at it and try and try again, they could hopefully build a tiny corner of the App Store for games in which the games that they ship are viewed positively by all involved.
01:27:51 ◼ ► The developers, the users, Apple, everybody. I wish them the best of luck because I want this to succeed.
01:27:58 ◼ ► But I recognize that it is not a thing that Apple has done before and no amount of money can pay for you to get good at it.
01:28:05 ◼ ► I just hope they either have already hired the right people or do hire the right people who know how this stuff works to give them the best chance of success.
01:28:13 ◼ ► I just wanted to quickly reiterate what Marco said, which is that I found this really, really exciting as someone who really doesn't find games that exciting.
01:28:21 ◼ ► So I'm very curious how much it would cost. I said to Marco on Twitter yesterday or the day before that I can't imagine it being less than 20 bucks.
01:28:31 ◼ ► And between Marco and some others telling me about other services that I was not previously aware of all costing $10, I think Marco you're probably right that $10, maybe $15 will be the answer.
01:28:42 ◼ ► But I don't know. We'll see. It seems like if they knew, they should have just told us.
01:28:46 ◼ ► But one way or another, this is more exciting than I expected and I'm really interested to see what games come from Apple Arcade.
01:29:01 ◼ ► There's an app. There's Apple TV Plus, which is some content that's made by Apple, which we'll talk about in a minute.
01:29:09 ◼ ► There's Apple TV 4K, which is a box and Apple TV HD, which is the box that preceded the Apple TV 4K.
01:29:16 ◼ ► But for now, we need to talk about the Apple TV app, which apparently is coming in May and it is going to be revamped in ways that I honestly couldn't notice.
01:29:33 ◼ ► The best part of that demo, they had someone up on stage demoing the new Apple TV app before they revealed all the other stuff that we're going to talk about their original content and the channels and blah, blah, blah.
01:29:42 ◼ ► They're just demoing. Here's the new Apple TV app and here's the ways that it's better.
01:29:46 ◼ ► And this poor person has the Apple TV remote that we all know and hate connected by a wire to avoid any weird, presumably Bluetooth like, you know, stuff like you don't want when you demo.
01:29:55 ◼ ► You don't want any weird signal stuff with a room full of people with computers. Fine. It's connected by a wire.
01:29:59 ◼ ► She's holding the thing in the traditional Apple TV remote way gingerly with her thumb hovering over it, because if you touch any part of it with your thumb, something will happen.
01:30:09 ◼ ► She's going through her scripted demo, which is I might like show X and show X is highlighted as the upper left show, or I might like to see what the next episode of show Y is.
01:30:19 ◼ ► I don't remember what the shows were. What she's supposed to do is move the selection from the upper left to the right one space to highlight the next show, because that's part of her canned demo, but she doesn't pull it off.
01:30:36 ◼ ► She tries to swipe to the right, but ends up swiping down, which causes the entire gigantic beautiful screen behind her to scroll the image of the TV OS UI up, and then she has to scroll it back down and then make a second attempt at the swipe.
01:30:53 ◼ ► And if we need any more proof that that remote is terrible, that even an incredibly rehearsed, carefully constructed Apple demo cannot successfully demonstrate basic use of the remote to do a simple function like move one item to the right in a UI, god, I hate that remote.
01:31:09 ◼ ► Alright, now hold on. I have many times defended this remote, and so now it's my time to tell you that this thing is a piece of shit and I'm totally on your side. It has taken me this long to finally come around to this point of view, but I think I said it on the last episode, maybe it was on analog.
01:31:27 ◼ ► Somewhere I told the story of Erin almost throwing the thing across the room, which is very uncharacteristic of her, because she couldn't get the darn thing to work, and I found that, I don't know if it's I'm becoming, maybe I'm getting older and I'm shaky, I don't know, but something is happening where I am becoming more inept at operating a remote that I've had for like two years now or something like that,
01:31:52 ◼ ► and it is getting to the point that even I, a previous defender of this remote, have decided I've had enough, and I am on your side, you guys, and I think this thing has got to go.
01:32:04 ◼ ► It's like the opposite of OXO Good Grips, like a tool designed for people with limited mobility. It's like, this is designed, it's like experts only. Make it the most difficult to use remote you can, and if you have amazing dexterity and never lose things and never inappropriately touch anything you want and can move your hands in precise angles and don't need to see things with your eyeballs and can carefully feel for the ring so you know which direction it's in, but don't reach too high because you'll touch the touch pad. If you can do all of that, you will be successful.
01:32:32 ◼ ► I know when it should be talking about the remote. This is about the app. Anyway, the app has minor improvements that don't seem to dramatically change things that we don't care about, and we have lots of stuff to talk about, so I think we should move on.
01:32:43 ◼ ► As I said, there's a new version of the TV app that will be coming to all your platforms. By the way, Mark Gurman pointed out that in the seeds for the iOS 12.3 beta and TVOS 12.3 beta, there's also an update for the old non-TVOS Apple TV, like the one that doesn't run TVOS, the one that was before that, and that could mean that the new TV app and the TV+ stuff might even be coming to that old Apple TV box, which I think is interesting and plausible because, as we'll get to in a second,
01:33:12 ◼ ► and as we talked about in many past shows, once Apple is paying billions of dollars to make original content, anything that stands in the way of people being able to watch and therefore pay for that content is bad, and one thing that might stand in the way is, I've got an Apple TV, meaning the stupid box, but it's an old one, and so I can't watch or pay for Apple's new programs.
01:33:36 ◼ ► And Apple might say, "No, we are going to launch an updated version of the TV app for the old Apple TV because we don't want you to not be able to watch any of our shows because we want your money to watch them because we've had a lot of money to make them."
01:33:51 ◼ ► Indeed. All right, so next in the trifecta of Apple TV things is the Apple TV Channels package, which is also coming in May, and that allows you to subscribe to channels, and all of these channels can have their stuff consumed in the aforementioned app.
01:34:17 ◼ ► Well, if you've tried to use the TV app in tvOS before, or any OS—you know the TV app? It's the icon that says TV on it, right?
01:34:28 ◼ ► Right. Although, you are, I believe, in effect using it because it's just a central interface, but once you start playing things, it chucks you out to the app that plays the content.
01:34:37 ◼ ► It's always been kind of weird. It's like this clearinghouse of stuff, but it's not really centralized because some things, namely Netflix, are not there.
01:34:47 ◼ ► And chucking you out to another application was weird, right? So the new one is—it's the same model, essentially, where there's a TV app where you supposedly see all your stuff accumulated there, and it tries to do a good job of saying, "We think you were just watching this, so you might want to continue watching that," and whatever.
01:35:03 ◼ ► It tries to do that type of stuff. The new one will play all your stuff in the app. So Apple controls the player, hopefully they make a good player with basic functionality in it that allows you to pause and skip forward and back by fixed amounts.
01:35:17 ◼ ► God, I don't want to go off on too much of a tangent here, but players for video? There is a minimum set of functionality I think it should require, and honestly that minimum is too low.
01:35:28 ◼ ► Maybe I'm the only person who finds themselves in this situation, but very often you'll be watching a television program and someone will pass a note to somebody or there will be some text on the screen or something, and I'll want to be able to read it.
01:35:39 ◼ ► I want to be able to pause it so I can read the text. Even if it's just an Easter egg and you weren't even supposed to read it, but sometimes you were supposed to read it, I want to be able to read it at my leisure and think about how it affects the plot or whatever.
01:35:51 ◼ ► Getting the thing paused on the frame that contains a non-motion blurred version of that text is incredibly difficult because so many players have controls that disappear.
01:36:04 ◼ ► If you hit the pause button and it's paused and you hit play, the controls that let you pause disappear after a moment and then you want to pause.
01:36:13 ◼ ► Oh, but the controls are gone, so my first tap actually just brings the controls back and now it's too far. And then you need a fixed amount skip forward or back.
01:36:21 ◼ ► If you don't have a fixed amount skip forward or back, then you're forced to scrub. Good luck scrubbing back 30 seconds in a two hour progress bar. Forget about that.
01:36:33 ◼ ► So let's say you have a scrub forward or back. If it's 30 seconds, now you've got to wait 30, 29, 20 something seconds to get back to where you were. And then you have to pre-stage the pause button. Tap to make the controls visible.
01:36:44 ◼ ► Oh, they disappeared. Tap to, you have to pre-stage it. And then when you get close, you have to do play pause, play pause, play pause, play pause.
01:36:51 ◼ ► Just to creep, it's like, for God's sake people, this is so easy on the QuickTime Player 7, which will soon be gone, where you can just pause at any point. Use the arrow keys to go forward and backward a frame at a time.
01:37:00 ◼ ► Maybe these are expert controls, maybe I'm asking for too much, but all I'm saying is when Apple has centralized the player into one place, that's the opportunity to have a way, even if it's just for experts, to do everything I'm just describing.
01:37:12 ◼ ► Forward and back by frame amounts, play, pause, skip forward and back by perhaps even configurable amounts that are non-universe. Even Overcast, the application that doesn't want to add weird features, lets you specify how much you want to skip forward or back.
01:37:25 ◼ ► And it's, oh God, anyway, sorry for that tangent, but I have high hopes for the Apple Player that Apple's, because Apple's players usually are pretty good in terms of scrubbing and features and skipping and stuff like that.
01:37:38 ◼ ► Oh, and by the way, have a way to turn on subtitles without going through seven submenus, Plex.
01:37:42 ◼ ► Anyway, that's the television thing, and the channels packages within television, you can subscribe to channels like Showtime and HBO and all that other stuff, and it's like, you can do that from within the channel, and then when you play them, you don't go to the HBO application, you don't go to the Showtime app, you don't have to remember what the hell's the name of the Showtime app, is it HBO Now or HBO Go, like, it's all in one place.
01:38:08 ◼ ► So anyway, that's Apple's TV channels thing. I think it is an improvement, a clear improvement over the current system where they try to do this, but not particularly well.
01:38:17 ◼ ► It still has the same lack of Netflix, which makes sense because Netflix is massively the market leader, and why would Netflix subsume itself to this Apple interface? Like, it doesn't make any sense.
01:38:28 ◼ ► Also, by the way, even, I mean, it's hard to tell because we haven't used this, but based on the demos, I would say that the Netflix interface to letting you continue what you were watching before and to presenting you with stuff you might want to watch is still probably better than Apple's because Netflix is pretty good at that.
01:38:44 ◼ ► Not perfect, and it could be better because Netflix really wants you to ride the algorithmic wave. They don't want you to build your list of things you want to watch, they just want to like, "We know what you want to watch," because it's either what you were watching before or what our system thinks you want to watch.
01:39:01 ◼ ► But you also have the ability to add things to "my list," but getting to my list in the UI is sometimes tricky because they don't want you to use it like a queue, right? But anyway, Netflix is good at figuring out what you might want to watch, and it is good about letting you resume where you picked up.
01:39:18 ◼ ► I don't want to go another stupid rant on this, unlike, by the way, so many other video apps where, like, I forget which one this is because I subscribe to so many freaking things. I think it might be Hulu or maybe it's a CBS app. Some show that I watched season one of, and I started watching season two of, somehow because of its bad ability to sync playback position between different devices, like I had to watch it on my TV, on my iPad, so on and so forth, thinks that I was partially through an episode in season one, or maybe I even went back to it to review something.
01:39:47 ◼ ► It thinks my play position is like season one, episode seven, like 2% through. But I'm actually watching, like, season two, episode five. But every time I watch the app, it's like, "Do you want to continue watching season one, episode seven?" It's like, "No, I don't. I watched that whole season, and there's no way in the application to tell it I've watched the show."
01:40:06 ◼ ► And I go into the episode, bringing the scrubber to the end and letting it naturally play off the end to let it think I played that episode, and I couldn't get through its thick skull. So the whole "continue watching" feature that I throw in your face, you launch the app, and it's like, "Do you want to continue watching season one, episode seven?" Like, "I do not. It's not where I am in the series, you stupid application." Again, basics that Netflix mostly gets right, and hopefully Apple will get right.
01:40:28 ◼ ► Like, you wouldn't think there's that many features to showing video, and there's only, like, a page of them, but if you don't have them all or you have a bug related to them, it is maddening.
01:40:37 ◼ ► So I have some hope that Apple will do well here, but I'm kind of glad that the Netflix app is still separate because I think, despite my frustrations with their application, they're probably one of the best.
01:40:46 ◼ ► And I think that actually their closed caption thing is only two taps away. One tap away would be ideal, people. Closed caption on or off. Anyway.
01:40:54 ◼ ► Oh, and on, yeah, I guess on the same thing that we were touching on before, Apple wants you to be able to watch your stuff everywhere.
01:41:02 ◼ ► This new Apple TV app will be on smart TVs, Samsung TVs in the spring, and on all the other TV manufacturers later, which means you don't need an Apple TV box to use this TV application.
01:41:12 ◼ ► Previously, the only way you could get this application with this UI, this wonderful UI that we just talked about, would be on a little black Apple TV box.
01:41:20 ◼ ► You'll be able to get it on your smart TV. You'll also be able to get it on Roku and Fire TV, the other little black boxes not made by Apple, which is kind of amazing because it means Apple is essentially developing applications for Roku and Fire TV.
01:41:33 ◼ ► Like, you know, the SDKs for those systems are not the same as iOS, and I don't think Apple has made like a miniature iOS emulator, kind of like when it was like QuickTime for Windows, they made like a miniature version of like the Mac toolbox calls they needed to run QuickTime on Windows.
01:41:48 ◼ ► So they're making considerable effort to make sure if you want to watch, and at this point, by the way, in the presentation, they hadn't yet announced all the original Apple shows, so it was kind of mysterious, but we all know the next item will be all the original Apple shows.
01:42:00 ◼ ► If you want to pay Apple to watch those shows, watch it on your Samsung TV, watch it on your Fire TV, watch it on your Roku, watch it on your LG TV, watch it on your Sony television, it's like, we don't care, just watch it.
01:42:13 ◼ ► So I'm glad they're pursuing this strategy. As far as I can tell, there's still no way to watch it on the web because Apple's like, web, what's that? Or on Android, which is weird because Apple Music is on Android.
01:42:23 ◼ ► But anyway, it seems the strategy is pretty clearly Apple TV and this Apple TV application, which Apple seems proud of, but which I think is just kind of middle of the road.
01:42:33 ◼ ► They want that to be available everywhere, not just on their little black puck boxes, not just on their iPads. Hell, there's going to be a Mac version of it, for crying out loud. A Mac version of the TV app, how are they going to do that?
01:42:45 ◼ ► I would imagine some Marzipan magic, although it says this stuff is coming in May, so I'm not entirely sure how they're going to do that.
01:42:52 ◼ ► I mean, obviously we're all running Marzipan apps right now, so it's not outside the realm of possibility that Apple can ship an Apple TV app that is in fact Marzipan, but we'll see.
01:43:00 ◼ ► Oh, and by the way, it's in 100, more than 100 countries, which every time we talk about any kind of service that we're interested in, lots of people come and tell us, well, that's great, but that service is only available in the US and Canada and some of Europe, but not where I live or whatever.
01:43:11 ◼ ► So they're going to try to go global with this. So I think overall this announcement, the Apple TV channels package and stuff, it's all improvements. It's available more places.
01:43:21 ◼ ► It is a better application than it was before, even if it's still not best in class. So I'm looking forward to it.
01:43:28 ◼ ► Apple TV Plus. We finally have a name. We have timing. We have no idea the price. It's coming in fall 2019, and this is the original TV and movie content that we've been hearing deals about, you know, hearing about the deals for months and months and months, if not a couple of years now.
01:43:44 ◼ ► I really disliked this part of the presentation. I thought it was really hard to watch. What ended up happening was they brought all of these content creators on stage one by one to tell us about the things that they're making and why they made them.
01:44:03 ◼ ► I did think the way that they just kind of had people appear on stage from, you know, a black dark stage and all of a sudden, "Oh, there's Steven Spielberg." And all of a sudden, "Oh, there's Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston."
01:44:15 ◼ ► I thought that was well done, but outside of who is the guy who's a stand-up comedian? I always forget the guy's name.
01:44:34 ◼ ► Yeah, exactly, which is why I think he was the best. But most of this I found exceedingly boring and exceedingly uninteresting. And I kind of get why it was done, but I feel like it could have been a tenth as long and potentially even just done with like a little trailer movie or something, like a Johnny Ives style, you know, in the white room or in this case black room sort of thing.
01:45:00 ◼ ► Maybe a white room with black curtains, who knows? Anyways, the point is I just felt like it dragged on forever and I really disliked it. But what did you guys think? Like, Jon, were you also bored to tears or were you really riveted by this?
01:45:12 ◼ ► So they have a bunch of stuff that they paid for. Some of it is presumably done or mostly done, but a lot of it isn't done or mostly done. And ideally, if you have a bunch of video content that you've made, the way you pitch it is to show people like trailers for it. Like, show me video about the video that you made.
01:45:35 ◼ ► That's why movie trailers are not a person who comes up in front of the movie theater and describes the movie.
01:45:40 ◼ ► Alright, so it's like the other Avengers, but there's even more characters. It has a different title and people fight each other in it and it's probably going to be pretty good. Now, they show a trailer. You want to show video.
01:45:51 ◼ ► And I think the problem was that they just didn't have enough video ready to do trailers for everything. They had like their sizzle reel thing where they show select scenes from a few shows, like all combined and kind of like a medley.
01:46:04 ◼ ► But I just honestly, I don't think they had enough to show you a trailer for all of the shows. And I think it would be weird and/or kind of unfair or probably not great marketing to just show the one or two that happened to be far this long in production that they have a trailer for.
01:46:21 ◼ ► And you do want to have the celebrities there. Like if they had all the trailers, they would probably still want the star power, but it wouldn't then be up to the celebrities to explain to you in words the video project that they were working on. And that's the job they had in front of them.
01:46:36 ◼ ► Some celebrities did it better than others. I think Kumail was the best one because he's a stand-up comedian and he got to be entertaining. And it's interesting to hear people pitch their shows to describe them, right? But in the end, we want to see the shows.
01:46:54 ◼ ► And failing that, we want to see trailers for them. So I kind of understand Apple's position. I don't think they should have waited. Like, "Oh, they shouldn't have shown this until they had trailers for them." No, they should announce it now because I think now is a reasonable time to announce it.
01:47:08 ◼ ► They didn't announce a price. It's only coming in the fall. But they did tell us, "Here are the people who are making the shows and here's roughly what those shows are going to be," which is better than nothing.
01:47:18 ◼ ► Honestly, no one cares about or will remember how boring the presentation of people talking about their shows were. All we care about, if you said a million times, is are the shows good.
01:47:30 ◼ ► And kind of like the discussion about games, just because you have lots of money doesn't mean you know how to convert that money into good television shows.
01:47:38 ◼ ► Unlike the game area, Apple hired a bunch of people that have lots of experience in this area and have a track record of knowing how to pick, pay for, and cause to be produced high quality content.
01:47:51 ◼ ► And those people in turn picked other people and give them money and it rolls down. And so I feel like they have a reasonable shot of producing one or two good things.
01:47:58 ◼ ► But it's not easy. It's hard to, I mean Netflix did it pretty amazingly well, putting all their money behind a couple of big name shows, all of which turned out to be pretty good for them.
01:48:08 ◼ ► And then they were able to diversify. Apple is behind everyone else in this area and they're spending a lot of money, but not Netflix style money quite yet, which I think is smart because you don't want to pay $10 billion your first year if you have no idea what you're doing.
01:48:21 ◼ ► But I'm looking forward to this video service. I'm going to pay for this video service. There is at least one or two shows on this video service that after hearing them described, I'd be interested in watching.
01:48:36 ◼ ► And I think have a chance of being good and being interested to me. I think it will probably cost around about the same as all the other video services I've subscribed to cost.
01:48:45 ◼ ► But that's fine with me. And I think I'm glad Apple has finally picked the name for the service and announced that it is real. And we all have a date and a concrete thing to look forward to.
01:48:57 ◼ ► And I'm mostly going to give a pass to the weird presentations where the celebrities talk for a little bit too long.
01:49:03 ◼ ► It was basically the TV show version of the endless parade of game demos that we often see like at WBC.
01:49:10 ◼ ► But the game demos show the actual games. Imagine if the game demos was just the developer talking about the game but they didn't show anything on the screen.
01:49:18 ◼ ► We're going to have a game later this fall that's going to really help you explore people's story telling and their artists and their stories.
01:49:25 ◼ ► It's going to be like, it's a great racing game. The cars go really fast and the roads have a lot of turns and there are items that you can shoot.
01:49:33 ◼ ► And the Oprah intro, my favorite tweet was Mr. Rebo on Twitter. Christ himself would be embarrassed.
01:49:49 ◼ ► And the intro they had was like, they had to have a video with their little words and dots about the voice that we need to hear and that has been gone for too long.
01:50:00 ◼ ► I thought it was going to be Obama at first. Some of it would have lined up with that but no.
01:50:15 ◼ ► Because they're kind of right that the whole story telling thing does connect with people emotionally.
01:50:20 ◼ ► And you can get dramatic lead ups like that that resonate with people because it is a valued property or story or there's an audience connection or whatever.
01:50:33 ◼ ► And even in the technology world, we were talking about the incredibly over the top intro to the iPhone.
01:50:41 ◼ ► There's been three amazing revolutionary things in the history of Apple and it's so incredibly overblown.
01:50:48 ◼ ► And yet in hindsight, probably undersold the iPhone which is amazing because they thought they had an amazing thing and they did.
01:50:57 ◼ ► But you could go back in time with hindsight and say, actually we can crank up the hyperbole here because you don't realize this but the iPhone is going to be way bigger than you think it is.
01:51:07 ◼ ► So you never know. I give Apple mostly a pass because I feel like their heart's in the right place.
01:51:18 ◼ ► And if it fell on its face a little bit, that's a great example of the experience of making and funding creative content.
01:51:25 ◼ ► You have to go into it with your full heart and sometimes you go splat on your face and you got to get back up and try again.
01:51:31 ◼ ► I have a very hard time getting too excited about this because the iPhone was the iPhone.
01:51:44 ◼ ► But even if one is really good and even if heck, let's say they do really well and they've done a really good job with these.
01:51:59 ◼ ► And don't forget, another recurring subscription to pay for those TV shows. Don't forget that part.
01:52:02 ◼ ► Exactly. This is going to be one of those areas like Android phones where I'm just not in this world at all.
01:52:18 ◼ ► Upgrade does a way better job of covering the TV and entertainment side of this than we ever can.
01:52:24 ◼ ► So yeah, just listen to Upgrade for this because Apple is super excited about their new TV series and that's great.
01:52:43 ◼ ► What was shown to us was a parade of celebrities that really was very long and drawn out.
01:52:48 ◼ ► And that Apple was hyping way more than what was warranted for the amount they were actually ready to reveal.
01:52:54 ◼ ► I think though, looking back up the stack at all the Apple TV things, combined it does make a fairly compelling Apple-related television story.
01:53:05 ◼ ► Despite the fact that they obviously didn't announce any new hardware or anything in that remote, it still sucks.
01:53:09 ◼ ► What they've done with their improved apps things, their channel deal, all the economics of Apple finding new ways to get cuts of people's subscription for their services while improving the user experience.
01:53:21 ◼ ► It adds up to a story that certainly makes sense to Apple from a financial perspective because recurring revenue and cuts of other people's subscriptions make sense to the user as a general improvement to the experience of using the Apple TV applications.
01:53:34 ◼ ► Despite the fact that it's surely not the center of many people's lives, it is a part of a lot of people's lives and making that part better is good.
01:53:41 ◼ ► Expanding it to be available to way more people like you don't have to have one of those black pucks anymore, right?
01:53:46 ◼ ► And funding original content, which as we know is table stakes for getting in on the business and being able to get your own recurring revenue of original content.
01:53:53 ◼ ► It adds up to a fairly comprehensive, fairly good Apple-style baseline level table stakes Apple entering the streaming video original content market, which is basically what we expected.
01:54:06 ◼ ► So, I mean, I don't think, I'm not sure what people, other than having a better presentation or having like shows that everyone agrees are going to be amazing even before they see them.
01:54:17 ◼ ► There's not some aspect of this where we're going to say, "Oh, they really messed up there," or "They really didn't announce this thing."
01:54:30 ◼ ► I think it's a good start for their endeavors, as long as they kind of like the games thing, as long as they stick to it and like when maybe all their original first shows flop or whatever, you just got to keep trying just to be a player.
01:54:45 ◼ ► It's not they're going to buy Netflix, which they maybe should have done a long time ago, but too late for that now.
01:54:49 ◼ ► It's not that they're going to become the center for all our entertainment because inevitably there's lots of competition.
01:54:59 ◼ ► And I think being a player in this market forces them to do things they otherwise wouldn't like, expand their software experience out to other platforms and make sure that, you know, the Mac can do this stuff as well.
01:55:09 ◼ ► And, you know, like I don't want to be negative about this section because I think every single one of our announcements was good.
01:55:15 ◼ ► There are just still question marks and because it's kind of all out in our future, there's the little kind of like hurry up and wait thing of like, well, you told us about some stuff.
01:55:30 ◼ ► But as somebody who subscribes to every video service under the sun and will watch a whole bunch of these shows, I'm actually kind of excited for it.
01:55:42 ◼ ► My interest is slightly peaked after a very long presentation and I have to wait six months before any of that can be resolved.
01:55:49 ◼ ► Like that's it's just it just seemed like this was more of a presentation for Apple's own sake than for ours.
01:56:12 ◼ ► Because like the more the more time they wait, the more there are going to be the details of the shows revealed, the more we're going to be like, who's making all these shows for what Apple service?
01:56:25 ◼ ► If anything, I'm a little bit anxious to get the Apple TV app update, because if you use that app at all, any significant improvement to it is welcome.
01:56:38 ◼ ► So I mean, I can see the perspective from the presentation, but I like again that this presentation will fade in our memories very quickly.
01:56:47 ◼ ► The way they'll learn about it is there'll be an iOS update that will or an app store update that will update their Apple TV app and they'll have a better app.
01:56:58 ◼ ► And then sometime in the more distant future, they'll buy a new TV or something and see the fact that they have an Apple TV app and they'll see original shows in it and maybe hear about one.