(Preview) Apple Gets a Temporary Reprieve, The End of Internet 2.0, An Incomplete Tech Blog Post Canon

Andrew and Ben discuss another weekend of pivots, updates and clarifications to the Trump trade policies, the big picture shifts and fundamental questions underlying these policies, a question about Spotify, and Stevie's platform rant inspires an emailer's request for a tech blog post canon.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Andrew Sharp?

  Hello and welcome to a free preview of Sharp Tech.

• 0:08Andrew Sharp?

  Hello and welcome back to another episode of Sharp Tech. I'm Andrew Sharp and on the other line, Ben Thompson. Ben, how you doing?

• 0:19Ben Thompson?

  I'm doing well, Andrew, and after we finished recording on Thursday, I told you and you sort of scolded me for not including it in the podcast, that, you know, you only a few times in your life get to experience that rush of the collective crowd reacting like happened in Japan when Max, you know, set that lap. A nice thing to call back to because Red Bull may never finish first in a race for the rest of Max's career.

• 0:47Andrew Sharp?

  Short-lived reign for you and Max this year, yep.

• 0:50Ben Thompson?

  But, but I was thinking about that today while watching the Masters. And of course, I got to watch sort of towards the end. So I missed a lot of the roller coaster and one of the, you know, time zone problems, Sunday afternoon sports are always a challenge in Asia. But the Masters, you know, everyone talks and raves about the experience of going there. And it seems obvious the experience is dramatically enhanced by virtue of the fact that there are no phones allowed. And what's interesting about the no phones allowed bit is we could talk about this and why this is great and why it particularly works at the Masters. There's such high demand for tickets that they control the market. So if you don't like it and you get kicked out, it doesn't matter.

• 1:35Ben Thompson?

  There's plenty of people willing to take your ticket, right?

• 1:37Andrew Sharp?

  10,000 others, yeah.

• 1:39Ben Thompson?

  Right, like could like the NBA enforce this in the regular season? No, because people just stay home, like screw you, right? The uniqueness and the exclusiveness of the experience is what makes this possible. And it's funny because you get this positive cycle where no phones makes the experience better, which makes the tickets even more desirable, which gives them more leeway to enforce the no phones policy.

• 2:00Andrew Sharp?

  But it's all part of the mystique. That's what you're paying for at the end of the day.

• 2:04Ben Thompson?

  Which I think, and I think that's dramatically becoming more and more valuable over time. My favorite moments from the broadcast were the shots of the 18th hole. When they have the scoreboard that shows like what everyone's, you know, where they hole by hole, where their overall score is minus 11, minus 12. It's a roller coaster. It's going up and down. But they pull the numbers down because they're going to update them for the players that are, you know, waiter, like particularly Rory McIlroy. And so everyone knows we're about to find out what's happening.

• 2:37Andrew Sharp?

  Yeah.

• 2:38Ben Thompson?

  And it's you get the collective crowd experience of discovering something at the same time. Again and again, it's actually like

• 2:49Andrew Sharp?

  Into the equation.

• 2:50Ben Thompson?

  It's like, it's perfect for golf in this where if you can imagine in a normal, if you have a phone or you smuggle something in, you're finding out individually. And there's the, the, the way people act is they continually choose individual experiences. We see this with social networks. All right. Like what is a social network at the end of the day? The crazy about social networks is even though they're framed as quote unquote, connecting people, they're actually deeply individualistic, atomized experiences that separate people. Your Instagram is different than my Instagram. Your Facebook is different than my Facebook. Your Twitter's different than my Twitter. So we have to all get every freaking Elon Musk post. But, but, but there's, there's

• 3:33Andrew Sharp?

  Somehow I don't get every Elon post, just for the record. I don't know what code I cracked. I never see anything that Elon Musk tweets.

• 3:40Ben Thompson?

  You probably blocked him, didn't realize it, but yeah, no, you should be.

• 3:43Andrew Sharp?

  It could be. Who could say?

• 3:44Ben Thompson?

  It's out of control. But the, the, like, there's a certain bit of gaslighting about this quote unquote, connecting us because it's connecting us on terms that are completely individualistic. And everything about tech drives towards this. Even though the scale is the whole world, the actual experience of the individual is completely unique and people like that in their choices, but there's a bit where what you like and what you choose isn't always what's best for you and what you love, right? There's like some sort of like relationship analogy here or something along those lines, right? And I just thought it was really striking. That was my favorite thing about the broadcast was,

• 4:26Ben Thompson?

  and they kept showing it. I maybe they have, maybe they've always done this or they just did this camera angle this year, but the number goes blank, crowd tenses up in anticipation, numbers flash up and this collective groan or collective sort of release at seeing what happened just a few hundred yards away, I thought was, was really, was really interesting. Anyhow, congratulations Rory McIlroy, career grand slam is amazing, but also.

• 4:54Andrew Sharp?

  I'm relieved on behalf of Rory McIlroy.

• 4:57Ben Thompson?

  As a millennial, you're like, I mean, where, you know, congratulations on your generation, finally.

• 5:02Andrew Sharp?

  He was supposed to be our guy. He was supposed to be the next Tiger and he's had a nice run, no question about that, but I was rooting for him at the beginning of the day.

• 5:11Ben Thompson?

  Well, the part when he won at the end and he had so much gray hair, it's like, wait, this was the guy that was promised, right? Like the, the, the next Tiger.

• 5:19Andrew Sharp?

  That's what he was promised.

• 5:21Ben Thompson?

  I'm glad, glad he scraped through to get his career grand slam.

• 5:25Andrew Sharp?

  Well, listen, Ben, I've got a few gray hairs myself. Nothing wrong with that, but Rory, he continued to like self sabotage throughout the 18 holes today. So it's really, really stressful as someone who was rooting for him. And I feel a kinship with Rory. I've got some Irish blood in me. So great to see him get it done at the end and great take on the Masters generally. I feel like whoever's running the Masters, they have to be on touch grass rush more because of the policy and how, how aggressively.

• 5:59Ben Thompson?

  I think it's a touch grass rush more because it's a golf tournament, which is literally about grass, but yes, beyond that.

• 6:05Ben Thompson?

  Literally and figuratively.

• 6:06Andrew Sharp?

  They're literally saying, put your effing phone in this bag and go touch grass for the next 12 hours and you know, get your money's worth.

• 6:15Ben Thompson?

  If we see you with a phone, we're not just gonna tell you to take it away. We are kicking you out of the course and you're done.

• 6:21Andrew Sharp?

  You lose your tickets for the weekend. Yeah, absolutely. That's the kind of enforcement we need in the future. Well, I will say, watching the Masters on Sunday was not as enjoyable as it could have been because I had to rework the outline for this episode. Most of the Monday mailbags, I set the outline on Friday and just said it and forget it. We record Sunday night. We did have some news over the weekend though, Ben, so we'll start there. We'll start with a note from SB that came in last Wednesday. He said, should I upgrade to the current generation of iPhone? I was planning to wait for the iPhone 17 in September, but should I just buy right now before the prices rise due to the tariffs?

• 7:06Andrew Sharp?

  So, thank you for the question, SB. That was a pretty simple question. We had it on the rundown last week. We weren't able to get to it. The dynamics surrounding the answer have changed multiple times over the past couple of days.

• 7:20Ben Thompson?

  Does the White House need to touch grass?

• 7:22Andrew Sharp?

  I mean, I wish we could all touch grass. I really identify with the friend that you cited on the last episode who said, look, I agree with certain things Trump does. I disagree with certain things Trump does. More than anything else, though, I am just exhausted under Trump and I don't want to live like this. And so, that's sort of where I think a lot of us have been over the last two weeks. I'll read two bits of news to anchor this. Bloomberg says, President Donald Trump's administration exempted smartphones, computers, and other electronics from its so-called reciprocal tariffs, representing a major reprieve for global technology manufacturers, including Apple and Nvidia.

• 8:07Andrew Sharp?

  The exclusions, published late Friday by U.S. Customs and Border Protection, narrow the scope of the levies. By excluding the products from Trump's 125% China tariff and his baseline 10% global tariff on nearly all other countries. The exclusions apply to smartphones, laptop computers, hard drives and computer processors and memory chips as well as flat screen displays. And then Trump on Sunday, that Bloomberg report was Saturday, Trump on Sunday came back and said, "Nobody," in all caps, "is getting off the hook for the unfair trade balances and non-monetary

• 8:46Andrew Sharp?

  tariff barriers that other countries have used against us, especially not China, which by far treats us the worst. There was no tariff exception announced on Friday. These products are subject to the existing 20% fentanyl tariffs and they are just moving to a different tariff bucket," he puts in quotes. "The fake news knows this but refuses to report it. We are taking a look at semiconductors and the whole electronic supply chain," in all caps, "in the upcoming national security tariff investigations. What has been exposed is that we need to make products in the United States and that we will be not, that we will not be held hostage by other countries, especially hostile trading

• 9:30Andrew Sharp?

  nations like China." So that's where we are as of Sunday night at 9:18 PM.

• 9:38Ben Thompson?

  Thank you for the time specification because I think it's necessary.

• 9:42Andrew Sharp?

  I'll keep checking back throughout the podcast. Do you have takes on where things stand for, let's say, Apple? We could start with Apple.

• 9:49Ben Thompson?

  Well, I think the most, the biggest take is you step back and this is what I expected. I don't think that the US has the stomach for an actual trade war. And so what, what, what we're, you know, and again, I

• 10:09Ben Thompson?

  To go back to our friend's thing, like this is tiring. I don't really want to talk about this because what's the point? If it's all just going to change in the next week or two? And that of course is the real damage here. We could, for Apple or anyone else, we could step back in a month. And everything that I wrote last week and getting worked up and writing two articles in these podcasts, we can step back and actually nothing has changed. Except for the fact that we've now inserted just this massive dose of uncertainty and reduced the possibilities of investments. And all of which theoretically would solve this problem. Like, like even if you wanted, even if you disagreed, or even if you wanted to go in this direction,

• 10:51Ben Thompson?

  you need to actually be credible and have faith that it's going to stay the way it is so that people do the necessary investments to come up with it. The whole point of tariffs is theoretically it should give an advantage to domestic production, which needs to be built and invested in. Impplied in that is the domestic production, at least at the beginning, can't succeed on its own without the tariffs. So if you think the tariffs are going to go away, then all you're doing is just introducing dead weight loss into the system.

• 11:20Andrew Sharp?

  All right, and that is the end of the free preview. If you'd like to hear more from Ben and I, there are links to subscribe in the show notes, or you can also go to sharp tech.fm. Either option will get you access to a personalized feed that has all the shows we do every week, plus lots more great content from Stratechery and the Stratechery Plus bundle. Check it out, and if you've got feedback, please email us at email at sharp tech.fm.