Pod Insights The Vergecast Apple unveils credit card, streaming plans, and more About this episode Apple's event this week introduced Apple TV Plus, Apple News Plus, Apple Card, Apple Arcade, and more channels on Apple TV. The Verge's Nilay Patel, Dieter Bohn, Chris Welch, and Paul Miller run through the event, their new services, and how it will compete with current products in the market.
Stories discussed this week: Apple Event 2019: TV plus shows, News, Oprah and biggest …Apple's TV efforts: an abridged history over the yearsApple News Plus: price, release date and how to sign upApple launches $9.99 Apple News PlusThe Apple Card is a perfect example of Apple's post-iPhone strategy …Apple announces Apple Card credit cardApple Card: Apple's thinnest and lightest status symbol everApple Arcade has game developers excited, but questions remain …Apple Arcade is a new game subscription for iOS, Mac, and Apple TV All the shows coming to Apple's TV streaming serviceApple's revamped TV app is coming to Roku and Fire TVMacbook Air (2019) reviewI rode with Nissan’s AR and 5G-powered virtual passengersNintendo plans two new Switch models for this year: WSJ
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Transcript 13,393 words · 4 speakers
Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.
0:00 Nilay Patel? This week on the Vergecast, we go through all the news from Apple's big showtime events, the news service, the TV service, the game service, the service service, the card service, and at the very end, we talk a little bit about the Nintendo Switch. That's the Vergecast.
0:14 Nilay Patel? Hello and welcome to the Vergecast, the flagship podcast of the Vox Media Network, which I'm gonna just keep saying until someone makes me stop. I am your friend, Neelai. Dieter Bohn is here.
0:25 Speaker 01 Hey, hey, hey.
0:26 Nilay Patel? Paul Miller is here. Hello. We got a special guest. Chris Welch is joining us. How are you doing, Chris?
0:32 Speaker 02 Doing all right, thank you.
0:33 Nilay Patel? Chris is my, the Verge's secret weapon for all things streaming services, which is what we have to talk about.
0:39 Speaker 01 Yeah.
0:39 Nilay Patel? Because Apple announced like a bunch of them.
0:42 Speaker 02 They announced something.
0:43 Nilay Patel? They announced something. It's very confusing. But Dieter, you were there.
0:46 Speaker 01 I was.
0:47 Nilay Patel? I'm gonna, I'm gonna just make an admission. I chose not to go. I'm in Miami this week with Danny Deal, our reporter. We're doing, there's a music conference here we're presenting, so I didn't want to fly back and forth. So we sent Dieter and Nick. You were there. I am gonna just be very honest. I kind of feel okay that I didn't go.
1:02 Speaker 01 Wow. Wow.
1:03 Nilay Patel? I just like, I, there's, you know that moment, like, right before it starts, and I was like, oh shit, I should have been there. And then by the end of it, I was like, yeah, I made the right choice.
1:11 Speaker 03 Dieter, how, how does that make you feel when Neelai says things like that?
1:14 Nilay Patel? But Dieter lives there.
1:16 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:17 Nilay Patel? If it was in New York and Dieter didn't come, it'd be different.
1:19 Speaker 01 Look, I'm, I'm the, I'm the most easily ignored man in all the tech reporting, Paul.
1:25 Nilay Patel? Anyway, so you and Nick were there.
1:27 Speaker 01 We were there. I made a video about the experience of this event. You should watch it. I have a show called Processor on YouTube. I'm gonna plug it real hard right now, because I think it's a good video. It was weird. It was a weird, weird event. And we all knew it would be something, because Apple had announced all the hardware of the week before.
1:45 Speaker 01 But yeah, it was super strange. There was potentially, like, a rule that you weren't supposed to have telephoto lenses that everybody ignored. They saw Josh Gad sitting in the audience for some reason, although he never got on stage. And then they just ran through the stuff that we all expected him to run through. And then, this is gonna be way out of order, but, and I don't want to just recapitulate the stuff I've already said, because you can see it on the website and on YouTube, but when they started putting the celebrities on stage at the end, they did it by like- Making the entire theater black and then somebody walked out on stage in darkness and then they brought up the lights. So you have this mode of, oh my God, it's so and so. It started with, I think, Steven Spielberg and you're like, oh, cool.
2:29 Speaker 01 Oh, that's right. He did amazing stories. Okay. He's talking about how amazing stories are great. I want to see me a trailer right now. This is going to be amazing. And instead, he just talked about how great it would be if this show existed. And I was like, okay, fair, whatever. They'll do the next one. And then it was just that, like 15 times in a row. And then they're like, we care what the customers buy. It's like, what?
2:57 Nilay Patel? And there was no pricing for anything announced, except Apple News. But we'll get into that. Release dates are still pretty hazy. They're just like off in the distance in the fall. Just an odd event. Dieter, your video is like, why did they do it?
3:10 Speaker 01 Yeah. I don't know. I like, I just don't know.
3:14 Speaker 02 That is a good question. I mean, why not wait until fall? Do they not want to share iPhone time with these services? Or like, now they're gonna have to come back to all the stuff in the fall and talk about pricing? And are these gonna be two separate events? The fall is gonna be pretty weird, is what it comes down to.
3:27 Speaker 01 God, are they gonna do a whole other event to launch this stuff? Separate from the iPhone because they don't want to crowd out the iPhone?
3:32 Nilay Patel? Right.
3:33 Speaker 01 That would be crazy.
3:34 Speaker 03 If you will recall several weeks ago on the podcast, I said in regards to Apple TV that they should shit or get off the pot. And so they shit.
3:43 Speaker 01 Wow. Actually, I have, man, I have so many thoughts about how the TV stuff goes. I don't even know where we should start.
3:53 Nilay Patel? Let's start with Apple News because we can just get through it.
3:57 Speaker 01 Okay.
3:57 Nilay Patel? Right? Apple News is an app that exists on your phone already, if you have an iPhone. They added a new thing called Apple News Plus, where you can pay 10 bucks a month and you get a bunch of paywalled stuff.
4:09 Speaker 01 Yeah.
4:10 Nilay Patel? The parameters of the paywall stuff are very confusing. So you can actually get the entire Wall Street Journal, but it's very hard.
4:18 Speaker 01 What do you mean it's very hard? Because there has been, like, in the early minutes after this event, it was like, all right, it's not the whole journal, it's some of the journal. Okay, well, it's some of the journal, but we don't know which parts. Okay, it's a whole journal, but only for a couple of days. Wait, no, it's, uh, yeah, it's a whole journal, whatever. And like, it just kept changing.
4:36 Nilay Patel? Okay, so like famously, the New York Times and Washington Post did not sign up for this bundle, right?
4:40 Speaker 01 Mm-hmm.
4:40 Nilay Patel? So if you're the Wall Street Journal, you're like, most of our subscribers are business people, expense accounts, rich people. We can go take that spot of like the national newspaper in this app because the Times and the Post aren't there. We'll like promote in the app our like politics and lifestyle and national news coverage and we'll just like not promote the business stuff that people pay for. So that's the, that's the strategy.
5:04 Speaker 01 Okay.
5:04 Nilay Patel? So they, it's the whole journal, but the stuff that you will see is the stuff they want you to see and you have to go dig for the other stuff. And it's somewhat hard to dig.
5:13 Speaker 01 Great.
5:13 Nilay Patel? Then there's magazine issues and that is like literally issues. A weird phenomenon this week in media Twitter is people who work at magazines tweeting that you should just subscribe to their magazine instead of buying Apple News Plus.
5:26 Speaker 01 Yep.
5:26 Nilay Patel? Which is crazy.
5:27 Speaker 01 It applied to the news thing too. So, um, so our sister site, Vox Media, has a thing. They're, they're, they're going to be in it. Uh, TechCrunch has a section in there and Josh Constance at TechCrunch published a very long editorial saying, "Apple News sucks and I'm really worried that my publication is in there."
5:42 Nilay Patel? Yep. So it's like the, you know, the editor of New Yorker dot com was like, "You should subscribe to the New Yorker because then you'll get all the stuff we publish every day and not just like issues of the New Yorker," which is what you get. And then the issues are magazine issues. About half of them have been like reworked in the new Apple News format, which is not HTML. It's like a custom markup. And then the other half, I swear to God, are fancy PDFs. And the fancy PDFs are not DRM. So if you use Apple News on a Mac, you can just get the PDFs out of the app.
6:19 Nilay Patel? Uh, which, like, I, I'm all in support of no DRM. It's just super funny.
6:23 Speaker 01 In terms of the, like, if you're on an iPhone, the Apple News formatted magazines look better, but if you're on an iPad, the Apple News formatted magazines look worse. If you are on an iPad, the PDFs look better, but if you're on an iPhone, obviously the PDFs are like, "Bleh." Um, and you don't know what you're going to get when you tap on a thing.
6:41 Nilay Patel? Yeah, so there's just like, it's messy. Will they fix it? Maybe, right? In the way that Apple bought Beats and they, the first version of Apple Music was like warmed over Beats and then they like slowly fixed it. They bought a company called Texture. This is obviously warmed over Texture. Will they fix it? One hopes so. But as a $10 a month service, it is so uneven that I'm not sure anybody should pay for it at this moment. And the economics of the news industry, which are extremely boring, but extremely contentious, are such that the, the people who work at the publications that are participating in this are kind of like, don't do it. So there's a lot of pressure there.
7:23 Speaker 03 It also just feels so old in the sense of like, like what, what media is now is sort of a multi-sensory experience where you have some niche YouTuber, you've got some podcasters who help explain the things. You've got like a few different large publications that you go to for news and then you also have some small publications that you go, you know, like,
7:47 Nilay Patel? You also sent influencers because it is multi-sensory.
7:50 Speaker 03 A lot of sent influencers. You, you kind of have to build your own picture of reality from a lot of sources. And so going in like, even the fact that, you know, it's just the Wall Street Journal as like that, that, I don't know. It just seems so weird and small and old to me.
8:07 Nilay Patel? Yeah. I think there's a, there is a value. You know, Apple made a big point. They put it this slide for all their things like, it's human curated. They want you to be able to trust it because they're putting effort into making sure it's trustworthy. They are not tracking you. They're not doing crazy targeted ads. It's, Apple News is fast when you're not downloading PDFs. Like there's some value, there's some great user experience value there. But the, the backend of it, which is, did you build super flipboard? Like you definitely built super flipboard.
8:39 Speaker 03 Well, speaking of the user experience, I, I don't know where Walt landed on this, but Walt was running some great experiments the other day. Where he would tweet out a mysterious Apple News leak and like, what? Happens when I do this. And so everybody would click on it and then tell them what happened. And so I clicked on the first one and nothing happened. It was just this page that told you that Apple News exists, but had no way to find the actual permalink to the actual story. And then the next one, I got lucky and I did get forwarded to an actual news story.
9:12 Speaker 01 What if, what if the lesson here is that Google AMP is good?
9:17 Speaker 03 Yeah, what is Apple's stance on like?
9:19 Speaker 01 Saying that.
9:20 Speaker 03 Apple just has to be better than AMP. What is their stance on being better than AMP? Have they said anything?
9:26 Speaker 01 No.
9:27 Nilay Patel? Yeah. I mean, just from what I know, the Apple news format, it is at once like easy to use and it also easy to be used disastrously.
9:38 Nilay Patel? It's weird, like a pitch to a website or a magazine, recode your entire thing out of HTML into our weird custom format. So we can take a 50% cut of $10 a month that we calculate based on engagement. Is like if Facebook suggested that, like the, the industry would burn down.
9:55 Speaker 03 Yeah, like we, we calculated based on engagement. Oh, and by the way, it's very hard to share these stories on Twitter in an era where the president is on Twitter all the time.
10:07 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Who knows? Is it better than like Facebook virality? Probably. That's a low bar. Is it better than chasing Twitter virality? Yes, that's a low bar. Is it actually better than like being a valuable search result in Google? I don't know. Is it better than building loyalty to a publication and saying like, come visit our website? Come visit our news app. I'm obviously extremely biased, but like I would prefer not to be disaggregated by one of the largest companies in the world that we also cover. So like Apple has like big questions to answer. Like if Apple has a privacy scandal.
10:51 Nilay Patel? And that's the biggest news of the day and the Wall Street Journal writes about it. Are they going to promote that in Apple News? Like, I don't know the answer. And that's like, I, you'll, I think you will see that question as they start to do more and more of these cultural products. That question's going to get bigger and bigger. So I think that's news. We can like, set that aside. Tito, you, you, you want to do the card next?
11:13 Speaker 01 So the card was on Apple Day, on the day itself, by far the biggest story of everything that Apple announced. More people cared about the card than TV. More people cared about the card than Apple News. More people care about the card than what I think was potentially like the, the best like put together section of the presentation. The Apple Arcade thing. The card was the thing. And the card seems like at first blush, really good. And then on second blush, like, meh, it's fine. So here's the deal. Apple partnered with Goldman Sachs and they are making a credit card and they want you to use it inside Apple Pay. And if you use it inside Apple Pay, you get 2% cash back. You get 3% cash back if you use it on Apple products. So there you go.
11:57 Speaker 01 The, the interest rate's somewhere between 13 and 24% give or take. But they are doing a bunch of stuff that is pretty, not necessarily completely unique, but pretty good for credit card stuff. So they won't hike your interest rate if you miss a payment. They won't charge you an annual fee. They won't charge you a late payment fee. They won't charge you international transaction fees. And then they're also doing some clever stuff like, I think Stripe did this first, but they will geotag your location when you buy something. So when you go to your credit card statement, instead of getting like a weird abstract, random code of letters and trying to guess what it was. They can do a better job of guessing where you actually spent your money. They present you a chart saying, if you pay this much, you're going to end up paying this much interest. And if you pay this much, you'll pay this much interest and you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
12:42 Speaker 01 And then most importantly, I think they are working to make sure that your purchasing information doesn't get shared. And it's a little potentially squishy about what Apple knows and doesn't know and is able to collect and what's only at local on the device. And what Goldman Sachs also gets. But Goldman Sachs has made a promise not to share that information either. So that's actually like, that's really good because you know, Target can't find out that you're pregnant because you bought, you know, a thing.
13:09 Nilay Patel? Sure they can. What are you talking about?
13:11 Speaker 01 Well.
13:11 Nilay Patel? If you buy a bunch of stuff at Target, they know what you bought.
13:14 Speaker 01 Well, not if you use the Apple card because then they like, they won't have shared the information back about who bought this thing.
13:19 Nilay Patel? No, but if you buy a bunch of stuff at Target.
13:21 Speaker 01 Yeah.
13:21 Nilay Patel? Then Target will just know.
13:23 Speaker 01 Yeah, but if I buy a bunch of stuff at Target and I pay cash, does Target know?
13:27 Nilay Patel? No.
13:28 Speaker 01 So this is, this is closer, maybe not all the way, but closer to the anonymity of cash. As long as you trust Apple and Goldman Sachs to not reshare the information of what you purchased.
13:39 Nilay Patel? Okay, I agree that the not resharing is an improvement. I do not agree that retailers will not find ways to be scummy.
13:45 Speaker 01 Oh, of course. Yeah, that's, that's like.
13:47 Nilay Patel? They will figure it out.
13:49 Speaker 01 Yeah, a lot of that underlies all of this. Like, we, we didn't mention this for Apple News, but Apple is not sharing any, uh, reading or tracking information. Well, they're not sharing any tracking information to advertisers on Apple News. It's unclear to me here and later with Arcade. If they're going to be sharing like zero information with publications, like it's actually useful to know, like if someone read this article or not that article. Or they read halfway through this one and all the way through the other one. Anyway, we haven't even talked about the best part or the most hilarious part of the card, which is. They designed a physical card that is made out of titanium.
14:20 Nilay Patel? Of course.
14:21 Speaker 01 Has nothing on it except an etched Apple logo and your name. Uh, so there's no, and you know, there's an RFID chip hidden in there somewhere. Or so that you can do contactless payment. Um, and then it does appear to have a mag stripe on the back. Which presumably includes the number, which they're like, it doesn't have a number on it, so it's safe. Uh, but it's like, the mag stripe has the number, you guys. And like, they individually recreate the number and secure codes for online transactions and. There's a whole system for like getting a number if you want to buy something, since it's not printed on the card and blah, blah, blah, blah.
14:53 Nilay Patel? It doesn't have a number. When you swipe it, it generates a number that then gets authenticated. It's a virtual number. And then you have to authenticate your phone.
15:02 Speaker 01 Is the mag stripe actually generating a virtual number electronically every time on the card? Or does it just have a number?
15:09 Nilay Patel? It just has a number. That number is not actually associated to you, like anywhere but inside of Apple.
15:14 Speaker 01 Okay.
15:14 Nilay Patel? So you can, you can like do all this crazy stuff with it. And then it obviously has like the EMV stuff.
15:18 Speaker 01 It's like two factor authentication with a credit card?
15:21 Nilay Patel? Yeah, like the, I think the goal is that you will, you will look at your phone a lot. You will off to your phone when that card is used.
15:28 Speaker 01 Yeah, and you only get. 1% cash back when you use a physical card instead of two when you use Apple Pay.
15:33 Nilay Patel? Right, but I think that their their assumption is that you will like use the chip more than the swipe, which is a very Apple assumption.
15:40 Speaker 01 Yeah.
15:40 Nilay Patel? Their assumption is also that you will never use a card and you will you will like make a sad face whenever you don't get to like Apple Pay with your watch. And that will somehow shame retailers into accepting Apple Pay, blah, blah, blah.
15:50 Speaker 01 Also, on top of all this, the Apple, the cash comes back to you every day. And in a thing that seems like the best, but also really does benefit Apple, it goes to your Apple Pay cash card. And so that money sits in like Apple's banks accruing interest until you use it to like pay somebody else with Apple Pay. Or to like pay down your balance or do whatever you do with it. It is, you know, it's like other cash cards that you get from other payment apps where it's like, it's basically cash. You can do whatever you want with it. But it just happens to be cash that is sitting in like Apple's vaults until you use it instead of like somewhere else.
16:22 Speaker 03 Can you spend the cash that's in the Cash App on your with your credit card?
16:28 Speaker 01 One assumes.
16:29 Nilay Patel? Wait, no, wait, no, you can't spend cash with your credit card. You can pay your credit card with the cash.
16:35 Speaker 01 Or you can use the cash to pay with Apple Pay.
16:36 Speaker 03 See, okay, so this highlights a very important. I don't have a credit card and I've been very curious about credit cards.
16:44 Nilay Patel? It's like the least surprising thing.
16:49 Speaker 03 When when I saw this announcement, it was like an irrational desire. Like I was like, that's it. I'm switching on the next iPhone. I gotta get this credit card. I don't know what it is. Like something about the the video. And I just think that there's an antagonistic relationship that you typically have with any of these companies and which I have had with credit card companies and it just didn't feel good. And and I just I just paid them all off and got got rid of them. But this one just looks nice. I feel like I could, I could succeed at this credit card, you know, for once, this is the credit card that was designed for my middling ability to handle having a credit card.
17:33 Nilay Patel? Yeah. I can't believe this is the thing that got you.
17:36 Speaker 03 I'm not, I'm not gonna switch. I'm not gonna switch. I'm being strong. I'm not switching.
17:41 Nilay Patel? This was the most popular thing on the site.
17:42 Speaker 03 I don't want Apple to run my life. It just looked real cool.
17:46 Nilay Patel? So, so I, I think we should talk about why it was so popular. Cause I asked, people were telling me, the consensus on the card is that it is like a basically mid of, middle of the road card, right? Like there are better cards with better rewards out there. If you are like me and you like, fly a lot, like this card can't give you airline miles. It can't get you into the Delta lounge. It can't get you into the Centauri. Like there are reasons to have all these other cards, right?
18:14 Nilay Patel? But Paul, to your point, people don't like their banks. Banking apps are bad. Like Apple saying, we're not going to do fees. It's not the point, blah, blah, blah. Sort of just like, also Goldman Sachs, like just like throwing that out there on the side. I think people are like, okay, well this company traditionally has cared about like my, my user experience as a person. These other companies like obviously don't. So like that's, I think that's the interest. And the card itself looks cool and everybody likes a cool thing.
18:42 Speaker 02 Yeah. I mean, Vlad wrote that story about how it's now their thinnest, smallest status symbol, basically. And I mean, you don't really get that from the Apple pay version of it, which is kind of funny, but uh, you need the actual physical card if you want to have that look.
18:54 Nilay Patel? Yeah. And I think people like physical cards. There's like a reason when Chase put out the Sapphire Reserve, like they literally ran out of aluminum, right? They like the card was on back order for a while because so many people wanted the aluminum card.
19:06 Speaker 03 I want to make it clear, my level of hype, hype beastness. I would leave the card at home. Cards are an old timey thing and we don't need this anymore.
19:17 Nilay Patel? Well, just like on every other episode of the show, you're like Bitcoin is the future. And now you're like, I want this Goldman Sachs.
19:22 Speaker 03 It is. I use, I use Square. I have a Square debit card and it's a wonderful experience and I'm having a great time and I get cash back when I buy a coffee and I use it to buy Bitcoin and it's wonderful and I'm a satisfied customer. And when I saw this Apple credit card, I was like, I could be in debt right now. It'd be great.
19:42 Nilay Patel? So I think the thing that is super weird about this card is that it does not, it makes sense from one perspective of Apple, which is they want to own like the stack of stuff that you use, right? So they have Apple Pay. It's a good experience to pay with Apple Pay. I like using it on my phone. I think it is, every time I try to use it with my watch, like the clerk just stares at me like I'm a space alien, but it's, it's like fun. It's like a good experience. The next obvious thing to do is to disintermediate Chase or whatever, Bank of America and say, okay, now it's an Apple credit card and we control the experience of like that money too.
20:20 Speaker 03 And then you make your own currency and it's an Apple currency.
20:23 Speaker 01 Yeah.
20:24 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
20:24 Speaker 01 And then you can use it to buy stuff at, you know, the company store, like pickaxes and shovels and, you know, dungarees, dungarees, dungaroos?
20:34 Nilay Patel? Dungarees.
20:34 Speaker 01 Dungarees. The company store, I mean, it's full on company town shit. Like at the end of this is like you're, you're mining rare earth metals to put in the phone that you buy from the company store.
20:45 Speaker 03 I feel like this came up before, but I feel like several of these tech companies now, and very clearly Apple, their business model is let's be like China, but with a twist. And Apple's twist is let's be like China, but we don't track you.
20:58 Nilay Patel? Yeah. Although they, if you sign up for news, the video service, the credit card, the game, like, and like they're, they know so much about you already. Like you're spending your time in their ecosystem. They don't have to track you. They're charging you for every minute that you spend working in a screen. Who cares? Like what is there left to track?
21:21 Speaker 03 We have a pretty good idea what he's up to.
21:25 Nilay Patel? So that's the one view, right? They're just sort of like integrating the rest of the tech stack. The other view is this is super weird, like nothing about a credit card sits at the intersection of technology and the liberal arts, right? It's just like Apple's conception of it. Nothing about fucking Goldman Sachs is like user-friendly and safe, right? Like, they're trying, they have the Marcus thing, like, sure. But it's, it's literally, Apple is like, we're a behemoth. Like, this is the thing that makes them a behemoth.
21:55 Speaker 02 Yeah.
21:56 Nilay Patel? This is the thing that makes them the corporation, is that they have a credit card with Goldman Sachs. And I think that is just, that's the thing where I was like, why is everyone so interested in this? And I get it, it's a card, it's pretty blah blah. But it is so weird for this, this company that started as the upstart that had the pirate flag. Like, do you think the Apple Pay team has a pirate flag hanging from the wall? Like, I just don't. Like, do you think the Goldman Sachs team is like, we're at, like, they don't.
22:21 Speaker 02 I am far too mired in debt to get this card, but uh, I mean, it seems interesting. I'm not really a part of the points and cash back culture that people seem to be super pumped about this. But I'm gonna push back, this idea that like banking apps have gotten bad. I think they've gotten a lot better over the last couple of years. Like, I have Citibank, I have Capital One. So if I have to like freeze my card or like do any kind of like customer service, that's all pretty quick and pretty easy. So I'm not sure like Apple's customer service benefits come through here, but the app looks nice. It's got that cute little slider where you can see how much interest you're gonna pay and things like that. So it is, so it's very transparent. But still, I mean, they were saying some things on stage that just weren't true, like the low interest rates. I mean, that's just not, that's just not accurate. And so like there, some, some parts of the stage show are a little bit deceiving.
23:07 Speaker 02 But there's a lot of excitement about it. And I guess my question is like, why not bundle in some other services with the card? Like, if you get a card, now you'll get one terabyte of iCloud storage. Or does that feel too icky as far as like mixing product and a, and a credit card?
23:21 Nilay Patel? Did they say iCloud once?
23:23 Speaker 01 They did not.
23:24 Nilay Patel? No.
23:24 Speaker 01 Not a single time.
23:25 Nilay Patel? Right. And I, I think this goes to like, how much will this all cost at the end? Because.
23:29 Speaker 01 Right.
23:30 Nilay Patel? If you buy any one of these services, they should give you more icon storage. They should be like, fine.
23:35 Speaker 03 Well, we.
23:35 Nilay Patel? Fine.
23:36 Speaker 03 And we already talked about this, oh, I think it was last week, but if they do an Apple Prime play, right? I mean, it almost feels like they're teeing themselves up for it. Like, we didn't tell you the price because we didn't want to yet unveil our great thing where we bundled it all. And you get all of it for one low yearly fee.
23:55 Speaker 01 So that would be rational. Um, that would be, um, you know, the thing you would assume any other company would do. I kind of think that maybe Apple won't do it. Uh, that maybe that there's like, there's a sense in the company like, nope, that we're, we're not playing that game. Like, well, we draw the line there.
24:13 Speaker 03 If somebody signs up for Apple News Plus and Apple Music, they're already paying more than Amazon Prime, right?
24:18 Nilay Patel? Per year?
24:19 Speaker 01 Yeah.
24:20 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
24:20 Speaker 03 Yeah. Amazon Prime is like a hundred dollars per year.
24:23 Speaker 01 I think they just raised it to 120.
24:24 Speaker 03 Well, still this, I mean, two $10 a month things is.
24:29 Speaker 01 Yeah.
24:29 Speaker 03 More than 120.
24:30 Nilay Patel? Amazon's sell there is like, you're going to buy more stuff from Amazon. Whereas Apple doesn't run a store. Like, I mean, they do, but like the store is full of like $1,000 baubles. It's not full of like socks and laundry detergent, which, you know, like Amazon cap, once you sign up for Prime, Amazon's captured you for everything else. So I think the, the model there is a little.
24:51 Speaker 01 Yeah. Amazon Prime is now 12.99 a month, so it's 155 dollars.
24:55 Nilay Patel? Okay, let's talk about games real quick and then we have to, we have to like dig in on TV. Dieter, you want, tell me about the game thing.
25:02 Speaker 01 Uh, so it's called Apple Arcade. We don't know what it costs because they don't want to tell us prices on anything. Uh, but it's a subscription service. It's a special section in the Apple Store. And when you subscribe to Apple Arcade Plus, you get access to these games and you can freely download them to your iPhone, your iPad, your Apple TV or your Mac, uh, which is new and exciting. We think they're going to be like exclusive and I don't know if you're going to be able to buy the stuff outside of Apple Arcade, but they've got some big names, at least in iOS world. So developers, uh, behind Monument Valley, Florence, Altos Adventure, they got Will Wright, who made SimCity, like that's, that's a thing.
25:37 Speaker 03 Also Spore.
25:38 Speaker 01 Also Spore. Man, actually I talked to somebody who worked on Spore not too long ago and, uh, she was a delight. Anyway, the games look good so far. I mean, we, we saw more of the games than we saw of TV previews.
25:52 Speaker 01 And to me, depending on the price, it might be the easiest sort of subscription you can get of everything Apple announced because you can just opt out of the hunt for good games that you can trust that aren't scummy, trying to get you to do in-app purchases every 30 seconds. There's a question mark about whether or not it will truly be good for developers because one, they might be locked into this thing. Two, we don't know how much money they're actually going to make. Three, like it feels nice to just buy something and own it. And this would not be that, you know, but the bottom line is like the app ecosystem,
26:34 Speaker 01 the way that money is working in gaming on iOS and just in mobile in general, is so sort of fundamentally broken and skewed right now and just not working super well, that any change is probably a good change.
26:48 Speaker 03 Wait, can I push back on that? How is it, how is it broken?
26:52 Speaker 01 In-app purchases, people don't actually pay for games. The, the price of games has dropped very low and so it's hard to like make a living and run a development studio based on your games. Like you can do it. There are successes, but there's not, it's not like the, the video game world for a PC or console, right? Like it's, there's, there's no reason it shouldn't be. Like the phones are powerful enough, the tablets are powerful enough, but you can't, no one has turned into EA on the back of iPhone games. And like, why not?
27:21 Speaker 03 Isn't that kind of the, um, it's almost like a, a, like if you're an indie and you make a small, good game and you charge $10 for it.
27:31 Speaker 01 Yeah.
27:31 Speaker 03 Yeah. You are not going to be as successful as Bejeweled.
27:35 Speaker 01 Right.
27:36 Speaker 03 Or Candy Crush or whatever, but you can make a living if you make a really good game that is really popular. It's, you know, it's like a proportion thing. Like yeah, in-app purchased games is like a multi-billion dollar mega industry that is, is, I'm guessing in-app purchases on, on games now probably dwarfs the film industry.
27:57 Speaker 03 But, but, uh, but you could, I feel like people can still make games and they can sell them and they can succeed. And also, you know, you have a larger chance of that if you have a larger market. And so, so maybe people don't ever pay for anything on Android, but you can also, you know, put it on itch.io. You can have it be in the humble bundle. You can put your game on Steam. If it's not an exclusive to this Apple Arcade service.
28:25 Speaker 01 To be clear, I'm not saying like, oh yes, this is going to save everything and everything is broken. But I think there's a bunch of stuff that's broken. It's worth trying something new, but there are open questions. How much will they get paid? Are this Apple going to pay you by like how long people spend in your game? How will you get into this subscription? How will you get into Apple Arcade? You gotta like get approved by Apple. Well, will that mean that like it's harder for the little guy to make good? Will be, be making a successful game turn into, do you have a good relationship with Apple's team? Like, that's like not the right incentive, right? So there's, there's potential problems that this could have down the line. In the same way that the App Store itself started as a very simple concept, but had these knock on effects
29:09 Speaker 01 that just radically changed economies. And like, we don't know how big this is going to be yet because, you know, for all we know, this will just turn into ping, right?
29:18 Nilay Patel? Yeah. I just think that Paul, that my read on it, um, I'm just a great piece for us where you like, broke out where the money comes from in Apple services. And it's like all in-app purchases and games. Those are the top grocers. It's like big paid apps like Tinder, which is the highest grossing app in the App Store, according to App Any, which is crazy town. And then it's like all in-app purchase games. It's like, Apple created this monster. We're like, literally, we're like, is this gambling? Like, it kind of feels like gambling. Like, kids are addicted to gambling now.
29:51 Nilay Patel? Like, huh, like, okay, like they created this monster, but they just sliced 30% off the monster. So like, that's a huge revenue line for them. And now they're going to like sell you the cure, which is like for 12 bucks a month, you can opt out of this scumminess of in-app purchases.
30:07 Speaker 03 Okay, that is the other thing. Apple is saying, hey, we see the sort of games that you enjoy playing. We have made a curated selection of possibly exclusive games that nobody's playing right now.
30:22 Speaker 03 You know, like, like, I'm happy that they are going for it. And like, you know, the, the, what that adventure game where you're driving RV through the desert. Like, I've been following that game for like years. It's beautiful and, and it seems very innovative and interesting.
30:39 Speaker 03 But like, you know, how it seems like they're, they're taking, they're taking creative risks. There it's, it's like Netflix, you know? This is the Netflix of iOS games. And, uh, you know, on Netflix, Netflix comes up with a lot of crap that I do not care to watch. And, you know, YouTube, I've talked about this a hundred times. YouTube constantly spending my YouTube red money, or whatever it's called these days, on horrible shows that I definitely don't want to watch.
31:06 Speaker 01 Well, they stopped doing that. They're, they're, they're getting out of the, the Hollywood game. It's like the day before Apple or the day of Apple. They're like, yeah, we're done making, we're done trying to be, make professionally produced shows. We're just going to focus on creators.
31:17 Speaker 03 They're like, Apple's got Aquaman. Like, he could never compete.
31:21 Speaker 02 So speaking of things that people don't play often, when's the last time you guys played a game on your Mac?
31:25 Speaker 03 Yeah.
31:25 Speaker 01 Womp womp.
31:26 Speaker 02 When's the last time you played a game on the Apple TV?
31:28 Speaker 01 Womp womp.
31:29 Speaker 02 So does this fix those platforms? I mean, that's a valid question. Like, if, if you make a game for this, do you have to make a game for the Mac? And the Apple TV by default? Like, do you have to be on all four?
31:37 Speaker 01 Or if you make a game for this, do you get the Mac for free because they're going to fix Marzipan at WWDC? And so that's why this is coming out in May or fall. Is this one May or fall? This one's fall.
31:48 Speaker 03 So they did announce that these games would be available on all the platforms, on the TV, on the Mac, on the phone, on the iPad. And the only way that this works on the Mac is Marzipan, right? Like, there's no other way.
31:59 Speaker 01 Yeah.
32:00 Speaker 03 And like, I don't know, man. Like, you just look at the Marzipan news app and you're like, well, these games are doomed.
32:06 Speaker 01 Yeah.
32:08 Speaker 03 Like, how do you solve that problem? How do you solve the problem of a game that runs great on an A12, running in Marzipan on like a MacBook?
32:17 Speaker 01 Without a touchscreen.
32:18 Speaker 03 Without a touchscreen, like.
32:21 Nilay Patel? What is your plan?
32:22 Speaker 03 Most of these games are developed in Unity and Unreal and Unity and Unreal can target the Mac directly. They don't need Marzipan as like a go-between. Like the, you know, Marzipan will be a thin wrapper around these games. Most of the code that runs these games is a game engine that was probably written in C++. So that is designed by necessity to be extremely platform agnostic. I mean, the only question with the Mac is do any Macs have GPUs that are as strong as an iPhone?
32:56 Nilay Patel? Yeah, I know the answer. It's no. It's like literally no. I have, I have like the last 2015 MacBook Pro, the GPU. It's like hot enough to fry an egg on and the fan runs all the time.
33:06 Speaker 01 Yeah. Here's, here's what I want. I just want a podcast where Neelai, you sit down with Epic's Tim Sweeney and you say, "Tim Sweeney, thanks for being on the show. Apple Arcade." And then you just stop. You just let him go. Wait for the next 35 minutes while he goes off.
33:21 Nilay Patel? Look, Tim is very accessible. He's on Twitter. He like had an entire argument about game store fees in my mentions with like a squad, a squad of people. Very entertaining.
33:31 Speaker 01 Yeah.
33:31 Nilay Patel? Tim, if you want to come on the show, we can, we can talk about it anytime you want, but it's fun. It's fun to talk to him on Twitter. Okay, we gotta take a break and then come back. Chris, we're gonna make you tell us about this TV thing.
33:41 Speaker 01 If you, if you're in your car, pull over while we take this break, listen to the break, but then pull up Andrew Webster's excellent article about Apple Arcade where he talks to a bunch of developers about their hopes and fears. It's well worth it and everything good that I said was cribbed off of it.
33:59 Nilay Patel? Okay, we're back. I mean, this is like the big one. I'm glad that we saved all the time for it. Chris, what the hell is this TV plan?
34:07 Speaker 02 So we have three things that now share the Apple TV name, which is very, very straightforward. You've got the Apple TV set-top box and on that you run the Apple TV app. And on top of that lives the Apple TV Plus streaming service. So. Yeah, they've got a lot under one brand. So they started off with the new TV app, which is a bit more personalized. And now they're doing this thing called TV channels where you can pay for HBO, CBS, Starz, Showtime, and you can watch those shows inside the TV app without having to hop over to HBO like you would now. And so that's very similar to Amazon's model with Prime Video channels. And so they're doing the same thing. I mean, those are really the only major partners they have.
34:51 Speaker 02 There's Epix, but after that, it gets kind of random.
34:55 Nilay Patel? So they put up a bunch of cable company logos, PlayStation View, Hulu Live logos. How is that stuff integrated?
35:03 Speaker 02 So I talked to Hulu and they said that you can't watch their stuff inside the TV app yet. I mean, there's a page on the Apple website that makes it sound very, very much like you can watch Hulu through the TV app, but Hulu told me directly that that's not the plan. So I think for that, for that and like some of the others, like Prime Video, those you're still going to have to bounce out to that app to watch the show. But those shows will be listed inside the TV app as they are now, but it's still going to be some friction and moving around.
35:26 Speaker 01 Yeah, so the interesting thing about channels, so I can't find the source now, but like people have said that Amazon actually makes like significant amount of money from people subscribing to channels inside Amazon Prime. But they make you bounce, but Apple doesn't make you bounce. But this is like, this is potentially like the actual thing that matters in terms of Apple making money off of TV is if they can actually get people to use a TV app and they can actually get people to sign up for subscriptions. Like, that's the thing. This is what Peter Kafka was reporting. Like, they're going to have their own shows and they're gonna, you know, make a new version of the app and there's gonna be all this stuff. But like fundamentally, the like intervention that Apple is making in terms of its TV strategy is you can subscribe to stuff inside the TV app and we'll get a cut of that. Is that, is that a fair assessment, do you think?
36:11 Speaker 02 I think so. It just seems like a very strange way to go about things. I mean, when you get, when you sign up for Netflix or Hulu, you have all this comfort viewing of older shows and older series that you can always just fall back on if you don't want to watch their latest original. Whereas with Apple, it's just going to be you've got TV Plus, and as far as we know, that's only their own shows. And outside of that, you have to pay for HBO if you want that. So that might be $10, according to rumors, which is less than it costs. But I mean, that's not a back catalog, really. You can, I guess that's enough for some folks. But I mean, there's a lot more to just fall back on if you have Netflix or Hulu or Prime Video. Or and that's, this is very much not that strategy.
36:48 Nilay Patel? I'm still like, I don't understand what's going on in this app. So there is right now an Apple TV app where it aggregates a bunch of shows from a bunch of services, including live TV providers like PlayStation View and Sling and whatnot, where you can enter your cable company password and authenticate a bunch of cable company apps. And then it'll just like bounce you around. So that is still happening.
37:11 Speaker 02 Right.
37:12 Nilay Patel? Right. And they put those logos on like you can authenticate to Optimum and Charter, like whatever. You cannot do Fios, which they announced two years ago and they still have not delivered. But the idea that you have a cable subscription, this thing basically replaces your cable box TV app. Fine. So that's still happening. Then there is like, we can basically surface content out of Hulu and Amazon Prime Video. And you can see it and you click on it and it'll bounce you into that app. And you'll watch it there, which is very confusing.
37:42 Speaker 02 Right.
37:42 Nilay Patel? And still exists. And then there's this new thing where you directly buy HBO inside of this app. You never use HBO Now or HBO Go. And Apple hosts the stream and so you watch it directly in the app.
37:57 Speaker 02 Right, exactly. They're saying it's going to be top tier quality for video and and sound. So so it's them hosting hosting the streams and so they're in charge of all that. So that's interesting. I mean, it's kind of curious about like what the branding is going to be like, like.
38:10 Nilay Patel? But so I just, that's three user flows inside of one app, like.
38:14 Speaker 01 I mean, Heim wrote a really great piece where he like unveiled the history or like reviewed the history of Apple, trying to figure out TV and like all the different times like blah blah, starting with, you know, Steve Jobs saying, I've cracked it and then nothing happening. And the whole history seems to be like, next year, it's going to be great. And then next year comes like, well, we didn't get the deal. So here's what we got. Try it out. But next year, it'll be great. And then a year passes and like, well, we didn't get the deal. So here's what we got. Try it out. And we've been having this cycle for. Five, seven years. And this was supposed to be the moment that they broke the cycle. And I just, I don't think they did. I think it's yet another moment of, well, we couldn't get all the deals. So here's what we got.
38:52 Speaker 02 It feels like Apple throwing its hands up and saying, this is what we've got. This is who we're partnering with, and this is what we're going to go with. And maybe more people assign on over time, but yeah.
38:59 Speaker 01 Yeah. And, and maybe it was too much to expect, but like, think about how different the, you know, the thing that, the thing that you two are describing is from the clarifying moment of the iTunes Store. Music is a mess. People are pirating, blah, blah, blah, blah. No one knows how to do any of this stuff. It's very confusing. It's getting really fragmented, but you know what we're doing? Songs cost a buck.
39:18 Nilay Patel? Yeah.
39:18 Speaker 01 Have at it.
39:19 Nilay Patel? That destroyed the music industry, just to be clear.
39:22 Speaker 01 Well, there's that.
39:24 Nilay Patel? It cratered me like, they've only just clawed themselves back from being disaggregated in that way. And like, my point is like, whatever happens to music industry repeats in every other industry. And like, I think we're seeing that repetition and we're seeing that the TV industry has learned, like, we don't just want to sell individual shows. We want you to subscribe to our bundle. And it's like Netflix isn't in this thing. And Reed Hastings is famously like, I want you to live in the Netflix app. And when you're done watching one Netflix show, we're going to suggest another one and you're going to spend all your time here. HBO, God only knows what's going to happen with HBO now that AT&T owns them. And literally all their executives are like flooding out the door.
40:04 Speaker 01 I think it's called HBO E now.
40:07 Nilay Patel? Oh, God, tell me.
40:10 Nilay Patel? But HBO, like their whole strategy, like AT&T bought them and they're like, we need to have more shows. Like, we need to like quadruple the number of shows. So people like spend time here. And Apple's just like, we're going to resell other people's bundle. And having three different, radically different user experiences inside of that app. One that's based on you having a standard cable subscription and authenticating, uh, like cable anywhere apps. And then another one that's like, you have an Amazon subscription, but we can just like surface the result and bounce you out. And a third one that's like, you have spent 10 bucks on HBO here. Like, all of that is insane to me.
40:50 Speaker 02 I don't know. It feels chaotic.
40:54 Nilay Patel? And then you put that on like a Roku, right? Like they're gonna like, right? Anthony Wood was at the event. They announced they're gonna be on Roku. And it's like.
41:01 Speaker 02 Do you bounce out from the TV app to the HBO app on Roku?
41:05 Nilay Patel? On Roku?
41:06 Speaker 01 What happens if you are in the Apple TV app on Fire TV? And you click on an Amazon show?
41:11 Nilay Patel? But at least the Fire TV has like a real processor, a GPU and a user interface. Like the Roku box is like a fucking command line.
41:21 Nilay Patel? Like I've talked to them about it on this show. Like Anthony Wood, why is your interface bad? And he's like, because people don't care. They just want to watch the thing, right? And they like, they, they, they sell boxes for like 20 bucks.
41:32 Speaker 02 Right.
41:33 Nilay Patel? Like, what is Apple's service gonna look like on a $20 Roku stick?
41:37 Speaker 02 Yeah, I mean, this does not sound very friendly to the cord cutter folks out there. I mean, if you pay, well, let's say $10, let's guess how much it'll cost for a TV plus and all of Apple shows, you get that. And then that's all you have. And so if you want HBO, 10 bucks more, Showtime, 10 bucks more. And this just starts to get very, very, very expensive pretty quickly.
41:53 Nilay Patel? I also, the list of platforms that Apple is committed to supporting with this extremely confusing app is insane.
42:00 Speaker 02 Right.
42:01 Nilay Patel? Right? So Samsung, they have to make a Tizen app for Samsung TVs. They have to make an Android app for, for Sony TVs. They have to make a WebOS app for LG TVs. They have to make a Roku app. They have to, like Vizio runs some crazy HTML5 thing. They have to do like, who is the poor person at Apple like tasked with port this insane TV app?
42:29 Speaker 02 Exactly. So there are all those apps.
42:31 Nilay Patel? All of these platforms.
42:32 Speaker 02 All those apps and there's no actual Android proper app for this thing, which is also pretty interesting.
42:37 Nilay Patel? The, the actual platform that most people in the world have?
42:40 Speaker 02 Right.
42:41 Nilay Patel? None of this makes sense, but they're doing it. It's, it's happening. It's here. We're gonna get it. I suspect this is why they didn't release it. Like you get the feeling they need to have some like slow rollout to explain how it works and they're gonna do all that stuff. And then all of that is next to, oh, you can pay some more money to Apple and. And Oprah will be there, right? What is that? Do you have a clear sense of that service?
43:06 Speaker 02 It sounds like they've got a lot of shows coming. I mean, they've got a lot of star power. It's hard to tell like what shows are actually ready. I think there was some report last week that several have actually, they're done, but, but they didn't really show it, show us much in the way of like trailers. There was just that really short, short montage of like 20 seconds worth of just random scenes. And that's, that's all we got. So they've got big names. I mean, I'm sure the shows are going to be great, but it just comes down to like, when you get Netflix, you get great shows plus a ton of other stuff. And they're really breaking that up here, so.
43:38 Nilay Patel? So Chris, compared to all the other services that you cover, where does this one land? Like, how should people think about it?
43:46 Speaker 02 It depends how they price it and if there's a bundle. I mean, right now, if you look at Spotify, you pay for Spotify and you get Hulu for free, which is pretty wild. I mean, so if, so if there's no like Apple Music and, and bundle for this, it just gets a lot more difficult to recommend to somebody to, to pay your 10 bucks for Apple Music and your 10 bucks for Apple Video and your, and God knows what else. And plus they didn't really show like how it actually works inside the TV app. They showed like one slide of it, just the shows there, but I mean, people just want to sit down and have the app tell them what to watch. And like, Apple didn't really go into like how it's going to go about that kind of thing. So there are a lot of unknowns. I think price is the biggest one and how they're going to piece all this together in a way that makes sense. Because right now, it's not making a lot of sense for a lot of folks.
44:27 Nilay Patel? Yeah. I mean, I just keep thinking about the number of times I have talked to Apple about their TV products. And like, basically the attitude is people love Apple, so they'll buy the Apple TV, of course. And then we'll just have all the people and people will have to sign the deals. And that just didn't happen. Like, it just absolutely has not happened. And so now they have to go out. It's amazing to me they haven't made a cheaper Apple TV.
44:53 Speaker 02 Yeah, there's that too.
44:54 Nilay Patel? Yeah. It's amazing to me they haven't just made a TV, like, just like, if they just did that, enough people would just go, like Paul's like, I'm going to buy this credit card because it's pretty. Like, imagine if they made a TV. Like, people would buy that. And now they have this like long-term, like, the problem with making a TV is that you sell it once, right? And so when Apple is just going to make a TV and you're going to plug some cable box into it and maybe rent some TV shows, that TV would sit on your wall. I think the average is like seven years in the industry. Like, that's not a great market compared to like the iPhone where you're spending a thousand dollars over two years or whatever. Well, if your plan is to monetize services over the time, now you should definitely make a TV.
45:35 Nilay Patel? And like, charge a subscription fee for the content, like that is, that's basically the, the cable company.
45:41 Speaker 03 To be clear, I'm not into this credit card because it's pretty. Like I said, I'd leave the titanium slab at home. But it, I like that the choices that it makes on my behalf, right? And it's not antagonistic against any of my lifestyle. Like, there's this, a lot of these services, you're, you're signing up and you are making a very strong commitment. Like Spotify versus Apple Music, like where are my playlists gonna live? Who's gonna scrabble my listening behavior, you know?
46:14 Speaker 03 And then, all of these different video streaming services are so antagonistic that, that we're at a point, I mean, we as consumers have greatly benefited from the streaming wars. And I think we will continue to benefit from the streaming wars in the sense that there are available some very great TV shows. There's like two or three per, you know, depending on your tastes, on each streaming service. Uh, and so if you spend sixty dollars a month or more, and you have a subscription to each of the big streaming services, you have the best TV that anybody in the history of the planet has ever had.
46:55 Speaker 03 And now, Apple, if they can actually make good shows and you are willing to pay another ten dollars a month, now you'll have even more of the best TV that anybody's ever had. But there, there does come a point where you can't actually subscribe to all of them. That at some point, some of them will have to die. And, and, and it is clearly, it, it looks like the way it's being invested in, it's almost a winner takes all market. Like, at least, it seems like these companies see that, that this is a very large pie that will, can't naturally be split up into a bunch of things. Because ultimately, people want to be able to watch all the TV. They don't want to just choose upfront. I will only watch things that are created by one company.
47:39 Speaker 03 You know, people like, that's not how you watch movies. You don't watch movies. You don't go to the theater. I only go to the theater if Warner Brothers produced it, you know? So it Actually avoid the theater when it's in the DC Universe. Just run away from that. Well, there you go. But you know what I mean? Like, say with music, like, I don't avoid, I don't choose my music based on which label produced it. And so I don't want that to be my streaming experience for the rest of my life. And so there's this antagonism. It makes sense that they have to fight each other tooth and nail because this is such a valuable market. But I feel like it can't last forever because it's ultimately going to be off putting to your customers.
48:18 Nilay Patel? Yeah. The comparison on credit card is really interesting, right? Why are you interested in credit card? Cause it, it, it offers you a better user experience that probably, it feels like it cares about you more than competitor products that you don't like, right? Well, everybody hates the cable company. Apple's been staring at everybody hating the cable company for how long? And they didn't enter. And so there are a bunch of great alternatives to the cable company that exists now that are proliferating, that are creating great TV. Netflix famously this week, Reed Hastings, CEO of Netflix, said, we're not a tech company. We're an entertainment company now. Right? Like this, we just, the distribution is like solved. We make entertainment, we compete in that space. Literally HBO is owned by AT&T.
49:02 Nilay Patel? It's, you cannot be said enough that HBO is owned by AT&T.
49:05 Speaker 01 Again, Neelai, you have to refer to it as HBO E.
49:09 Nilay Patel? HBO 5G E exists. It's so bad, but that is a distribution play, right? AT&T wants to distribute this stuff. So Apple, how do they express that they care for you better? Well, all they really have is like a great user experience that you sit down and like, shows you a bunch of stuff you want to watch and like, it's easier. And nothing about the current TV app is a great user experience. Nothing about this TV app that they've shown off seems like a great user experience.
49:33 Speaker 03 That's not fair. It seems pretty okay.
49:35 Speaker 01 It seems fine.
49:36 Nilay Patel? It's, it seems messier than ever to me. Like, I mean, I use a Roku, so. Yeah, but like here's just like but one example, if you just watch the video again, none of the shows have text titles below them. All the titles are baked into the graphics of the show. So just like scanning the list of things is hard. Like that's, that's just a weird decision.
49:59 Speaker 01 Yeah.
50:00 Nilay Patel? And I, I honestly don't think like lots and lots of tiles of stuff is how anybody wants, like that's not, I don't think that's the future of the TV. But that's like another, that's like Neil I Smokes Weed, like just talks about the future of TV.
50:13 Speaker 02 There are so many questions. I mean, one of mine is like, where does the privacy line land here? Because on stage I just watched today, they were saying, we'll not share, we will not share your personal information with anyone. And so, I mean, what's personal, what's personal data? I mean, where's that line? What's, I mean, what?
50:26 Nilay Patel? So they told me at CES, when they did AirPlay on Sony TVs and whatever else, like, they told me that the Samsung, the app on the Samsung TVs, Samsung would not be able to see what you watched on that app. And that the AirPlay TVs, the, you know, whatever automated content recognition on those TVs would not be able to see what you were.
50:43 Speaker 02 So then what does Roku get out of like having the Apple TV app on its platform? If there's no data to be pulled from it?
50:49 Speaker 01 I mean, Roku will take any app from anybody. Like, what does Roku get? They get another app. That's, that's all Roku wants.
50:55 Nilay Patel? Or they get some cash, right? Like, how does Roku make money? They sell ads, basically. They do channel placements. Like, there's a whole market for, for all we know, the app on Roku is just Apple TV Plus. It's not this channel thing. It's not this other stuff. It's just where they're going to distribute Oprah. We don't actually know, right? So like, maybe it's just another movie store with some Apple stuff in it, and it's not this channel thing. We, we just don't know the answer. And again, there's just, try to imagine what Apple building a Roku app. Like, Johnny Ive approving the design of a Roku app is insane.
51:32 Speaker 01 I just, I just wanted.
51:34 Speaker 02 I mean, it's got a better remote.
51:35 Speaker 01 Pull over again, pull over again, and just close your eyes and imagine Johnny Ive holding a Roku remote.
51:42 Speaker 01 This is how it should be done. Looking at the headphone jack, having feeling about the fact that there's a headphone jack on it, that there's a crackle button on it.
51:50 Speaker 03 Hey, guys, I came up with a completely different mod. I'm gonna revolutionize the TV industry. All right, you ready for it? Rent to own. You take the entire iTunes library, right? Like, you know, every once in a while, you can't find the actual thing you actually want to watch on a streaming service, because they actually have very limited selection of the incredible archive of great films and television throughout history.
52:17 Speaker 03 You go to a service like Amazon or Apple and you buy it or rent it. And it's like $4 to rent and it's $12 to buy, all right? It seems ridiculous to pay $12 to own it. And it seems ridiculous to pay $4 to rent it, because then you could only watch it one time. But if you rented it and that counted as one check, right? And if you rent the same thing three times, now you own it. Rent to own.
52:45 Speaker 01 That's just...
52:46 Speaker 03 Think about it.
52:47 Speaker 01 More predatory practices. I will tell you, actually.
52:51 Speaker 03 I want to own things.
52:52 Speaker 01 Movies Anywhere has me buying more movies than ever. Yep. I used to rent stuff and never bought stuff, but because Movies Anywhere exists and is so good, it has me buying more, because I know that I'll be able to use it on whatever device I happen to be on. I know it'll work in whatever service I happen to be using, for the most part. And if, like, the TV industry would just, like, look at that and think as hard about it as we imagine, Johnny, I've thought about thinking about the Roku Remote. I would, I would pay more for TV stuff if I, like, felt like I could own some of that stuff and it wouldn't go away when Netflix loses a deal.
53:26 Speaker 03 Mm-hmm. Yeah, rent to own.
53:29 Nilay Patel? Chris, did they say that iTunes movies and TVs, like, they showed movie trailers in this ill-fated TV app, right?
53:36 Speaker 01 Yeah, so that's gonna be the new home for your TVs and your TV shows. So I assume there are gonna be some changes coming to, like, the software on the Apple TV and they'll phase out the iTunes app that was there, or, yeah, so that's where you're gonna watch all your owned content and your rented content now as well.
53:51 Nilay Patel? I cannot wait to try this app.
53:52 Speaker 01 But I don't know if that's just on the Apple TV device, or is that also on your iPhone, or who knows, but, uh...
53:58 Nilay Patel? Who knows? The story of Apple's Showtime.
54:01 Speaker 01 There are a lot of questions and there's a lot riding on the fall.
54:04 Nilay Patel? All right, we're gonna take a break and when we come back, we're gonna get through the rest of the stuff. We're going over here.
54:12 Speaker 01 Paul.
54:13 Speaker 03 Yeah.
54:13 Speaker 01 Every week. My dude.
54:15 Speaker 03 Hmm.
54:16 Speaker 01 What happens?
54:17 Speaker 03 It's called invisible to visible. Which, um, it's weird. A lot of people think I came up with the name for this segment that I do every week. It's actually, it's actually a Nissan thing. I'm ripping off Nissan's incredible branding. By the way, the abbreviation for invisible to visible is ITV. And ITV technology is when you're riding in a van and you're wearing an AR headset and then like a weird avatar appears in the empty seat in front of you and starts talking to you.
54:57 Speaker 03 But, but it's not a virtual avatar. It's an avatar that's controlled remotely by somebody wearing a Vive headset. And Nissan has hopefully offered a really great diagram of invisible to visible or ITV. And you basically, what you need to do is pull over in your car and go to theverge.com and search for invisible to visible and look at this diagram because I, it has the words, virtual world, metaverse, digital twin, cloud. In fact, the digital twin is inside the metaverse and then it interfaces with the cloud, which is outside of the metaverse.
55:41 Speaker 03 And then through 5G connects to a van.
55:47 Speaker 03 And then you can get nauseated watching, talking, oh my gosh. It's so.
55:53 Speaker 01 Someone just watched the Spider-Man into the Spider-verse movie while high and be like, I can make a great product out of this.
56:00 Nilay Patel? I love it. The world needs more of his 5G vans.
56:03 Speaker 03 Yeah. 5G vans, Adam in, metaverse, digital twin, omni sensing data.
56:09 Nilay Patel? I gotta say, Apple also changed the indicator on AT&T phones to say 5GE this week.
56:14 Speaker 01 Yeah.
56:15 Nilay Patel? Which just fills me, like my phone says 5GE.
56:17 Speaker 03 Yeah. What's it like having 5G now?
56:19 Nilay Patel? I hate it.
56:21 Speaker 01 5G is bad?
56:21 Nilay Patel? I hate it.
56:22 Speaker 01 Is that what you're saying?
56:22 Nilay Patel? I literally look at my phone every time I'm in one of these, I'm in Miami Beach right now. I have 5GE and I'm just like. You people will do anything for me.
56:34 Nilay Patel? Literally the reaction I have to my phone every time I see it. I almost am getting like 250 down, but I think you got that before they changed the indicator because it's just LTE. It's the worst. Everybody send a screenshot of your 5G indicator to Tim Cook. To Tim Cook. Wow. But why'd you do this?
56:53 Speaker 02 It seems like at least this time, people aren't really falling for the scam of the fake thing in the corner. I mean, for our crowd at least, for your common AT&T customer, there might still be some confusion, but I mean, there just seems to be a lot of pushback and anger over what is clearly just a trick, just a dirty, dirty trick. And so.
57:10 Nilay Patel? It's an obvious, an obvious stupid trick. Also, AT&T owns HBO now. I just want to, I don't know if you got that from a previous conversation.
57:19 Nilay Patel? It's literally crazy. Okay, Dieter.
57:21 Speaker 01 Yeah.
57:21 Nilay Patel? Last week, we promised people that you would review the iPad Air.
57:24 Speaker 01 Yeah. And thank you for that, by the way, because the number of reminders and questions I've got of where's your iPad Air review comment was out of hand. I was very busy, but it is, it is now reviewed. It's on the website. It's on the YouTube and you know, it's an iPad. It's very good. It's a, almost a carbon copy of last year's iPad 10.5. And if you can get last year's iPad 10.5 Pro, you should, because it has like speakers on both sides. And you know, I think it's the same thing. So rather than like get too deep into like the review of the thing, because you can go read it. It's an iPad. You know what it is. It's good. At the end of the review, I decided I know what air means when Apple calls a product air now. And it's different than it was before. And I just want to like,
58:09 Speaker 01 hear what you guys think air means to Apple and then run my theory by you. What do you think air means? We did this last week. We decided it was medium. Yeah, I don't think it's medium. Oh. Because the MacBook Air is not in the middle. It's at the like the bottom.
58:23 Nilay Patel? Hmm. It just means sort of like the one you should get.
58:26 Speaker 01 Yeah, that's what I think. I think, I think air means this is the one that most people should get.
58:30 Nilay Patel? Yeah. The, the air means middle.
58:32 Speaker 01 Yeah.
58:33 Nilay Patel? Well, it's good enough.
58:34 Speaker 01 The MacBook isn't in the middle. That's the problem. It just means, you just get, it means just get this one. Air means just get this one. Famously, Goldilocks did pick the middle one. Yeah. It doesn't, the metaphor doesn't work for the MacBook Air. I just keep coming back to it.
58:51 Speaker 03 Yeah, it's the one you should get, you know, like air, you know, everyone needs air.
58:55 Speaker 02 Yeah, so it seems like we were pretty high on the cheap iPad at one point. So, so is this, I mean, that good where you would steer people away from the entry level iPad and towards this or?
59:03 Speaker 01 I, I think that if you can afford the extra 170 bucks and then the 160 bucks for the keyboard, yes, I think you should. If you get the basic iPad, I think that you are still getting a remarkable deal. You are getting more technology per dollar, more quality per dollar than you can get virtually anywhere else in tech. I love the basic iPad, but if you just want to type, if you just want a little bit of a step up, the step up of 170 bucks from the basic iPad to the, the new iPad Air is like noticeable and significant in a way that, you know, in other, in other categories, the step up isn't necessarily worth it. And it just, it has the keyboard connector like,
59:45 Speaker 01 and I know it's dumb to like care that much about a keyboard connector, but it's so much more convenient than a Bluetooth keyboard. So yeah, I, I think that if you can afford the extra 170 bucks, it's a pretty easy decision. The screen's better. You notice the difference in the screen. It's laminated. You know, you notice the slightly bigger size, not that much, but you notice it. It's totally worth it in a way that, and the, the reason I'm so happy about the iPad Air existing is the previous step up from the basic iPad to the iPad Pro was such a huge jump for a bunch of stuff you didn't need. This is a smaller jump for a bunch of stuff that you'll actually notice.
1:00:20 Speaker 03 This is a bit of a tangent, but if you had to choose between an iPad, Apple's iPad keyboard.
1:00:27 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:00:28 Speaker 03 A Surface Go keyboard.
1:00:30 Speaker 01 Uh huh.
1:00:31 Speaker 03 And any MacBook currently made by Apple, an evil company that hates typists.
1:00:40 Speaker 03 Which would you go for?
1:00:43 Speaker 01 I would go for the probably the Surface Go keyboard, although it's a little bit small and they can get squeaky sometimes. But like a Surface keyboard, either Pro or Go, then the iPad keyboard and then the MacBook keyboard at the bottom. Actually Joanna Stern just published a retrospective on the Butterfly keyboard on the MacBooks where there are no Rs or Es anywhere in it. Because those keys are broken on her thing and you can toggle them on and off.
1:01:10 Speaker 01 Yeah.
1:01:11 Speaker 03 Nice.
1:01:11 Nilay Patel? All right, last thing to talk about and we got a break. Just one non Apple thing. The Wall Street Journal says Nintendo plans two new Switch models for this year.
1:01:19 Speaker 01 What?
1:01:20 Nilay Patel? It's crazy to me. A high end and a low end.
1:01:23 Speaker 01 Yep.
1:01:24 Nilay Patel? The low end has integrated controllers.
1:01:26 Speaker 01 Yep. And no vibration apparently. So here's the really fascinating thing. The writer, whose name I'm gonna slaughter, but Takashi Mochizuki tweeted a couple of things. I think they're in the story, but one says they're different from the original and you'd be surprised. And that, quote, "You would be wrong to think the enhanced version is similar to what Sony did with the PS4 Pro." And the other is a just cheap alternative that looks very similar to some past handheld machines like the PS Vita. So they're not just like bumping the specs on the high end one and they're not just making the small, the cheaper one, just like cheaper and crappier apparently. So they're gonna do something interesting and I'm, you know, I'm, I don't know, I'm a huge Switch stan.
1:02:11 Speaker 01 I'm very excited. Like at some point, the battery on my Switch is gonna start running out. I'm gonna want to replace it. It'll be nice to replace it with something nicer. Maybe someday I will like be like all in on, I don't know, Google Stadia. A bunch of people gave us feedback that we were super harsh on Google Stadia. Like I actually very hyped for Google Stadia. I just am very cautious about the lag and the latency. Anyway, like if Google Stadia turns out to be real, then I would maybe still want a Switch, but I would just get the smaller one and travel with it, you know? So anyway, I'm very excited about the Switch.
1:02:43 Speaker 02 They don't really have to go too crazy, you know, I mean, for this fancy model, just put a nicer screen on there, maybe OLED? That would be lovely and some nicer speakers and you're pretty much there.
1:02:52 Speaker 03 I don't own a Switch, but every time I've used the Switch, I've had some sort of Bluetooth issue. Like I would really like that to be improved. I think it's just Bluetooth. That's what that is.
1:03:02 Nilay Patel? It's like, I think what you're saying is, I'd really like them to not use Bluetooth.
1:03:06 Speaker 03 But I have used a lot of wireless game controllers and I've never had as many problems as I've had with Joy-Con.
1:03:12 Nilay Patel? How many of them are Bluetooth?
1:03:14 Speaker 03 Some of them. The PS4 is Bluetooth, right?
1:03:18 Nilay Patel? I think it's like a weird, technically Bluetooth Sony layer thing.
1:03:22 Speaker 03 I think Nintendo put some garbage antennas in its Joy-Cons.
1:03:27 Nilay Patel? I think that's probably true as well. But what am I, what am I most willing to blame? Oh, Bluetooth.
1:03:34 Nilay Patel? That's, that's what I'm gonna blame.
1:03:35 Speaker 03 This, I mean, I, I feel bad that I haven't ever got a Switch because it, I, I, it's such a great example in the tech industry of somebody just blazing their own path and they keep on going in their own path and it keeps on being great. Like, it doesn't feel like the Switch, you know, the Switch is obviously not competing with the PS4 Pro or the Xbox One X in any direct ways. And yet it seems to have way more hype around gaming on the Switch than those consoles have had in years.
1:04:02 Nilay Patel? There's just more joy in it. And so there's more joy in the indie games. There's just more joyful.
1:04:07 Speaker 02 Yeah, they just made VR a cardboard fun. I mean, it's, it's wild. You should go eat Dami's piece. It's a lot of fun. That thing is amazing. So, yeah, I mean, it's, it's, it's just joy.
1:04:17 Nilay Patel? Yeah, like Nintendo saw that VR is a ridiculous thing. My wife works for Oculus, disclosure. And they're like, VR seems ridiculous. Let's make it as ridiculous as possible.
1:04:29 Nilay Patel? Yeah. I'm excited. Things, there are things to be happy about in this world. It's mostly the Switch.
1:04:34 Nilay Patel? Everything, everything else will find out when it gets a price and a release date.
1:04:37 Speaker 02 This fall. How much will joy cost in the fall?
1:04:41 Nilay Patel? It's horrible. You could talk to us. I'm Matt Reckless. Dieter's at Backlon. Paul's the future Paul. Chris, Chris Welch?
1:04:47 Speaker 02 At Chris Welch.
1:04:48 Nilay Patel? Let us know what you think. Let us know if you're interested in these services. Let us know if you two are being sucked into big credit Goldman Sachs like Paul.
1:04:58 Nilay Patel? I'd like to point out, I made a joke about, and then he defended it for five, four minutes. We would love to hear reviews or tweet at us. I'm very curious what you think of these services. I'm very curious if you think Apple can just like capture that much more of your money and time. You can also listen to other stuff. You can listen to Recode Media with Peter Kafka. We're actually going to have Peter on the interview episode next week to help me unpack some more of this TV stuff. That'll be really fun. You can listen to Recode Decode with Kara Swisher. You can listen to Pivot with Scott Galloway and Kara Swisher. You can listen to all the seasons of Watch What's Up Button, which is spitting up again. That'll be very good. And you can look at theverge.com and you can watch Processor with Dieter Bohn on YouTube. So, so much. All that, by the way, I just want to point out, is free. We don't actually charge you a monthly fee for that.
1:05:39 Speaker 03 But it won't be out until this fall.
1:05:41 Nilay Patel? Yeah. But yeah, Dieter's price will be revealed later this fall.
1:05:44 Speaker 03 Yeah.
1:05:45 Nilay Patel? That's it. We'll see you next week. Rock and roll.
1:05:47 Speaker 03 Paul.
1:05:48 Speaker 01 Promo code.
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