Morning Brew Daily - FTC Investigates AI Price Adjustments & TNT vs. Prime for NBA Rights

Episode Date: July 24, 2024

Episode 372: Neal and Toby recap the FTC’s probe into how companies may use AI to use personalized pricing for its customers. Then, a roundup of the biggest news in the day’s tech earnings from Te...sla and Alphabet. Also, the coveted NBA TV rights deal adds some spice when Warner Bros. threw its hat in the ring by matching Amazon’s offer. Next, Logan Paul’s drink brand PRIME is sued by the US Olympic Committee for using trademarked terms to sell products without consent. Meanwhile, Amazon’s dream of placing Echos into millions of households has resulted in a nightmarish reality where it's losing billions of dollars because of it. Lastly, it seems like Apple is moving forward with a foldable iPhone. Checkout https://beehiiv.link/morning-brew-daily and get a 30 day free trial and also 20% off 3 months with code BREW Get your Morning Brew Daily T-Shirt HERE: https://shop.morningbrew.com/products/morning-brew-radio-t-shirt?_pos=1&_sid=6b0bc409d&_ss=r&variant=45353879044316  Listen to Morning Brew Daily Here: https://link.chtbl.com/MBD Watch Morning Brew Daily Here: https://www.youtube.com/@MorningBrewDailyShow 00:00 - Intro  03:00 - AI Surveillance Pricing 08:30 - Tesla and Alphabet Earnings 14:00 - NBA Rights Fight 18:55 - Olympics Suing Prime 22:00 - Amazon Alex Losing Money 25:00 - Foldable iPhone Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

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Starting point is 00:00:26 Good morning, Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Fryman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, Amazon is losing an astonishing amount of money on its echo devices. We'll tell you how much without waking up Alexa. Then TNT told the NBA, I wish I knew how to quit you as the TV contract bidding wars are getting juicy. It's Wednesday, July 24th. Let's ride.
Starting point is 00:00:50 I woke up feeling competitive today, Neil. When do you not wake up feeling competitive? That's true. But I'm feeling particularly. particularly ruthless this morning, and that's because we've got ourselves a t-shirt selling contest on our hands. That we do. Listeners of the pod know that we recently released our summer merch, a beautiful MBD t-shirt with a retro flare to it. And you guys have been awesome so far in supporting the drop. Seriously, thank you to everyone who has hit up shop.mortmoo.com and bought a shirt so far. But we wanted to up the stakes a bit now, introducing a discount code off. Yes, right now you can head to shop.
Starting point is 00:01:30 Morningbrewer.com and enter code Toby 20 at checkout for 20% off your order. Or you can head to shop.morgon.com and enter code Neal 20 at checkout for 20% off your order. By the way, my name is spelled N-E-A-L. Good point. Yes, we have dueling discount codes. We can see which code is used more frequently, Toby 20 or Neal 20. So we're having a competition to see who can sling more t-shirts from now until next Wednesday. And we want to take this seriously, so we're adding some stakes. If you're listening to this, email us or comment on the YouTube channel with the punishment the loser should have to face.
Starting point is 00:02:07 Get creative, but remember, Neil is going to have to do this, so be nice. Now let's go team Toby 20. Not Neil 20-hive, let's ride. Are you kidding? That is my line. Now a word from our sponsor, Beehive. Neil, is it fair to say that most hobbies don't make money? Well, let's see.
Starting point is 00:02:24 Golf is like setting money on fire, so is having a boat. even crafting is getting expensive these days. So yeah, totally checks out. Well, what if I told you that you could turn your writing hobby into real cash? You're preaching to the choir, Toby. Beehive is not only a wonderful platform to start your first newsletter on. It's also a wonderful platform to make your first buck on. They have a built-in ad network, which is essentially like having an entire sales team in your pocket.
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Starting point is 00:03:23 Study and play. Come together on a Windows 11. And for a limited time, college students get the best of both worlds. Get the unreal college deal, everything you need, to study and play with select Windows 11 PCs. Eligible students get a year of Microsoft 365 premium and a year of Xbox GamePass Ultimate with a custom color Xbox wireless controller. Learn more at Windows.com slash student offer. While supplies last, ends June 30th, terms at AKA.m.m.S. College PC. There's a new name on the Federal Trade Commission's Noddy List, and it's
Starting point is 00:03:57 surveillance pricing. The agency is launching an investigation into this budding practice to see how AI is being used to change prices right under your noses based on data gleaned from your behavior or characteristics. On the list of companies it is looking into are eight names, ranging from MasterCard to McKinsey to Task, which counts McDonald's and Starbucks as clients. FDC chair Lena Kahn describes surveillance pricing as shadowy ecosystem of pricing middleman who exploit your data to charge higher prices. Factors like the device you're shopping on, your location, your credit history, or your browsing history could all influence how much you're charged. If that sounds familiar, that's because surveillance pricing is a cousin to dynamic
Starting point is 00:04:39 pricing, which has been used by airlines or companies like Uber to charge customers, higher prices when there's higher demand. But the FTC is concerned with the level of specificity and opacity involved in surveillance pricing. So it wants to get a look under the hood of a couple of companies to see if anything nefarious is going on. Yeah, she's, uh, Lena Kahn is going straight to the source on this because companies over the past few months have been bragging about their
Starting point is 00:05:06 personalized pricing. You had Lowe's Finance, Chief Brand and Sik saying, we're going to continue to leverage that data, continue to drive personalized offers, personalized pricing. And then over at Verizon, they said, with personalization, we are able to give offers that are targeted at customers. So the FDC heard what these companies were saying
Starting point is 00:05:25 that they're going to try to implement personalized pricing, which is very different than dynamic pricing. This is pricing geared toward a specific person based on their personal data. And she said, well, I want to look into this because I don't know if this is good for consumers. The incentives are all there for businesses to pursue this because businesses have always tried to maximize
Starting point is 00:05:47 what they can charge people to pay. They want to walk it up right to the last. line of what they can charge someone without having someone walk away. And what's ironic is that this is the way that business used to be conducted. I mean, if you go back to like the 1800s, sales clerks would haggle with people over what price they would pay. They're aiming for that sweet spot. Some people would pay more. Some people would pay less. And it was only when like department stores became a thing in the late 1800s that putting a price tag on items became mainstream. And so once that occurred, it's very hard to charge people something different. And
Starting point is 00:06:20 because just the public perception of doing that, if you see a price and you heard that your friend got a lower or a higher price, that's going to make you mad at the company. But now Pandora's box has been reopened because a lot of our shopping is conducted online. You're not seeing a price tag in a department store, and therefore companies are saying, wait a second, I think we could maybe notch up our pricing personalization a little bit and get back to almost like the old way of doing business. Yeah, I mean, I don't know what when you open Amazon or any e-commerce say, I have no idea what your price is compared to mine. I was thinking about this on Amazon Prime Day. Just you're inundated with price information. And I'm looking at them.
Starting point is 00:06:58 I'm like, well, I bought a laptop in the past. Are they upping the price on me because they know I'm willing to pay vis-a-vis you? So you just don't know. And that opacity is really what these companies are preying on. But there is an expectation that consumers will not be happy with this. I mean, there have been numerous examples in the past of companies trying out personalization and facing a lot of blowback. I mean, in 2000, Amazon varied its prices randomly for DVDs and MP3 players as an experiment
Starting point is 00:07:26 to see which price points worked. But people found that out. They talked to each other in chat rooms. And then that forced Jeff Bezos to apologize. And then in 2012, Orbit steered Mac users to priceier hotels because they learned that Mac users spend $20 or $30 more per night. And then the Wall Street Journal found this out and Orbit's backpedaled. So there have been numerous examples of companies trying to do this right under our noses
Starting point is 00:07:49 until people found out and they had to walk it back. I mean, diving down the price personalization rabbit hole is wild. I just looked at what, think about what McDonald's could do with their app that they now have and the treasure trove of customer data they have. If the app knows that maybe you get paid on Friday, it can make your deal cost $5 instead of $4. If it knows that you always get an egg McMuffin before class, then they can run a promotion for that. If they know it's hot out, maybe they'll make McFlurie's less expensive.
Starting point is 00:08:17 If they know it's cold out, they'll make a cup of coffee. different. So there are so much, this is why there's been this race for data. This is why McDonald's has been like pushing you into their app ecosystem because they want to be able to add up those little price changes over time because it ends up being a very big business increase for them. Totally. I mean, look at Walmart. They're rolling out digital prices in all of the, in 2,300 stores over the next few years, they're going to be able to change prices six times per minute. So dynamic pricing is absolutely coming. What the FDC is, wants to draw the line is that hyper-targeted personalized pricing that these companies and a bunch of consultants, which they're
Starting point is 00:08:56 going after, are offering their wares for. Earning season kicked into full gear yesterday with tons of companies dropping their Q2 reports. Toby, you won the pre-show Limbo contest, so you get to go first. My company up first is Tesla, and Tesla earnings came in, sort of like my bench press at the gym yesterday, a weaker than it. expected. Revenue was up 2% from a year ago, but auto sales actually dropped 7%. And that's including a hefty $890 million in regulatory credits, which was more than triple last year. Remember, earlier this month, we got word that Tesla actually beat expectations for deliveries. It increased their total from Q1, but they are still down compared to Q2 last year. Neil, the drum that Elon and
Starting point is 00:09:38 Tesla have been beating is that, hey, we're in between growth waves right now. Our goal is to cut costs and growth is going to be lower this year, but we have big things coming. And those big things being the optimist humanoid robot that Elon says they'll be using at Tesla next year, as well as Elon's versions of Gatsby's Greenlight, the autonomous Robotaxie. Elon said yesterday, the value of Tesla overwhelmingly is in autonomy. Those other things are in the noise relative to autonomy. Again, he told everyone who disagrees to sell the stock. Neil, the stock is down about 7% pre-market as everyone digest this earning report. How's it sitting for you?
Starting point is 00:10:16 It's sitting like Tesla is not a car company anymore. I mean, they're not. They're just focusing totally on tech. Elon is spending $10 billion on AI-related expenditures. He talked a lot about Nvidia GPUs and building a dojo supercomputer. He talked a lot about this humanoid robot that is expected to come into Tesla factories next year and then go into other factories in 26. You just didn't hear a lot of excitement or interest in new car models.
Starting point is 00:10:46 The only thing that seems to be on the radar is this robo taxi, which the unveiling of was pushed back from August 8th to now October 10th, which is probably a soft deadline. So you just don't hear much about the car business anymore. Tesla's market share has dropped in the U.S. from 60% last year to 50% in the first half of this year. It seems like Elon is just betting the bank on AI for Tesla. The only way that they've been beating on deliveries, too, for their cars is by just putting a bunch of price cuts out there. I mean, remember, their automotive gross margin, which used to be the gold standard of the industry, used to be in like the 20% range, has now fallen all the way to 14.6% in the second quarter.
Starting point is 00:11:29 That's down from 16% the first quarter. So they've basically been cutting costs, they've been dynamically pricing their cars by just making them a lot cheaper to try to boost those delivery numbers. But you're right, like the enthusiasm from Elon is not directed towards its car business at all. It's directed towards pretty much anything other than its car. So I think you're right in saying that Elon doesn't even see Tesla as like a car business anymore. No, he's very loud about that. As for Alphabet, the parent company of Google, it was another ho-hum quarter of making more money than God. While its AI buggy search might tell you to eat rocks or put glue on pizza,
Starting point is 00:12:07 everything else is clicking for this company with its cash cow ad revenue. and growth engine Google Cloud, both jumping by double digits last quarter. Profits rose 28.6% from a year earlier to $23.6 billion. The only thing that's been a real headache is all these failed purchases piling up in its shopping cart.
Starting point is 00:12:27 In recent months, Google has been trying to land its biggest acquisition ever, first with software firm HubSpot, and then with Cloud Cybersecurity provider, WIS, the HubSpot deal fell apart. And then earlier this week, WIS said it was rejecting Google's $23 billion, offer because it wanted to control its own destiny and go public. So while most things are going
Starting point is 00:12:46 perfectly fine for Google, its acquisitions are getting stymied. Yeah, one acquisition that it made a long time ago is doing well, though, and that is Waymo. It's under its other bets unit. It finally brought in a little bit of money, $365 million up from $285 million a year ago. But the big news is that Alphabet did say that they're committing $5 billion more to investment in Waymo. And remember, Waymo did have a pretty nice quarter. It opened its service to all San Francisco users. Sooner Pitchai said that they're now making 50,000 weekly paid public rides between San Francisco and Phoenix. So Waymo is doing all right. Right. Waymo is doing fine. And so are many of other Google's past acquisitions. I mean, remember, they kind of built this company a lot due to these very savvy purchases like Android and
Starting point is 00:13:34 YouTube. But right now they just can't buy anything. And that's because of one, antitrust scrutiny. And two, specifically for Wiz, this has directly to deal with the crowd strike outage that happened, because Wiz is a cybersecurity provider. And once they saw what happened with CrowdStrike, they were like, Google is paying us $23 billion. Like now, definitely not because every company is going to come to us to batten the hatches after what happened with this massive global IT outage. So people are saying that Wiz backed off because of CrowdStrike, and Google's probably like, damn it.
Starting point is 00:14:06 Just a few days after the NBA confirmed it was committing to a long-term thruple with broadcast partners, Disney, NBC Universal, and Amazon for 11 years and $76 billion for the rights of the league. A new bombshell has entered the villa. The current rights holder Warner Bros. Discovery has rediscovered its feelings for the NBA and exercised its matching rights in a last-ditch effort to keep games on its TNT network. Rumors have it that it's after Amazon's $1.9 billion per season portion of the deal. The NBA, meanwhile, is playing hard to get. It said it had received Warner's proposal and is reviewing it but gave no indication on whose offer it'll accept. Though, Commissioner Adam Silver has expressed his preference for a pure streaming
Starting point is 00:14:49 partner like Amazon. One thing Warner and TNT have going for them is a lot of history. TNT has carried the league for more than 30 years, but when the deal came up for renewal, the bid started to get a little rich for their blood. NBC and Disney have both agreed to pay more than $2.5 billion dollars per year. So it looked like TNT was going to let its basketball love slip through its fingers, but clearly it's still got some fight left in it yet. It has some fight because this is existential for this company. The NBA contributes 7% of their total profits. analysts predict that if they lose the NBA, they're going to lose out on $600 million in revenue. So this is really the last gas for this legacy media company that is on its last legs. It has $40 billion.
Starting point is 00:15:36 worth of debt. Its share price has declined by a third. And it's going up against Amazon, which doesn't seem like a fair fight, given that Warner Bros. Discovery is worth $20 billion compared to Amazon's $2 trillion. So you have to, you know, NBA Commissioner Adam Silver is looking at this and being like, do I go with nostalgia with Warner Bros. Discovery and TNT and inside the NBA? Or do I go with this hot new streaming platform, Amazon, which I know has a lot of money and a ton of distribution and a ton of tech and data behind it. And it's actually growing while the other company is shrinking, but without the NBA and all of the ecosystem around it, like, if you don't show the NBA on TNT on a Thursday night, what are you going to show?
Starting point is 00:16:15 I mean, the NBA and live sports are the only thing holding up the cable package at all? So are they just going to throw like on the Hobbit or the dark night for the 50th time? Ratings would plummet. So I think they're going to go all out to try to get this deal from the NBA. And it's been a rocky last couple of years between TNT and the NBA because Warner Bros. Discovery CEO David Zlaslav said at an investor conference in 2022, we don't have to have the NBA, which kind of set a lot of warning bells off. And if you're Adam Silver, of course you're going to shop the league around because literally your biggest partner just said that we don't
Starting point is 00:16:48 really need you anymore. And yeah, it is a streamer's world that we're just living in it. Adam Silver has come out and said we wanted to make sure that going forward our games would be accessible to our fans through various streaming services. So it looked like all the the eyes were dotted and the T's were cross on this deal, but then at the last second, Warner Bros does have the option to exercise the right to match any deal. They went on the lower end of the spectrum. It's not the A package, the B package that ESPN and NBC sheld out for.
Starting point is 00:17:16 They're going after Amazon's portion because it's a little bit more in budget for them. They said that they'll be able to show some of the games on their max platform, so they're trying to show that they still have that they have the streaming fastball that the league is looking for. But I don't know. Who would you choose? Amazon. Yes, you lose like inside the NBA, which is this pregame and postgame show that has been lauded, considered one of the best sports studio shows around Charles Berkeley is the star of that show. But if I'm just making a calculated business decision, I look at Amazon Prime Video with 200 million subscribers. I look at, you know, a shrinking legacy media company with a streaming platform, though Max has 100 million. So it has half of what Amazon has. I think if you're making just a business decision here, you have to go with. with Amazon, but this legality could come into play because Warner Bros. Discovery does have this
Starting point is 00:18:08 matching clause, and they're threatening to possibly sue if NBA goes with Amazon. So I think there's a long, a lot of story left here before we see the NBA leave TNT. But it is coming to NBC, which means that we get Round Ball Rock and that song back for the first time since 2002. Up next, wouldn't you believe it, but Logan Paul and KSI's prime hydration is in trouble again. Pay off your home, travel for life, drive a Ferrari. In celebration of the world premiere of the Monopoly Big Board Buckslot slot machine by Aristocrat Gaming, Yamava Resort and Casino at San Manuel is giving one person a $1.6 million dream package.
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Starting point is 00:19:03 It's time to refresh your yard during spring backyard days at the Home Depot. Get low prices guaranteed on propane grills starting at $179, like the next grill 3-burner gas grill. Or get $50 off a select Weber Spirit grill and bring big flavor to your backyard. Then set the scene with Hampton Bay string lights that bring it all together. Shop spring backyard days for seven days at the Home Depot. Now through May 6th. Exclusion supplies to homedipo.com slash price match for details. Paul may be a professional wrestler, but if there's one organization you do not want to get in the
Starting point is 00:19:42 ring with, it's the U.S. Olympic and Paralympic Committee because their lawyers will knock you out cold. Unfortunately for Paul, that's a situation he finds himself in after the committee sued his drink brand prime for trademark infringement just one week ahead of the Paris Olympics. The committee accused prime of using trademark phrases such as Olympic, Olympian, Team USA, and going for gold on the packaging of a drink it made in partnership with NBA star Kevin Durant to capitalize on a hype around the Olympics. The Olympic Committee is very protective of its trademarks, saying it uses the licensing of them to fund and train Team USA athletes. It accuses Prime of profiting from its brand despite having no connection and wants all the profits from the Kevin
Starting point is 00:20:24 Durant drink sales, plus millions more in damages. After the lawsuit was filed, social media posts containing the phrases were removed from Prime's pages and the drink appears to have been removed from its website. But just add it to the list of controversies this company is racked up. Yeah, Prime can't get out of its own way. It seems like it's a company run by two YouTubers because they seem to play fast and loose with a lot of legal things from time to time. But yes, there are a few properties which brands and distribution partners are very, very protective over. One of them is the World Cup. It happens every four years. One of them is the Olympics as well because that is a property that you pay a lot of eyeballs for and that you paid a lot
Starting point is 00:21:03 of money to be like the sole distribution rights of it. So it is interesting that it's not Coca-Cola suing. It is literally Team USA suing because they say like, hey, this is how we derive a lot of our revenue is that through these exclusive brand partners, if you're stepping on the toes of Coca-Cola, we don't like that, so we're coming after you. Right. Currently, Coca-Cola does have the exclusive right to use these Olympic trademark on its beverages. Coca-Cola has been a sponsor of Team USA for 90 years. It's the longest continuing sponsor of the event. So, I mean, I just didn't know that Coke was so intertwined with the Olympics for 90 years since the 1940s.
Starting point is 00:21:39 Just did a little math in my head. No big deal. But yeah, so Coke is the only one that can do it. It just signed a recent contract with the Olympics that last 12 years and reportedly cost $3 billion. So that's a lot of money in the Olympics saying, Prime, you don't get any of that. And we've alluded to the fact that this is not Primes for. rodeo when it comes to controversy. Remember last year, a bunch of doctors, lawmakers came out and criticized Prime for just the absurd amount of caffeine in their energy drinks saying that they could
Starting point is 00:22:07 be harmful to children. And then Senator Chuck Schumer called on the FDA to investigate their caffeinated drinks, which that's where the famous stat of. It's got 12. It's got as much caffeine as six 12 ounce cans of Coca-Cola. So ties the whole ribbon on things right there comparing. They tend to get wrapped up with Coca-Cola when it comes to controversies. This drink does. When Amazon launched its smart home devices like the Echo Speaker, it had high hopes for the Alexa equipped gadgets. The vision was to sell the tech at an affordable price and hopefully make back some money when people ordered a bunch of stuff off Amazon. But that vision never came to fruition. And now it's devices business, which includes its echoes, Kindle's firestick, and doorbells is a hot mess.
Starting point is 00:22:51 According to internal documents, Amazon lost more than $25 billion on devices, between 2017 and 2021. It's a mess that was made by former CEO, Jeff Bezos, that current CEO, Andy Jassy, is working to clean up. First step, charge for Alexa. To help stem the bleeding, Amazon is launching a paid tier for the voice assistant as soon as this month. But, Neil, there is a lot of bleeding to stem.
Starting point is 00:23:17 How is it that this device's business could chug along for so many years, losing so much money? It seems to be caused by this particularly obscured, metric that is unique to Amazon that they rounded up a team of economists in 2011 to create. It's called Downstream Impact or DSI, which assigns a financial value to a product or a service based on how customers spend within Amazon's ecosystem after they buy it. So think about the Kindle. You know, you buy a Kindle, but that is sort of a opening to the broader Amazon ecosystem.
Starting point is 00:23:50 It's marketplace because you consistently buy books, e-books, on your Kindle. So they say, okay, well, when I'm looking at the value of a Kindle, let's not just look at the device sale itself. Let's look at how many, how much people spend on it. And they use that across their devices like the fire stick. And they also use it for the Echo device with Alexa on. And that seems to be one way that this, by wrapping up the value of Echo and across its devices with, you know, the broader Amazon ecosystem sales, that's how this product was able to stay under the radar for so long and surviving, even though Bezos's motto is fail fast. that doesn't seem like that applies here.
Starting point is 00:24:27 Yeah, with Echo Devices, the downstream impact idea broke down a little bit because it was harder to attribute specific sales to what was going on with activity around the Echo devices. They relied so heavily on this metric saying that, hey, we get to claim a portion of all e-commerce revenue, and that is why to justify the cost of the product. And it's really the worst type of product if you're a company because it is something that sells very well. There's over 500 million equipped Alexa equipped devices out in the world right now, but they're not making money. They're selling those devices at cost or literally below cost to just, because the idea was get them, let's just win, let's get all these devices in consumers'
Starting point is 00:25:09 room and then we'll figure out how to make money on them after. But that figured out how to make money on them after portion has just been really tough, which is why this has just been a black hole of money. People don't buy anything on Alexa. They use it for, to ask it the weather and they used to asked the timers. There was a survey of people who used who you use Alexa and they asked, they said, what do you use it for? And the item that ranked the last was buy stuff on Amazon's marketplace. This hasn't worked out. They wanted to be a direct parallel to what Gillette does with razors. They'll give you a razor for cheap and then they want you to keep buying razors over and over and over again. That has not happened with Alexa. And it looks like Andy Jassy's
Starting point is 00:25:49 trying to make some changes. They're going to soup up Alexa with generative AI and more capabilities and then charge a monthly fee for it. It seems like that could be coming this or next month. I don't know whether that will stem the bleeding. I don't know if it'll stem at Ealing either. They're trying to put AI capabilities in it trying to let you control smart devices. And also, I do just want to say, I apologize for any Alexa devices. We set off throughout this entire conversation. I hope you're listening to this on headphones right now. And we're not, your whole house isn't talking to you right now. Finally, in recent years, Apple's new iPhone releases have been met mostly with shrugs, but come 2026, it might cause you to double over. And that's because Apple is working
Starting point is 00:26:27 on a foldable iPhone that could be ready two years from now, according to a report from the information. This seems pretty legit. Apple has already reached out to suppliers in Asia to make components for the device, and it has given it a codename to V-68, suggesting that it's moved beyond the theoretical phase and has moved into the product development stage. If it were to release a foldable iPhone, Apple would be fashionably late to the party, as always. Samsung debuted its first foldable phone in 2019, and other companies running on Android, including Google, Motorola, LG, and Huawei have released foldable smartphones. For Apple to go full-fold, though, would be the biggest splash of all and represent one of the
Starting point is 00:27:08 biggest hardware updates the iPhone has ever seen. Toby, rumors have swirled as far back as 2016 over a foldable iPhone, but these reports indicate one could be very near. Do you think people would go for this? No, I'm so against the foldable phone trend. I mean, we had this big conversation in the Morning Brew office yesterday where one of your newsletter writers said she loves the idea of a foldable phone because of a typical iPhone is just too big, especially for her pockets. So this idea of a smaller profile, smaller footprint foldable phone does get people excited.
Starting point is 00:27:42 And Apple has said that the two biggest problems that they've been trying to solve with this phone is one, the creasing that happens whenever you're folding a screen over and over again. But then two, making the phone slim enough so that it doesn't make the phone bulkier when you fold it in half. They seem to have solved both of those problems, which is why they're reaching out to suppliers. But I'm just a little, I'm not too bullish on it, especially from like a brand safety perspective, because the iPhone is the coup de grace. This is their flagship product. I can't believe that Apple would take the risk of introducing folding technology to their main product.
Starting point is 00:28:17 rather than rolling it out with a little bit lower stakes, maybe a foldable iPad or some other technology that isn't their flagship product. So it just seems like an overly risk. It's going to be expensive to, and it aids when everything is getting more expensive. So it doesn't feel like quite the right path to go down. I'll tell you why they're doing it. They don't have a choice because they are losing market share in China. And China is awash in all these foldable phones that I just mentioned. Samsung, Huawei, all these Chinese consumers have all of these options.
Starting point is 00:28:47 So Apple feels like it needs to compete in China with a foldable phone. It's being kind of forced into this. And I'm sure they wanted to start with the iPad or a Mac or something else that was a little lower risk. They don't want to go all in with the iPhone, which is their flagship product. And they live or die from the iPhone with like this huge experimental thing. But I think they need to feel like they need to do it in order to compete in China, which accounts for 20% of their sales.
Starting point is 00:29:10 I've totally changed my mind because at the end of the day, being able to shut a phone and just going, good day, sir, and just having that feeling again, it makes it all. Everyone knows, I mean, everyone who lived in the 90s and 2000s know exactly how that feels. Okay, let's wrap it up there. Thanks so much for starting your day with us and have an epic Wednesday. Hit us up at our email Morningbrewdaily at Morningbrew.com for any feedback. And also to offer suggestions for who the loser of this T-shirt contest should be. Remember, Toby's going to have to do it.
Starting point is 00:29:42 So think of something not too embarrassing. Let's roll the credits. Emily Milliron is our executive producer. Raymond Liu is our producer. Olivia Graham is our associate producer. Eugenio, Yucenoa Ogu is our technical director. Billy Minino is on audio. Hair and makeup knows when to hold them and knows when to fold them. Devin Emery is our chief content officer and our show is a production of Morning Brew. Great Saturday, Neil. Let's run it back tomorrow.

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