The a16z Show - a16z Podcast: How Many Taps in the Apple (Plus) Tree?

Episode Date: March 30, 2019

with Benedict Evans (@benedictevans) and Steven Sinofsky (@stevesi) What does Apple's recent event — in which a range of new services was announced, from Apple News Plus to Apple TV Plus to the Apple card — mean for the company's overall strategy and tactics? In this another of a16z's 'hallway conversations', Benedict Evens and Steven Sinofsky discuss the build up, announcements, and postmortem of the recent Apple event, and consider what it all means in terms of a big company's evolution into services. How many different places is Apple now putting a tap into the tree, with new subscriptions available? What’s the positioning underlying all those different services, from a new credit card to new magazines and content, all bundled up together? The views expressed here are those of the individual AH Capital Management, L.L.C. (“a16z”) personnel quoted and are not the views of a16z or its affiliates.This content is provided for informational purposes only, and should not be relied upon as legal, business, investment, or tax advice. You should consult your own advisers as to those matters. References to any securities or digital assets are for illustrative purposes only and do not constitute an investment recommendation or offer to provide investment advisory services. Furthermore, this content is not directed at nor intended for use by any investor or prospective investor, and may not under any circumstances be relied upon when making a decision to invest in any fund managed by a16z. (An offering to invest in an a16z fund will be made only by the private placement memorandum, subscription agreement, and other relevant documentation of any such fund which should be read in their entirety.)Past performance is not indicative of future results. Charts and graphs provided within are for informational purposes solely and should not be relied upon when making any investment decision. Please see https://a16z.com/disclosures for additional important information. Stay Updated:Find a16z on YouTube: YouTubeFind a16z on XFind a16z on LinkedInListen to the a16z Show on SpotifyListen to the a16z Show on Apple PodcastsFollow our host: https://twitter.com/eriktorenberg Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only; should NOT be taken as legal, business, tax, or investment advice or be used to evaluate any investment or security; and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any a16z fund. a16z and its affiliates may maintain investments in the companies discussed. For more details please see a16z.com/disclosures. Hosted by Simplecast, an AdsWizz company. See pcm.adswizz.com for information about our collection and use of personal data for advertising.

Hi and welcome to the A16Z podcast. In this episode, another of our hallway conversations, Benedict Evans and Steven Sinovsky go over the recent Apple event, Apple Event Plus, and consider what it all means in terms of big company strategy and the evolution of Apple moving to services. Please note that the content here is for informational purposes only, should not be taken as legal business tax or investment advice, or be used to evaluate any investment or security, and is not directed at any investors or potential investors in any A16Z. fund. For more details, please visit A16Z.com forward slash disclosures. Welcome to an episode of the A16Z podcast. I'm Steven Sinovsky. I'm Benedict

Evans. And today we're going to talk a little bit about the announcements at Apple's sort of new look event. The Apple Plus event. The Apple Plus event, the event plus. But I want to start off because, you know, I haven't paid that much attention afterwards, but certainly during the event, there was just so much buildup as usual, which is good because they're a huge company and people pay attention. But then so much, you know, sort of, oh, it was weird, it was different, and it wasn't what we were expecting and all this kind of stuff. And I want to take a step back because I'm completely fascinated by Apple moving to services, which is obviously a huge deal. And I want to talk about it at the strategic sense, not necessarily the financial. This isn't really about the finances or the

the business side as much as the strategy. And so one thing that's super interesting is just out of the gate is Apple has 360 million or so subscribers worldwide. That's a sort of a vanity number because it includes subscriptions to apps in the app store. But because Apple gets a cut, at least for year one, it's a relevant number. So I try to find other subscriptions that were big. The only one I came close was China Mobile, which is like a billion. And then after that, Benedict's old friends in Europe, Voda and Telephonica. Yeah, global mobile operators, global mobile operators have got hundreds of millions, nobody else is this big on a global scale.

But even Voda and Telephonica, at least the current numbers, are under that 360 number. But it's very close. Yeah, it's interesting. If you sort of sit and make a list of how many different places is Apple kind of putting a tap onto the tree and taking some sap out. So how many different places do you have an opportunity to pay Apple $10 a month? It's a little bit like, you know, the joke about cable TV. Like, you cancel your cable for $100 a month.

Right. And then you sign up to this for $10 and this for $10 and this for $10 and you end up spending $100. You could probably, pretty soon you'll be able to pay Apple $100 a month in subscriptions. Right. And the interesting thing, and of course, that's a, it is a good joke about cable TV and unbundling. Now, one of the things that I think that's super interesting about that is it is replacing a place where you have no choice effectively, especially in the... the U.S. market for television, but not the case for news necessarily, but it's replacing it with a feeling of self-determination and control, which I think is really important. And I want to come

back to something that just resonated for me throughout each of the main new plusy things. And that was the sort of this positioning underlying everything they said. And it's sort of the number of times and this consistency across each new subscription, $10 a month thing, that they talked about it being private and having no tracking between it being curated and using humans. So I heard there somebody on Twitter said that they were a publisher and they had a big advertising deal on their, for their content on Apple News. They had a big third-party advertiser. The Apple News team blocked the advertiser because it wanted tracking that they weren't willing to give it. Guess who the Apple advertiser was? Apple. Oops. Apple's advertising team

was demanding tracking that Apple's knees team was not allowed to allow a publisher to do. Well, I've been in the situation of the right-hand, left-hand, on tracking in particular, and I know how tricky that one can be. But going back, so it's private, no tracking, curated with humans was very important, and that's obviously a statement they're making. Also, no ads and family. And that's, you know, of course, when you subscribe to a magazine or cable, it's for your family too. So it's not like some giant leap, but particularly on games, which, you know,

know, today aren't quite shared. You know, obviously Netflix does a great job on family. So there's a big kind of sense of kind of the brand, the fuzzy brand feeling here, which is not about the technology and the product. It's about privacy and curation. The sort of, there was sort of gossip coming out of Hollywood that Apple kept pushing back on the TV show saying it wasn't family friendly enough. They were, this is going on, Tim Cook apparently was writing this as being too mean. Can you be less mean? And, you know, that's a very different. to where the direction of travel of TV has been in the last of five and ten years

with other subscription services, which is being less family-friendly and more edgy and more alternative and pushing the boundaries. Interesting challenge for Apple, of course, they end with April Winfrey. Start with Stephen Spielberg and end with April Winfrey.

They didn't show lots of action movies in the interim. You're talking about services, I mean, there's something that sort of intrigues me here that for a long time, you would look at the app store in the 30%. And people would say Apple is one doing X and Y and Z,

I don't like on the app and they're doing it for the money. And you would say no, because actually if you think about what 30% of the app store is, it's tiny in proportion to the overall Apple business. And the purpose of the app store is to sell iPhones and to make the iPhone a great experience. And yes, they're making a little bit of money from it kind of on the side, but actually it's there for the app store, to sell iPhones. And I think that's still sort of true, except there's now 800 million iPhones and over a billion iOS

devices. And I think Apple said 500 million people open the app store every week. And so 30% of those purchases has become a real number. Yeah, yeah. And so there's a kind of an interesting thing across many of these tech companies, actually, that's something that was kind of non-core or non-strategic or sort of not there for the money, the money that you weren't really there for has now become a really big number. Well, and that's one of the things about the scale that makes this all very interesting.

Because I think that this move to services, people are just having trouble getting their heads wrapped around it. And it's a very natural progression for any company when it starts to reach a mature level, which is, okay, are we now effectively, you know, selling things to our, quote, installed base enough? And in the world of enterprise software, like, every company is in the transition to cloud space. They're taking their existing customers and they're reselling in their old software, but on a cloud thing. And in the enterprise space, that's, like, heroic and it's viewed as this, like, brilliant strategy. And here's Apple doing the same thing. And it's like, oh, this is a recognition that they're doomed and it's the end of the line for them.

And it's a very weird thing to sort of see because it's both natural. And unlike all the other enterprise businesses, Apple is saturating the population, not some artificial number like number of computers and marketing people. There's five and a half billion adults on Earth and four billion also people have a smartphone and 800 to 900 million of those now iPhones. I mean, we should probably just kind of, for people who aren't obsessed with this stuff and haven't seen the event, we should probably talk quite specifically about the first that they announced. So they did four announcements. So the first is that they've extended the existing news product, which has been, so they have Apple News product, has been kind of a sleeper hit. It drives a lot of traffic for publishers.

It's, again, manually curated, so they don't let any, theoretically, they don't have kind of random junk in there. Apple News now gets this company they bought last year called texture, which is sort of PDF magazines plus, reformatted magazines, $10 a month, and there's, I think, 300 magazines on the title, and there's some notable exceptions, but basically everything is in there. Like the New York Times and isn't in there, but National Geographic and all sorts of other stuff is in there, loads and loads of magazine. And you pay your $10 a month, then that sits within the news curated experience, so it will suggest stuff from titles that you wouldn't necessarily have looked at.

It will, say stuff will flow up. And the pitch to magazine, of course, here is this found money, because these people wouldn't have bought your magazine, they won't read all of it, but they'll read five stories and you'll get some money from that. People in magazine business are saying, A, you're giving up customer ownership and B, you're giving Apple 50%. An awful lot of people don't get customer ownership. Well, this is me, like, yoga magazines.

Like, the only time I really buy yoga magazines is at the airport. This is the thing. So you've got people at kind of top right corner of the quadrant titles saying, you're insane, you shouldn't give up customer ownership. You look at these titles, most of those titles don't have customer ownership and will never get it. And so there's a sort of a found money conversation in there. So there's a news product.

That's kind of interesting. There's some execution questions. You could go and do the micro thing, which we won't on what's going on there. There's News Plus. Then they have a credit card. Well, let's slow it down for a second. One more thing on news. Well, shall I go?

I'll do the Four Bullets. So there's news. They've extended Apple Pay and Apple Cash with a credit card. They have got a new version of their TV app that aggregates content from other TV apps on your phone, on your device, and from stuff that you might have access. to through your cable subscription, so it should all just show up in one UI. And then they have, they are paying people in Hollywood to make TV shows for them. So there's those four things.

It's about the interesting thing for me about news, again, it comes back to, so Apple has like core values, it has a set of core attributes that Tim Cook has done, but there's three sets of Apple values that sort of float around. The Steve Jobs one, the early Tim Cook ones, and then the most current ones that you can see on the website. But the middle ones, one of the things that they really talk about. about a lot is they like to make complex things simple. Yeah. And to me, the thread through all of the announcements today was like making complex things simple. And for most people, a lot of these things are

actually pretty complex. Like the idea of subscribing to six magazines, it's not just that it's expensive. It's kind of a complex thing. You got to find them. You should make a note here that the U.S. print magazine market is a subscription market, which is not true in other places. So in the UK, no one subscribes to magazines. There's a shop selling 300 magazines every 100 yards on every shopping street. You want a magazine. You go in and you buy it. No one subscribes in America. Like, live in San Francisco, supposedly in an urban center. But I want to get a magazine, I actually can't, like unless I go to the airport. Yeah, all of those stores, there used to be many of them. But the only way I could get a copy of National Geographic today is to find some way of getting

them to mail it to me. So in that context, moving to Apple News product does actually solve a consumer problem. Right. And also just, like again, with all of these, there was a lot of like hemming and hawing over, oh, is this part of it going to be available in Germany? And is Liechtenstein going to have special TV shows for them? And the thing is, when you're looking at your installed base as the potential customers, you have a lot of data over who's buying what and where. And so it becomes very natural to sort of tilt things towards where the money is already being spent because the easiest dollar to make is, is a dollar more from somebody who's already paying you. And in Apple's case, like tilting it towards the U.S. and the early versions of these products makes a ton of obvious sense. Now, they'll have and expand it, but they will follow the economics much more than you might, for hardware, it'll look a lot more like when they opened their Apple stores.

Yeah, and going back to the old world of print, U.S. magazines is a bigger market, and then the U.K. is a bigger magazine market than France or Germany, and that you would expect that to be reflected in what happens on this platform. Yeah, but it's part of what made the event weird for people is sometimes it was like, well, this isn't what we're really used to. We're used to like a new device that'll be available on 160 countries on Thursday. And all of a sudden it's like, well, it's complicated to roll out all these things. Like even just the magazines, you've got to get everybody to be in sync on an issue.

Like they can't just show up. And TV production, it's even more uncertain. So I personally thought that Apple News was particularly interesting. I have some beefs with it. So I think, yeah, I mean, I'm just listening to you talk. I feel like there's these four events and you could put them in very different places. Because Apple News is, I would say this is a good, solid, incremental upgrade to an interesting, useful product. It's not changing the world.

It's a good product. This is a good upgrade. The same thing with their refresher of the TV app. Yeah. This is a good upgrade of an existing product that solves a bunch of problems. There's also a two-hour argument about how well it does that and what else. will happen and so on. Right.

But there basically is an incremental upgrade to an existing well understood product. Then you have these kind of two sort of meteorites. Let's finish TV and let me get to that one because I, the thing on the TV that I think, this is one where I would say it's the, if only Apple got into the business of X, they would fix it. And there's just this hope that Apple could show up and erase the existing business infrastructure of television. And all the reasons why it's like that would stop mattering.

and just go away. It reminds me of, you know, like anything that we all dislike and we all wonder if only Apple would make that, the world would be a better place. And we forget they didn't do that to telco. Yeah. You know, you still pay your telco X amount of money and the service is still the works pretty much the way it worked 10 years ago.

In fact, then they, you know, especially with the soft sim and things like that, they've made pretty incrementally. It's incremental, but it reduced complexity in some significant way. And so I think that... But they didn't buy a record label. Right. They didn't buy telco. Exactly.

They didn't, until they didn't buy a bank. Or a book publisher. Yeah. You know, to fix books and stuff. And so I think that there's... The problem is when people are unhappy with any company doing something, it's often because, you know, the company messed up. But it's equally often that there's just a mismatch between expectations and what was really done. And I think in the case of TV, everybody just wants so much more.

And really, nobody has cracked it. In fact, what's interesting is so much of the negatives about what's going on with TV, we forget how many people thought Netflix would never work. And how many people that were in TV said Netflix wouldn't work? Like, there were a bunch of people at Disney who were clearly convinced that it wasn't going to get any traction. Which is why they let them buy their shows. Right. There's just no escaping this reality of TV that the people who make things like there to be a large number of customers

and divide up the market in different ways by streaming. not streaming and DVD or pay-per-view or theater plus by country. And that's not, they make it. So it's not going to change. Yeah, exactly. I mean, it is so Apple had to do a telco and then you were complained that somehow the existing telco market structure hadn't changed. Well, yeah, you're only going to do this slowly and piecemeal and in a careful

bits because there's very, very strong incentives there that aren't going to go away. Right. But if they can make, you know, like I'm a TiVo user and one of, and Roku was much the same way. And both of those are products that take a very complex world of many different apps with many different feeds of potential content and make it simple. And there's so much room for Apple to make that even simpler. And the fact that they have a TV device is very interesting. The fact that they will incrementally expand where that, you know, Envisio TV or LGTV or Samsung TV is all goodness. And I think it's just it fits the description of like progress.

And that's good to see. It didn't erase the TV industry, but it's progress. Yeah, we've got news and the TV app. These are interesting, useful products that sell problems for people. They are not the Jesus phone. No. But this is just good incremental work by a bunch of people there, making it a bit better. Apple card.

I'm not a card person, which is actually also interesting in the context of TV. Are you like, so you're like anti-tracking and everything? No, no, no, it's not that. It's not a British thing. No, no. What I mean is I can't sit there and analyze exactly what this proposition is and what it looks like, well, I should be about the propositions, which is, similar to TV, a lot of the TV questions are actually TV industry questions, not Apple

or tech questions. Right, right. I think another way you can think about all of these services are they all bind you into the phone. Right. And so there is a, you know, just as everything Amazon adds to Prime keeps you from canceling your prime account and that drives all of your purchases through Amazon, all of these things are sort of ways of making your next phone purchase be another iPhone.

and if your credit card is a particularly sticky thing, if you're getting your TV through it, if you're getting your magazines through it, if you're getting any other kind of transit, XYZ service, anything that you can do that both makes the product better, but also it's something that's going to be kind of a pain in the backside to switch out and replace with something else.

All of that becomes valuable. Right, which is of course exactly what everybody enterprise software does and why SaaS is so interesting to them. So it's no surprise that Apple is doing all. of these things. And it's this, it is just this weird view of, like, Apple as a boom-bust company dependence on hit gadgets, which isn't true all that much either. But the thing to me about the card, I found the card, you know, actually particularly innovative. And then a lot of people like, oh, you know, you go to nerd wallet and you see all of these cards that do better

points or better this and better that. You think it's like the people who said, oh, Dropbox isn't very innovative. You just go into your GitHub and you can download 15 scripts and tie them together and you get the same thing. Like even people who said that the way Apple did Wi-Fi hotspots wasn't innovative. And like underneath every, what, they're probably, you know, a very, very small number of people at a very, very smaller number of companies that understand all the complexity that could go into delivering Apple card. That complexity, Apple is erasing.

Like some very simple thing. Like you mentioned, well, if Apple can make the phone sticky when you get a new phone, right. This is exactly the kind of thing that they. can do. Make it really easy to get a new phone, even if all your credit card and money are sitting on your Apple device. And that upgrade is hugely valuable. But on top of that, there's all this innovation that happened in the space. And yes, you can go to NerdWallet and you could find some card that does 3% cashback on everything, not just store purchases, or

you can find one that gives you better miles. But anyone who knows any of these things knows that once you're on that game, you're almost like the person who's determined to find everything you want to watch on off-air free TV. Like, it's only, there's, people are only willing to spend so much effort for some of those. You're the coupon. You're like the coupon queen. Well, coupons are very good for certain people at certain economics, but like at some point, like you're making a trade-off over time versus, versus effort.

And if you're an Apple customer, you've already made that trade-off because your phone is a luxury good. Like you didn't buy the $99 phone. You bought the expensive one. So you're looking for other things. And this is where another part of where people view these services, they sort of get a little confused, which is Apple, first, Apple off the top is not aiming for all five billion humans that will have a smartphone. They've already said we're going to only go, we're not making super cheap phones. It's not that way. We're aiming for a billion. Right. And on top of that, they can do their services as a subset of those people. Like, they already have everybody in the app store, and then they have some very large percentage of people that will buy iCloud

for backup. And then after that, they don't have to get 900 million people for every service. And they can aspire to that, and they can measure that. But there's some point where it becomes a very good business and a very great value proposition, even for people who don't have them, to know that they can get them. I think that kind of takes us onto the TV product, where we're sort of slightly hesitant about, I suppose the best way of putting it is to say, We're sort of reserving judgment on any kind of specifics because we don't have the specifics.

We know Apple has officially said we're doing a TV service. We're going to get a bunch of really great people to make some fantastic TV. We'll tell you more later. Yeah, yeah. So that's TV Plus you're talking about. Sorry, TV Plus. Apple will pay people in Hollywood to make TV shows for them and they will tell us more in the autumn. You can guess that it will be $10, $15 a month.

They've said it will be global or 100 countries because they own the rights. the big unanswered question is how much, what actual volume of content, because Netflix is spending something over $10 billion this year. How much are they going to make? And therefore, how big will the proposition be? How many of those great shows will there be? That's kind of the big thing everyone wants to know and we don't know. And we'll find out.

And the thing is, people are like, ooh, this is weird and stuff. And look, this is what, this is the power of being Apple is that you basically can convene all of these people. They're willing to experiment. But the strategic lever that one sees there is here again, Apple is saying, here is something good that you might like and you can pay a bit more money and get it on your Apple devices. And that sits next to news. It sits next to the card. Is Apple bringing something unique to credit cards?

No, they're just changing the experience. Well, and there's a bunch of integration. I think the credit card is more innovative than people are willing to say because they focused on sort of the nerd wallet checklist as opposed to the security and the privacy and the money management. of Apple engineering stuff going on in the card. There's not apparent that there's a bunch of Apple engineering stuff going on in the TV, but there's a bunch of Apple decision about what should you see and how does this make your overall being an Apple customer experience better. Right. And if they can reduce the friction of acquiring it, of browsing it,

of suggesting what to watch and when, I mean, there's a whole lot of places where this is literally, you know, like, the Jim Barksdale famously said, like, there are two ways to make money in business. you can either bundle things or unbundle them. And so what we're seeing is a gradual creation of a series of bundles from Apple. And yeah, sure, there might be Apple Prime or something down the road that bundles all of these into some thing. But for the time being, they don't need to. In fact, it's, I would argue, one of the things that people were jumping to

is to have, like, this all in one. But the fact that Apple is allowing them or keeping them separate is also a way to find product market fit for each of those because you don't prematurely bundle things, because then you really don't know if you're successful or not. Yes. And this is what all the credit card companies sort of count on, which is basically they're going to make a giant basket of stuff

and move it around all the time. And most people only care about, like, one thing that they're getting. Yeah, I mean, theoretically the Apple could say it is $200 bucks a month and you get a free iPhone and a free iPad every two years and you get all of this stuff. Yeah. And, yeah, that would, I don't think that would actually be a good proposition for most customers because you wouldn't get to pick and choose,

which bits, and it would also be kind of a huge sticker price. And it's much better to say, well, there's a phone, and there's how you pay the phone. And then there are these bits that come that you can have on top of it. And also, the people who would jump at buying that probably would be spending $400 anyway. And so that's like one of the weird things when you do these mega bundles is you're also trading off. Yeah, those are the people who'd buy a new, top of the line, iPhone XS. Every year. Every year.

Every year. And they would buy AirPods and a whole bunch of other stuff. And so, you know, for me, like, there was just a lot of overthinking of this whole thing. And that's the constant challenge with Apple is you over. In fact, last night I tweeted that, like, when before the iPad came out, we were all sitting around trying to figure out what they were going to do. And we, we for sure thought they were going to go build a Mac tablet with a pen, which was just sort of our weird strategizing about what they were going to do. Not this very... I think there's a kind of, there's a sort of a high-level point here, which I think you said a kind of...

couple of years ago that, you know, Microsoft would do some big event and then you'd look in the tech press and you'd discover what your brilliant Dr. Evil strategy was and you'd read it and you think, oh, that would be a good idea. Yeah, right. We should do that. And that people sort of, you know, there's, I said earlier, there's like, there's two sets of Apple strategy here. There's, there's news in the TV app, which are incremental improvement. And then there's a credit card and the TV content, which are rather bigger ambitions. And you can kind of generalize that over any kind of big company that you've got stuff for doing, which is just VP's doing, VP, stuff and product teams doing product stuff and they'll just carry on doing it. Every now and then,

like you've got the huge mega strategy. But very often you're just kind of carrying on doing what you're doing. And I think a lot of what we saw was sort of Apple just kind of carrying on doing what they're doing. Some of it's good. Some of it you can argue about. Some of it is a big mega future strategy. Some of it isn't. And you can kind of over an over, over, you can kind of over rotate on the we've got to work out. And it is one of the things that Apple does particularly well is progressively reveal the strategy. Like take something like the Apple card and the Apple cash that's in it. Like Apple Cash came out and everybody's like, why would I ever use this? What am I going to do? And then last week, they just, or earlier in the week, they made the change that

now you can pay off your bills using Apple, which now it's all starting to come to other. And it's this whole thing like I always think about keychain. And how for years they were doing keychain. And then one day they have the fingerprint reader. Yes. And it all comes together. And suddenly your fingerprint, your password is automatic. Yeah. I mean, you can run your scenario back. So they start with a fingerprint reader before the year before they do Apple phase. It's really obvious they're going to do Apple Pay, but they do the fingerprint reader first, and there's a reason that it's there. Then they had Apple Pay, then they add the cash, then they add the card. Now you take the Apple card, you get your 2% cash back on everything you spend, and where does that money go? Well,

it goes into P2P payments using cash, or it goes into the app store, or you spend it. And taking their family-friendly view of things, well, now you have like a credit card where your son or daughter doesn't need the card, can use it at a set number of places. They have spending graphs, they'll earn this man, you can give them cash allowance directly. All of a sudden, it's like the family-friendly way to run finances. And it's super interesting. So, sort of for me, like, there was just a lot more there. And I think it just didn't have this big bank, you know, big companies, too, that you set a date and you have to do an event. Like, you can't not do it. And then you run around. And like, sure, when you're launching hardware, you know, we forgot, we forgot

to mention the game thing. Oh, the game, right. The game thing is also the family-friendly piece. Right. Which is you pay this subscription, you get these nice, fun, interesting indie games that are not about blowing people up and are... Curated, and private and are not about kind of manipulating you to get you to spend more money on loot boxes. And also about kind of trying to help the indie development developer base a bit more, which is obviously sort of a challenge that they have to address. iOS only. And make money. In this case, IMac 2, or Mac 2.

And pull people, you know, another way in which there are a better game. on iOS and then they're on Android. And it's another $10 thing, and it's another piece of your brand experience and a reason why, as a parent, or something you might prefer to be on iOS because you've got this great thing. And again, you wouldn't want to say, well, you have to have this, but it's an interesting experiment for a way of shifting what that gaming experience might look like that kind of fits into the Apple kind of branding and experience.

Right. And also it shows that their view of how these bundles work, which is they're confident enough in the value proposition of the, of the. the phone itself, that they're not bringing all of these things in for free on the phone. Like, it's very easy to see another company with a similar set of assets and other strategy constantly worried about making the phone upgrade cycle work and drawing every bit of software that they make into the sort of the default phone experience. And then a bunch of groups within all the VPs, as you said, within the groups, like

competing over which percentage of the phone upgrades did their free thing cause. Yeah, and then it would be like you can only get the game subscription on the new iPhone. Right. You have to buy this product in order to get that subscription. And again, this was something Apple pioneered very early when they made upgrades to the Mac operating system free. They realized that that turns out to be a better business if you just make owning being part of the ecosystem great. So for me, I felt that there was just a lot of strategizing and hand-wringing and trying to find like the big thing, when in fact, this is a big company executing reasonably well on a bunch of stuff.

And some of it is going to play out and some of it won't. But the strategy is really clear and the evidence is clear. And then what I would call like the framework or the meta strategy of being family friendly and private, it resonated across all the things that they did. I left thinking it was a pretty positive view for them in the sense of putting together a strategy and communicating it. Okay. Thank you. Thank you. I'm Steven and this is A16C podcast.