Upgrade - 238: The Future of TV Was Apps

Episode Date: March 26, 2019

Apple spent two hours on stage unveiling a bunch of new services, and now it's time to break them down. We discuss the method of the Apple TV+ rollout, whether Apple Channels and a revamped TV app will change Apple's fortunes, what Apple Arcade means for how the App Store works, and the possibility that Apple News+ will make an impact.

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 238 and today's show is brought to you by text expander from smile lunar display bombass and simple contacts my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by mr jason snell hi jason s Snell. Hello, Mr. Mike Hurley. Big show today. Big show. Apple event. You know, it doesn't get any bigger. It doesn't get...

Well, the September event is a little bit bigger, but this one has a lot of information, which we're going to do our best. I mean, the sort of genre of the type of show that it is doesn't get any bigger, but yeah, you're right. You're right. We're going to do our very best to break down the information today uh but it must start we don't even have time for snow talk this week because we must start with our draft results draft results yes they get rid of snow talk on a week like this okay so in case you didn't hear on our last episode which by the way uh i was really proud

of the way our last episode came out and i hope that we have some new upgradians out there in the audience who may have come from last week's episode. But if you did miss it, then we did a draft in which we tried to pick what we thought was going to happen during the event. And I have scored it. You have scored it. I think it's pretty clear cut that you took this one.

Yeah. But I still want to go through it anyway. So the video streaming service, neither of us got the name you thought apple tv i thought apple video you were close yeah very close i left this unscored because i thought that if it was a very very very close thing i would make an argument that you know really i just missed a bit of punctuation. But I don't need the point, so fine. What would a services bundle be called? Let's just skip that one for the moment. You can imagine.

I'm still wondering. Then you pick the four following things. News launches by the end of April. You get a point. Apple will offer subscriptions to other video services. You get a point. Video game service unveiled. You get a point video game service unveiled you get a point

video service costs more than $10 a month again we'll come back to that in a minute because we don't know and then we move over to mine services bundle unveiled Apple to have video content that they did not make available for free to subscribers again we just don't know

but we didn't get that information today video service launches in the US only. That was not true. And Apple credit card. I got that point. Then I think, personally, we should give a round of applause to each other for the full point scoring celebrity round. Yeah, we got all the celebrities right.

All the great celebrities. Oprah, Spielberg, Sarah Barry Alice, and Reese Witherspoon, J.J. Abrams, Sesame Workshop. That is a full point scoring rant. Yeah. I realize now that I should have made you choose a Muppet. I would have gone with Big Bird anyway because it's the only real one that I know. Fine, fine. Yes.

But you get that. You get that. It turns out we could have done more rounds of that because there were lots lots of celebrities on stage but we got we got it we we got i would say though we applied the same thinking to the trailers round and that ended up also doing a pretty decent job so for you you definitely got c we know that much because we could see jason momoa um because they showed like a little video package i'm assuming the one of the more sci-fi series was the space stuff that we saw. Not only the moon landing, but there was like a guy looking at a newspaper that said that the Russians landed on the moon, which is that's the premise of that show is that the

space race continues. And there was a quick Snoopy thing in the sizzle reel too. Yeah, that was like an image. I mean, I was kind of like willing to give that one, but it was less than. Because they had a bunch of photos. Yeah, I almost suggested that we not score the trailer round, because none of these individual pieces of content

got their own trailer. They were just in the sizzle reel. But we could also score it. I don't think it changes the overall idea. We did say that we'd... But anyway, I know that the morning show drama was in there. And again, unfortunately, Little America could have been featured, but it just couldn't be identified. I am certain that Little America is in there. There is a picture of a girl wearing a hijab, riding her bike down the street.

I cannot imagine that that is not Little America. It could have been that movie they signed at Sundance. Could be, but I would give you that one. And there's no Oprah content because there isn't any. Yeah, then we're gonna go with nine six for the school uh the tiebreaker question um congratulations white no i thought they were black shoes they look black well they might have been and we might need closer um analysis from our shoe correspondent but it but it was a dark gray or black sneaker with a big white sole all the way around. And I picked white, but you, you know, and you picked dark gray. So I think I would probably go with you in terms of the tiebreaker, although it's as close to a tie as you could

possibly get on that, but it doesn't matter because I won. So in the end, I got this one. One of those classic situations in the draft for me where i bet heavy on a thing that we all thought was going to happen but just didn't come true so well nine six wasn't too bad i thought for a while it was going to be real bad but then the celebrity round uh paid off for me so i've got some points in there so bravo jason you pick up the first win of the year excellent excellent. Excellent. I'm happy about it. Should we just call it right there? Is this the most important thing of the episode? Oh, no, it isn't.

We're actually going to go straight into talking about this stuff. I've actually ordered this stuff, I think, in a non-chronological order, because I think it would be more interesting to talk about this way. And I want to start with the Apple TV.

The Apple TV. Okay. The Apple TV app has been completely redesigned, is what they said. It looks very different. There's definitely some different focus in different areas. A lot of the features that we're used to are still there. You know, they kind of pitched them as if they were new, but they weren't. So, like, iTunes content's there. Single sign-on content is there.

And content from other streaming providers is there. But were you surprised about the amount of focus the TV app itself got, including clearly some overhaul? I'm not. This is a big part of the strategy here, right? If they're going to roll out a new service and these new channels, which we've been saying are like, we'll call them channels because they're like Amazon Prime channels. They literally are calling them channels. Yeah, Apple TV channels.

There you go. That's what it is because they're rebuilding the cable bundle inside the TV app, basically. I'm not surprised because there's work to be done, right? The TV app isn't great. And let's not forget the TV app comes from the era where the future of TV was apps. And as we learned today, the future of TV is channels inside the Apple TV app, which is apps do now, like Hulu and Amazon, it's also going to have this scenario where they will sell you a service and it shows up inside the app kind of natively as if it's part of Apple's own stuff. It's been clear unofficially for the last year or two, at least, that this is the TV app is this big bag that holds all video content for Apple going forward. And so, yeah, they got to redesign it because and it looked good. But I tried to say when I was live tweeting this, I tried to say it looks good in the demo because, of course, it does.

And it looks like they've addressed some of the issues at the same time i did get the sense at one point like they were scrolling endlessly down a page and i thought is that gonna be any good it's like oh look you've just stumbled upon a new way to have the fundamental issue of the tv app which is just infinite scrolling which is not nice to use on that remote i mean net, Netflix does this too. The amount of content in any of these things that's cataloging all the video services is difficult. But I think Apple's vision here is that basically if you're on any show but Netflix is going to all roll kind of into this TV app, whether it's from Apple

or from one of these other providers. And, you know, that's what they're going with. But the truth will be when we actually try to use it because it it could be a mess, depending on what's in there and what's not. And some of that has to do like they were demoing an ideal situation, where I think the woman who was doing the demo said something about like, Oh, I'm on, I'm on charter cable. So I have this thing. It's like, well, yes, that's a best case scenario while I'm on Xfinity personally. And although they've got a really great iOS app, they won't let it on Apple TV because apparently that's a deal.

They want to extract something from Apple in order to do. I don't even know. And so, you know, I don't have the best case scenario and lots of people won't have the best case scenario. So we'll have to see. I actually think you've stumbled upon what, I actually think that the introduction of Apple TV channels was the weakest part of this presentation

because it's just what Amazon's doing is what it appears to be in that you can pay Apple to provide you with content from other providers companies like HBO, CBS All Access and Showtime

Starz is in there as well but that's about as good as the lineup gets. The list is not very deep. It's not that massively impressive, in my opinion. They were talking about the ability to offer this stuff outside of the US at some point, but they didn't really give any information on what that's going to look like.

Like, what kind of channels am I going to get? It's probably not going to be an incredible list, probably similar to what Amazon has. But a lot of the talk, again, and this is the thing that me and you've been talking about for a while where a lot of the reporting on the rumors of this was like the apple was about to do this amazing thing here but we have been talking as many listeners of this show will know for upstream over months and months in the past apple probably wasn't going to do anything that wild here and they kind of didn't like it kind of met what we thought which was they don't they're not going to have at least they're not showing right now this uh heavily discount we're not seeing any of that we're not seeing some way to put your own package together it's just you pick a channel you pay for

a channel and that's about it it's it's Amazon channels, but within Apple's interface instead, which is not the worst thing in the world. I think the big difference in this is that Apple, because they did offer that API, what, two years ago for the TV app, where they wanted, back when the future of TV was apps, they built this API so that if you've got an app, you can share your watch data with Apple and it'll become visible in the TV app. And then it will basically go out to that app if it needs to jump to the episode or start playing or whatever. And what that gets Apple is, as they showed quite prominently in a lot of the slides, things like Amazon, Prime Video show up in the TV app. Even though Prime Video is not a channel inside Apple. Can you imagine? It's like channels within channels within channels. You can't do it.

But it doesn't matter if you've got stuff in Prime Video because they're using the API and they are syncing with the TV API on Apple's platforms. Amazon shows show up in the TV app. on Apple's platforms, Amazon shows show up in the TV app. So that's weird in the sense that there are going to be two ways you could see something in the TV app, from an external app or not. But I think the bigger issue is that it also means Netflix has opted entirely out, and that exacerbates that situation even more because now there's even more content in, and Netflix is really out because it's still all the way out. It's not tied in. And you can see why they wouldn't

want to be, right? Because they would be, all of their shows would be mixed in with everybody else's shows. And the recommendation engine would be for all sorts of different shows on any of the networks you subscribe to. And Netflix doesn't want that. Netflix wants to be the only place you ever think of going for video. But, you know, like I think that the Netflix problem, it exacerbates the issue that I find, which is if you're used to going away from the TV app for some of your content, would you not just continue going out of the TV app for all of your content? Right. Like that's kind of been my experience.

So like if I look at the stuff that I watch, right, so a lot of Netflix, a lot of Amazon Prime, and a lot of YouTube one it's in the prime app so doing apple tv channels similarly if i've got the you know a whole bunch of stuff amalgamated together in one place so that i know i only need to check in this scenario basically i only need to check the tv app and netflix and the rest of them i don't need to worry about i don't need to switch to other apps because the tv app and net Netflix are the only two that really contain pretty much everything that I've got. That's the advantage. Well, tell me then about the channels.

Do you think that there is enough there to be compelling? Well, I mean, it's just reselling channels. I just don't think that anything is going to rise or fall based on the partnerships. I suspect they have more or less, I mean, by launch time, will they have more or less the same partnerships that Amazon has? Yeah, I imagine so. I imagine they will resell everything that isn't either a giant of streaming or is a direct competition to Apple. If I were, again, if I were Netflix, I'd probably do exactly what Netflix is doing. But if I'm BritBox or CBS All Access, I would be like, you know, yeah, integrate me, Apple, integrate me fully into your interface where my stuff is in there along with your other stuff. And I'm just, you know, I'm part of the big, you know, package of all that content because it's more, you know, it's more subscribers, it's more money, it's easier, and it's providing access to those things. And the channel concept is nice in that way.

So I imagine they'll get all of the partners that Amazon gets because those are the kinds of partners who benefit from that business model. And then what they won't get is the ones really like Netflix where it just doesn't work. Probably Disney, right? I'm kind of up in the air about Disney. I'm not sure about Disney, right? Like, I feel like I go backwards and forwards on it because they don't have the competitive advantage that some of the other companies need, right? Like, they don't need to compete in the same way.

I'm really intrigued about that. They're not Netflix. I mean, they're not Netflix though, right? They're competing with other people. And the argument would be, I think with Disney, it comes completely down to what the terms of the arrangement are.

What percentage does Apple take and all of that? Because the great advantage of Disney Plus being in Apple TV and on Prime Video is it's a huge potential audience. And these big stores basically are selling your product, rather than making everybody go on the outside. The disadvantage is now you're mixed in with other stuff. And you got to do some revenue sharing. And that's not so great. So the question is, you know, what are your designs? Are your designs to be Netflix or not? If you're Disney, think about where you want to be in five years and then think, well, does that Apple deal make sense with where I want to be in five years?

And maybe it does. I mean, I'm kind of of the opinion that unless you are Netflix, these channel deals are good because it's another place for you to sell your stuff. And the more you're in front of people, the better. Like I use CBS All Access more in Prime than I did when it was its own app.

Right. Because I was only purposefully going there for Star Trek before. And this year, I see it in my Prime video with a bunch of other stuff when I'm thinking, oh, I'm going to watch a show. What do I have? And then all the CBS stuff is just integrated in there. And that's really good. So if you can imagine, you talk about that on the Apple TV, like you throw in CBS, you throw in

BritBox, you throw in, you know, I don't know, Showtime, HBO. And yes, you are rebuilding the cable bundle, but you are also, you are rebuilding the cable bundle, but you are also, uh, you've got the convenience of the fact that all of that content is just kind of there and you can find it and you can see it and you don't have to worry about where it's coming from. Uh, which I think from a consumer standpoint is the ideal, which is not to worry about what channel a show is on, just find the show and watch it. Um, so i don't know i i think it's uh not the ultimate solution but i think it's it's good and i think it's good that apple's doing it because amazon's doing it and i think it's a good experience so i think it's good for apple

to replicate it yeah so we don't have pricing no well this is going to be this stuff's all going to be priced the way it's priced on amazon i mean i really think like if you are wondering how apple tv uh channels is going to work just look at amazon prime channels it is the same literally the same product so the new tv app is coming in may i'm assuming that apple tv channels comes in may as well uh yeah i assume so yeah that they'll they'll start selling those within um within the apple tv app then yeah that makes that makes sense crazy speculation time it's our favorite segment here on upgrade crazy speculation time so um a lot of the con a lot of the uh advertising copy on apple's

website is referencing to the tv app as the new home for itunes content like and it's it's calling it like your movies and your tv shows it's like the new home for that and i'm wondering jason are we maybe seeing the breakup of itunes and one of the reasons i will say this that the tv app is coming to the mac and they say in the fall marzipan uh which i absolutely love oh in the fall for no reason it will appear on the mac um so i'm wondering you know maybe we have thought of the potential that what it will now take for itunes to go away is for apple music to be its own app built on marzipan now apple tv being its own apple marzipan that could be it right and that itunes as we know it becomes just the store like we have it on ios it's just the name for the store

well i think on the mac the more likely scenario is that itunes the app will remain like a quick time player for a while in this weird limbo where you can download it or it's there because there's stuff that it does that other apps don't do. And it's actually a really nice escape valve for Apple because they don't need to build something that mirrors all the features of iTunes. They can just build the things that they want and say, well, if you really want to manage an iOS device, just use iTunes. Fine. We don't care. But yes, I think it's a strong implication. It's not impossible that they might try to make it run on previous OS versions, too. I don't know quite whether there's some marzipan stuff that they're going to put in the next version of Mac OS that they could also kind of package together and do in a Mojave update. Probably not, but I'm going to leave open the possibility of that just because the thing that does strike me as a little bit weird is if they say it's coming to the Mac in the fall, but the only way you can get it is by updating to the new version of Mac OS. But that may be it because it does feel very much like they're just going to take the TV app in Marzipan and run it on the Mac in the fall.

I can't think of any other reason why they'd wait for the fall for it, right? That it's surely got to be to do with something that is released in Septemberember i.e the next version of mac os the strong implication is that yeah especially because between now and then uh more tvs so we'd previously heard samsung was going to be getting the tv app right that was clearly like samsung got an exclusivity period because lg vizio and sony are all getting it. They're all announced with HomeKit support, which is coming out with 12.2 today, but they're also going to get the TV app. And as we have, again, been talking about over the last few weeks, Roku and Fire TV will be getting the Apple TV app.

Yeah, this is big. That's the one that we predicted it uh there was a rumor about roku i don't think i've heard a rumor about amazon but the moment that they said we're going to be on those um smart tvs uh then i made a couple assumptions and we talked about it on this show one is when they said itunes was going to be on samsung I was like, well, that'll be the TV app. Yeah, we know what that means. We knew the iTunes app was never going to actually exist on this TV. And a bunch of people said, no, it's just going to be AirPlay. And I was like, no, I don't think so. And then today you heard them say,

oh yeah, the TV app is going to be on the Samsung TVs soon because this is the Trojan horse. They were really going to launch with the TV app and not just like an Apple Music app or something. And it's going to come to these other TV providers. And I was like, oh, my TV provider isn't on the list. But that's okay, because my TV is a Roku TV. And it was on the TV content that Apple is going to be providing in the fall, you'll be able to get it on an HDTV in your house for under $50. Like the one I bought, the Roku I bought for my mom does $1080, and it was $29. And I think there's $49. You can get a 4K of the Roku or the Amazon or both. of the Roku or the Amazon or both.

Like it's, if all you've ever been thinking about are Apple TVs, well, these other ones are a lot cheaper. The 4K like Fire TV stick is 50. Yeah, see? And they do like 30 or 40 for the non 4K one. Yeah, so it's just, I mean, it's a done deal. And this is the answer to that question that we thought we knew in January, which is basically Apple's not investing all this money in all these shows with all these stars in order to sell you an Apple TV.

That's not the point. And we have seen it now. The Apple TV will, I think, continue to exist as a product because it is now like the HomePod, a kind of a premium product. product uh but uh it's not the it's it's not also a uh barrier in order to get you to qualify to use a portion of apple's ecosystem that's not what it's for they may have found a new life for the old apple tv with apple arcade which we'll talk about later on in the show but they referenced apple tv when talking about where the these games are going to show up so that's true it's true that is like it they're actually finally maybe trying to make it more of a gaming box. Every two years or so, we hear about Apple trying to make the Apple TV do games.

So here we are. The old Apple TV is now called the Apple TV HD. Oh, okay. Because the Apple TV is now a product that exists, right? Because it's now available outside of the apple tv so they've had to change the name of the old apple tv to apple tv hd because apple tv the app now is like it has top level navigation on the tv page on apple's website so it's apple tv hd and then apple tv 4k yes and then apple tv plus is the the product and apple tv is the app yes that can exist in

other places yep well i i missed i missed the punctuation but i do feel like this was this had to be the name of it right it's just so straightforward it's apple tv that's what it is so it's apple tv apple tv is the app including the channels inside the app and then tv plus is the apple service that is ladled on top, which is nicely parallel with the news service that they announced today, too. Yeah. Before we get into Apple TV Plus, is there anything more you wanted to talk about with the TV app? You know, I want to try it. And I dread that because, again, it's all about the details. And it's also, unfortunately, about some of the partnership stuff.

And I think if you've got a cable company that is partnering with Apple on this, you're going to have a better experience. But if your streaming services are either using the TV API or are an Apple TV channel, I think it has the potential to be a pretty decent service. But again, you got to use it, right? Because it could be that you use it and your reaction is, oh no, this is not, this doesn't make sense. And there's just no way to tell from a canned demo. But otherwise I would say, I think this is what they had to do, right? I think that the Amazon Prime channels thing is a good idea if you're a major player and a platform. Having the ability to roll these smaller services inside of your ecosystem is a good thing. And I actually think it's a good thing for everybody.

I can't speak to the business model between the services that are being resold and the big guys like Apple and Amazon. Maybe it's desperation or maybe it's a good deal for them, too. between the services that are being resold and the big guys like Apple and Amazon, maybe, maybe it's desperation or maybe it's a good deal for them too. I would like to think it's a good deal for them just because of the promotion it, they get inside these apps because Apple and Amazon are motivated to, to do, to sell channels.

And for consumers, I think it's actually a great deal because, you know, quite frankly, if I never have to launch the CBS all access app again, it'll be too soon. It's like, I have loved not having to launch that app or deal with their infrastructure and just deal with Amazon. And Amazon has been rock solid for that. And I love that that service and when I've had BritBox inside Prime channels, the same deal, like it's so much

nicer to reduce the number of apps that I have to use to find what I want to watch so I think Apple had to do it and I think it will ultimately be good for everybody assuming that they executed right. This episode of Upgrade is brought to you by Simple Contacts. You probably have a bunch of things that demand your time. You have work to do, side projects to complete, amazing episodes of Upgrade to listen to, maybe a video game or two to play. Luckily, you don't have to worry about spending a bunch of time ordering your contact lenses anymore because Simple Contacts will let you renew your prescription and reorder your contacts online. You can do it from anywhere in just minutes.

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for their support of this show and RelayFM. Apple TV Plus. Is this why the phones are called Macs? Maybe. I think it might be. It reduces some confusion. I feel like it would have been super weird if they would have had multiple products with plus in the name

and some of them are written out P-L-U-S and some of them just have the plus sign. Considering they at least tried to clear up some of the issues of Apple TV. They don't want too many things named exactly the same anymore. The opening was really cool. They had a bunch of... We should mention they had like a bunch of like that we should mention they had a really nice kind of opening credit sequence video at the start of the presentation that was nice but i did notice something jason i want to see what you think about this when they

kind of showed off the apple tv plus they had like this clouds and this little sound played which sounded like a modified kind of startup sound for like a mac or something do you think this will be apple's network stinger? I don't know anything about it. I don't know if I even noticed that. So I have no comment on that. I'm going to see if I can try and grab the audio and put it into the show so people can hear it for themselves.

But there was like this nice little chime. I was like, oh, I wonder if that's their version of the HBO thing, you know? So Tim brought out Zach Van Amburg and Jamie Ehrlich to say, which I was pleased about, actually, because I figured that these should be the people, right? They are the TV people. They should be the people that introduced this part of the presentation. Was this a welcome surprise for you?

I'm not surprised. I thought that they were the ideal candidates to this because Apple hired them June 2017, by the way, not quite. It's 21 months ago they hired them. They announced that they hired these guys. So this has been in the works for a very long time. And so for them to be able to push it across the finish line, I think was only appropriate. This part of the event is very much this weird hybrid of an apple event and a television industry like something like an upfront or a television critic association's tour kind of thing where they're it's a dog and pony show for uh you know

networks and this was kind of that this was like saying, we can use our power as a company that calls these events to do our own dog and pony show about our new stuff. And these guys have been running it and living it for a year and a half. And so I thought it was only appropriate for them to do it. Now, the way they did it is fascinating because what they didn't do is what we assumed, which was that people would come out

and there would be trailers. And instead what we got is people came out and talked about what the content of their show was and why it was important and showed kind of like a, there was like a backdrop and they actually had projectors that were projecting it onto the sides of the theater.

Okay. So it was almost like kind of a wraparound thing um in the theater itself that that up the sides on these like little slats of the of the um like the walls of the interior um was from a projection in the back as far as i could tell um and, and the, but showing like a still, but that was it. And then they talked about it and that was the whole thing. And then we got the brief sizzle reel at the end. And I think partly that was because Apple wanted to show off the people and put the people, you know, who are mostly the stars of these shows at the center. Um, but, uh, it is interesting that they, that they didn't do anything but a sizzle reel. I have some theories about that. I feel like this isn't coming out until the fall,

which was one of the rumors, was that the programs wouldn't actually be ready until the fall. And that has proven to be true. They didn't mention a price. We don't have a lot of details about the rollout. And i've seen some disappointment about that i'm a little disappointed because i always want to know whatever but um i feel like the purpose of this was to was for apple to explain what this was and give it its branding explain where it fits and what apple is doing and and show off the people that it, and that they value the creative people, right? Which is some of these stories that have come out. It's like, oh, what does Apple feel?

And this was Apple basically saying and sending a message to the entertainment industry saying, here's what it is. Here's what it's called. We love you. You are storytellers and we think you're the best. The story was starting to get out of control for them for many reasons one for the rumors and two just because they're continuing to sign more and more content whilst never acknowledging that they were actually doing anything and the tenor of the

industry pieces and some of the larger like wall street journal and new york times pieces about this has become well more negative but when i read through the line between the lines of them i kept thinking there's a lot of people in hollywood who are just frustrated that this is not a thing that's been announced yet, and they want to know more. And that is, you can roll your eyes at that, and I certainly did a little bit, but at the same time, those are the people who you have to work with to make these shows. Yeah, you can't completely come in as apple and do things only your way right like they have to play ball a little bit with the industry at large and this is part of that so this and this so they show their appreciation they're they're you know kind of bending the knee to uh the greatness of hollywood storytellers and it's zach and jamie

on stage doing that because they're the ones who are making the deals and it them, everybody knows what it is now. It's Apple TV Plus. Here are some of the people involved. It's coming this fall. Here's what the interface looks like with the Apple TV shows in it. This is how it's going to work. And yeah, there are details missing.

But if I'm a Hollywood person who is frustrated that it's all like, I've been working for two years on something that nobody even knows about. You know, maybe you're not Jennifer Aniston. And if you are, hi, Jen. Hi. It was nice to be in the room with you today. If you're not Jennifer Aniston,

at least you know the circles in which you're moving, the product you're working on. You can tell your friends, yes, I am working on a thing for that apple tv plus thing that launches this fall it's out the uh you know it's it's out in the world now and and while if you're a an apple follower and you're frustrated because you were just trying to see what the price was i hear you i don't think it was for you i think this was apple setting the table there is a second event coming, which will be the iPhone event,

when this will all be announced and shown off and they'll talk about pricing and that's when we'll get our trailers. So, okay, so here's the thing. It wouldn't surprise me if they launch this or announce the launch date at the iPhone event. Here's the thing. Now that the sizzle reel is out,

now that they've launched, they've unveiled, whatever you want to call it, they've announced the name and the stars and some of the names of the shows and all of that, Apple is now free to roll out trailers whenever the heck they want. Right? So they could drop a Jason Momoa C trailer in May and say, isn't this, you know, everybody get excited about how amazing this is. And in July, they could drop a thing, uh,

with Jennifer Aniston and Reese Witherspoon and, and Steve Carell and be like, Oh my God, isn't this going to be fun? And they can just keep on promoting that stuff. They don't have to hold it. They could hold it until a little bit closer to air, but they don't have to.

Now all those rules are out the window because the product is now a real service or service is now a real thing, whatever it is. It's a service that has been announced instead of being one of these coy, like, we're very excited about Oprah, and we'll have more to share later. Now it's like, okay, it's called Apple TV+.

It exists, it's coming this fall. That opens the door for all sorts of promotion at whatever time Apple wants. You mentioned Jason Momoa. He came out among many stars, came out on stage he came out of alfrey woodard and they spoke about c now all we've really known about c is that it was a sci-fi show and it was probably the most expensive tv show ever made yeah um but we found out like we did with many of these shows today what they actually are and i already had read

that c was about a a post-apocalyptic world where where people can't see that i haven't seen that one but there's or at least even we we the very most we had like real top line descriptions for what they are but the creators were able to talk about it a little bit more and i thought that this show i'm excited about the show i love the idea i love the premise right so the premise is that there was a virus that hit the earth and it killed many people it left like a few million people left but all of those people couldn't see anymore so you're like oh that's the show is about them dealing with it but then they kind of twist it a bit where it's like many generations later the world is now kind of just adapted to the fact that people can't see.

The idea of sight is almost feels like a fable. The show begins. And like, I think that that is really interesting sounding. Yeah, it's and the funny thing about TV is this is why you have to do a lot of different shows is that different shows are going to appeal to different people. you know i'm sure you already have understood that stephen hackett and i will both be uh right there for that ron moore uh oh what's it called i wrote it down anyway it's the it's the space race one right because it's like oh space race alternate history space race it's great sounds great to me too though like i will say that like especially everything they showed today i want to watch all that for all mankind by the way is the name of it for all mankind but like all of the shows that they that they put on stage

today i'm like yeah i would try all of those like the the pitches for those shows sound exciting to me and some of them will be good and some of them will be bad um anthology shows i this theory which is that anthology shows were big in the like the 50s and 60s, but have decreased in popularity as time went by. They basically died on network. And the truth is that Black Mirror made anthology series hot again. Cool again. If I were Steven Spielberg, I would send many notes of thanks to Charlie Brooker for doing Black Mirror. Because everybody saw Black Mirror and was like, Ooh, anthology series, tell me more. And my theory is that most people don't want to

watch anthology series. People like watching, um, like shows with, with the same actors and the same characters every week. And although with streaming, it's a little different, it's like a bunch of mini movies kind of thing. And mirror has been successful but um there are two of these apple shows or anthology series the kumail nanjiani um emily gordon uh show a little america and of course amazing stories with mr spielberg who um doesn't want netflix to win oscars but this is tv man this is apple tv tv's fine it's not it's not getting any oscars it's fine it's fine it can get all the Golden Globes at once. Yeah, all the Emmys.

Go for it. Yeah, right. So anyway, I think that's funny. And I think that is something I'm going to watch because I'm skeptical about the appetite for anthology series. And if you look, let's see, the replacement for Black Mirror when it moved networks was the Philip K. Dick's Electric Dreams series. That got canceled. Twilight Zone on CBS All Access is Jordan Peele. And that'll be great, except nobody will watch it. Because this is my prediction, is nobody watches anthology shows.

And Black Mirror has made a lot of money for a lot of people to make anthology shows that nobody will watch and will eventually fall off the network. Doesn't mean they are not good. And the Apple ones may be good too but i feel like you already kind of gave a hint earlier but being in the room of all those celebrities were there any like specific that stood out to you as you were just excited to be in the same room as them uh well i mean they're all down low in the in the good seats right where the pretty people are and then the press is up up up high and it from far away you know it's like is that tim robbins i think it is tim robbins talking to eddie q i don't know maybe

um you know yeah i i so it's cool to see people i've seen so many famous people at in theaters at apple events that it's a it's a ridiculous list and i got a lot more of them you know i don't think i've ever been in a room with JJ Abrams. He did a WWDC thing that I didn't go to. Um, and yes, like I, like I,

as I spoke earlier to a veteran upgradian, Jennifer Aniston, um, you know, she's about my age. I remember, you know, her being in friends and all of that.

And that was kind of fun to see that. And a bunch of other famous people, Steven Spielberg for Pete's sake, I got to see Steven Spielberg in person. That that was pretty cool um but uh you know it's it's fine i've seen you two a couple of times at apple events too and look how well that went so i think the overall slate of content is looking pretty interesting that you know they they had like their scissor reel showed off like a bunch stuff. And it looks like from at least a production standpoint, they have a lot of shows that look very pretty.

Oprah came out. She was kind of like the one more thing type situation, right? And she gave a really touching speech. And they actually gave some information about what she's working on. So we knew it was like a big deal with Apple. A lot of things they're working on together. But she's working on two documentaries right now. And it seems like some kind of video like whether it's going to be in the tv service or it's going

to be a podcast we're not sure the book club uh that like the oprah book club she wants to kind of put that into a billion pockets so she said i really enjoyed her speech i thought it was very touching and very funny um but yeah so like that we we had assumed oprah would would come out and tim seemed very emotional about oprah he wiped away a tear he did he did wiped away a tear for oprah we we knew i mean that was the easiest one to call right and in fact when she wasn't in that original the guy sitting next to me i don't even know who he was was like oprah oprah come on oprah oprah oprah and it was never oprah right it was always somebody else. And then he was big burning.

He's like, I don't think this is Oprah, right? And then, and I'm sitting there going, okay, guy next to me, I'm a little surprised too that there's no Oprah yet. And then there's like, oh, there's one other person. And I'm like, and I began writing my tweet at that point saying that Oprah was on stage because I knew that that was going to be there.

And that was indeed what it was. So, you know, what they're using her for is also interesting because it's the you know she's got a bunch of projects in the works that that was a good example of somebody who's got an overall deal with apple instead of somebody who's got a show on apple um although i think reese witherspoon's company has sold like three shows didn't we say last week she sold her company hello sunshine has sold the most kind of like individual shows but like oprah has a special deal which is just like overarching all kinds of content right including oprah's making content yeah just like the that uh obama deal with netflix right exactly oprah deal with apple and she's got a documentary and a mini series

uh doc and she's gonna do a book club book club with live conversation with the author and stuff. Which I actually think, because Oprah's book club, for people who don't know, and people don't know Oprah very well. Oprah's book club on her weekday show in the U.S. when that was on was enormous. Like one of the greatest ways to sell a book ever. And honestly, I think got people to read a book who'd never read books. And it was a phenomenon. And so the fact that she's kind of going to bring that back and use Apple as the platform, I think could be very interesting depending on how they do it. Because the digital media world might be a better fit for something like that.

Because you could do little bits about the book and talk to people who are reading it. And she's going to do this apparently like a live conversation with the author, but that'll be available on demand. And I kind of feel like it would be easy to say, oh, well, it's nice. This is prestige stuff, but who's going to actually do it?

But I will say Oprah's Book Club was like an enormous thing. And if they can do that right using the technology at hand for apple that could be um a big deal all right should we move on to apple news uh yeah i think so i mean we will have every opportunity to talk about apple apple tv plus in the future since it's not out yet later we don't know how much it costs we don't know if it's going to cost anything we don't know anything well. So I want to make a point there. We do know that pricing is going to be announced in the fall and that it is a subscription service, which to me, and again, I don't believe these reports that we've seen that said, oh, they're just going to give it away and make the money up on channels because I don't think that actually makes any sense at all. No, I don't think that actually makes any sense at all no i don't either i think you would have to be really far down a rabbit hole to believe that the press release saying that pricing is going to be announced in the fall and that it's a

subscription service could mean that the pricing is nothing and that anybody can subscribe i just no it's it will have a price pricing will be announced in the fall they're not going to give this stuff away the real price is the the bundle. That's the real price. Probably. If there is a bundle, that's probably it. And then also, you know, we'll see how they want to do the trial period because like other stuff,

Apple Music had a trial period. Apple News Plus has a trial period. So there's opportunity out there. One thing we do know though, is it won't be US only. It will be launching in over 100 countries at launch. Yeah. And that's because they signed all of their deals to have full worldwide rights to their content. To which I'd sincerely thank Apple for making that happen, because that was never a dead set in my mind. So I'm very pleased that that's going to be the case.

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mike all right so should we move on to apple news plus uh yeah let's let's do it this is the um texture thing that apple bought which was the magazine service. Now, the big difference here, and I thought very cleverly shown on stage by being demoed on an iPhone is what they're not trying to do is digital replicas where there's like, hey, here's an

iPad and we scanned in a page of a magazine and you can read it. That's not what they're doing here. They have worked with all these companies that publish these magazines to try and get the content feeds out and then have them display in an attractive way, but using the Apple News format. And so yes, you can read them on your iPad and they'll look nice, but you can read them on your iPhone. And so they've taken their deals, the texture made with the publishers, they seem to have rolled those over so there's 3 000 i mean 300 magazines in total that was a little slip up in a order of magnitude mistake by the presenter that's um and uh and then also um and it's funny i was watching my twitter feed

and like i was literally watching people complain about things that hadn't been mentioned yet as they were being mentioned multiple times in this event, including, but what about newspapers? And the answer is, well, yes, the LA Times and the Wall Street Journal. So not the Washington Post, not the New York Times, but the LA Times and the Wall Street Journal are in there. There are a bunch of digital premium subscribers, like subscriptions like TechCrunch has their new premium tier, and that's going to be covered in here. And other stuff like that is going to be covered as a part of this single subscription plan.

And unlike so many of the things announced today, this is basically pushing out with the next version of iOS and macOS with an updated news app, and will be a one- free trial and it has a price of $9.99 and is also launching in Canada. And they've got Canadian partners, including magazines and a large newspaper and in English and French. And then we'll be rolling out in the UK and Australia pretty soon, like this fall. So this is a service that is the furthest along of anything announced today i think yeah because it's out now right like that that makes it not just naturally the furthest

right because it's something pretty pretty far along if it's actually been released yeah i i think so but i think this is um i i i'm fascinated because i i my guess is that this was not part of their original plan with news um if it was then good for them for having the foresight. But like the first step with news was to get the news app out and try to make the news reading experience and the web reading experience nicer by letting Apple control the app part of it. And then you just have to generate content in a feed format, in RSS or an Apple news format.

And then they hired, you know, they started hiring editorial people to curate and they built recommendation engines, which also I should say, every single presentation today had at least a nod toward privacy, which was very interesting. And that is something that Apple

has just all in on now. Every product, it's like the Greenpeace protests. Leading to the eco-friendly slide. On every single product announcement Apple makes. This is like that. Where it's like there will always be a privacy mention. In a product or service. And so here. They revealed that.

Your personalized news recommendations. Actually come from a pool of recommendations. That is dropped in your device. And then your device uses its on-device analysis of your behavior to select out of that pool and show you stories. So Apple doesn't know what you're reading. Only your device does, and it doesn't radio that back. That is really interesting, and I didn't know that before. I'm not sure if they've shared that before, but that is something that they kept hitting home about in terms of what their commitment to privacy is.

Do you think, I mean, they didn't say, but do you think that they're maybe doing some iCloud-based sharing like they did with photo stuff? Because you could end up with completely different recommendations device to device, right, depending on what you're reading. I don't know. I think, I don't use Apple News enough to say, but I think maybe there is some tracking of what you've read in your iCloud account.

But I'm not 100% on that. I mean, it would make sense that it is that way. It doesn't mean that they did it, but that would make sense. And that would be something that would be locked to you and it wouldn't be Apple knowing it, right? It would be your data syncing across devices. So it may do that.

Anyway, so the next step of this is there's still a lot of paywalled content out there, and it's not in Apple News. And they decided to buy the texture service because they wanted to go in this direction. And I got to say, I think this is a pretty cool idea. I think $10 a month to unlock access to all sorts of extra content could potentially be really good. It all comes down to the partners. Although I will say, as a Californian, having the LA Times is really good, because that's a really good newspaper. Street Journal, honestly, like $10 a month for the Wall Street Journal alone is not a bad deal at all if it truly is the bulk of the content from the journal. And there's some kind of question about exactly what is in there. Yeah. It doesn't seem that there's a definitive answer yet. But that and then like Sports Illustrated and like some of the other magazine partners, like it doesn't take a lot. If you're somebody who likes to read, it doesn't take a lot for the $10 a month to actually be a pretty good deal.

Now, it's not for everybody, obviously. But their point with the 300 magazines was to say there's probably five or ten magazines on here that speak directly to you. You're not going to, as they said humorously, now, if you subscribe to all 300 magazines, it would cost you $8,000 a year. I like that. Nobody's going to do that. But you can burrow down into something that is super interesting to you. Maybe Rolling Stone is interesting to you or Sports Illustrated would be interesting to me. I used to subscribe to that.

There's a lot of opportunity here for this to be, not for everybody, but to be a good deal for a lot of people who like to read so this felt to me a lot like another attempt at newsstand right like apple's old service yeah they even said oh we love a newsstand and they had a picture of a newsstand with uh i looked mac life because mac world's not printed anymore but mac life is still done in print and there was a MacLife issue right in front of a Wired issue. And I was like, yeah, they put a Mac magazine in there. It's great.

So they mentioned a newsstand and they showed the newsstand. And, you know, this is what newsstand should have been. That's the tragedy of it is that newsstand should have been this, you know, eight years ago. Newsstand should have been this.

Newsstand should have been, and Steve Jobs got carried away with a product demo and went in a totally different direction newsstand should have been um i am uh providing you with this this player basically app and here's a spec you put your content in this format and it will be viewable. And instead what newsstand was, was, Hey, why doesn't everybody write an app? Their own custom app, which was super expensive, hard to do, led to a lot of bad apps and ultimately was a failure. So, uh, this is very much like newsstand except the right way. As I, as, as somebody went through that process with Macworld, let me tell you, boy, I wish this had been it because it would have been so easy to set up a project saying, we're

going to do an Apple News export from Macworld magazine. Whether our business people would have wanted to do the deal for the premium one, I don't know, but it would have been a conversation and it would have been something that would have been within our area of expertise. And instead we spent a lot of money on an app developer for an app that was okay. So, you know, it is nice to see Apple finally get there with this. Apple news is a pretty decent vehicle for this. Apple News is not my favorite thing. I don't use it a lot, but it has gotten better over time. And I think that putting premium content in it could potentially make it just that much more appealing.

Yeah, it reminded me of Newsstand in a few ways, right? Like the bold layouts and the interactive elements and moving images and automatic downloading and all that kind of stuff yeah except they did it all with this apple news format stuff where um you don't have to write an app you just have to they write the app and say here's here are the the rich elements you can provide me which is absolutely the right way to do it yeah i, I guess the other part of it, like we're not going to know, is when thinking about like, is this going to be a success?

It's like, this is great for the customer because you get a lot of option available to you for not a large amount of money. But what is it going to be like for the publisher? Like we just, we don't know. And I think that that will be the thing that ends up like will this be newsstand failed attempt three or is it going to be a better a better more long-lasting experience than that for more publishers we just don't know my my gut feeling is that because this is a some something where there are deals happening behind the scenes

that it is much more likely to be successful there are already a lot of people using apple news it is a because it's installed on every apple device there are a lot of people using Apple News. It is a, because it's installed on every Apple device, there are a lot of people who use it. It's a much friendlier approach than RSS was. As much as nerds love RSS, fact is regular people didn't really ever get it. And this is, but that is basically what this is, is a glorified RSS kind of reader system.

And those deals behind the scenes can be adjusted. So if this, you know, Apple can drop its percentage, Apple, you know, can make new deals based on what publishers are seeing. Maybe some deals will fall out and others will come in. But I feel like it will, they've got much more flexibility with something like this to keep adjusting it on the fly and making sure that it works pretty well. If nobody ever uses it, then it'll be a flop. But I think it's got a good chance of succeeding at some level. Maybe not to the wildest dreams of some of the publishers, but I think it's got a shot. And I am somebody who has kind of been skeptical about this thing. I think it's got a shot at success.

Is this a product that Jason Snell wants in his life? I will seriously consider it. I have a lot of things to read, but I would seriously consider it because, like I said, I think it's a pretty good deal just for the LA Times and Wall Street Journal and, you know, some of those magazines alone. I will seriously consider it. Yeah. Yeah. See, this isn't going to be my thing right i don't think unless you know like i pay for the wall street journal because

i get great use in my work out of the articles that they write um but if for example it was the full wall street journal uh experience that i currently have available to me and or it's just the things that i want which is mostly the tech coverage, then then I would switch over to Apple News because it would be saving me money because the Wall Street Journal is already more expensive than $10 a month. It's like $25 or $30 a month. So, you know, there could be something in it there for me, but I don't know. I don't know. I don't know if it's something that I particularly would want in my life. All right, should we take another break and then move on to Apple Arcade and Apple Card?

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and all of RelayFM. Apple Arcade. That's right. Going on down to the to the apple arcade let me just say something about the naming of these of this whole thing you know apple confuses me with their naming right because like why is why do we have apple tv plus we have apple news plus why do we have apple arcade like how did that happen in the lineup of looking at their services? I prefer the name Apple Arcade to Apple News+, and Apple TV+, but it's like, ah, you're going down a route.

No, you're not. You've gone off on the left field here, and we now have Apple Arcade. What else would they call it? Games Plus? Apple Games Plus? Yeah, well, why not, though? It's called news plus and tv plus like that's just they're just as bad names but there's like a consistency right

yeah well this is a better name i like this name this is adorable trust me because it's fun it's a way better name because it's fun it's a game so it's fun okay tv is serious business mike serious business but games and ty senior vice president of the App Store, came out to talk about this. And she said a phrase that I loved. Competing with free is hard. Yeah, this is basically the mea culpa on how distorted... I mean, they didn't say it this way.

They're like, hey, free-to-play games. Everybody loves them. They make lots of money. And they make lots of money for us because we take our cut. And you do in-app purchases. And it's great. Everybody loves them. But what of the other games our system is broken and they are not as successful as they

should be and so apple has basically created a separate business model that is not purchasing games it's not free with in-app purchase it's not purchasing games it's not free within app purchase it's not purchasing games it is subscription service where they apparently are like helping fund games and uh and publishing them and they're exclusive to this service fascinating so yeah the publishing part is is one of the things that is most important and i have some stuff that i want to get to about that in a minute um but this is a hundred games right that apple are claiming some level of exclusivity over as part of this uh game subscription service right mobile exclusivity and service exclusivity it doesn't mean that they might not sell it on a

console exactly because there was a specific game that they showed, which I think is called Overland, which is coming to the Switch. So it was one of the ones that was in their little presentation. But to be honest, Apple just doesn't want these games on Android. Like that's their big thing, right? Like not on Android and not on any other maybe subscription service

that will come out. Now we need to say this is a subscription service. It is not a streaming service. I get these names wrong all the time and I will continue to get these names wrong. But like this is a, you pay an amount of money. You can download these games. These games are yours, I'm assuming,

until you stop paying and you can play them offline. You can play them online, et cetera. Like they are are you're paying an amount of money to get access to playing these games i think that they have an incredibly exciting selection of games available there are a lot of really top tier developers working on this so you have like sega they're bringing sonic racing le Lego is building a game for this Annapurna Interactive they're a fantastic publisher there are some sequels

there was a wonderful RPG called Oceanhorn Oceanhorn 2 is going to be on this Us 2 Games, the creators of Monument Valley have a new game called Repair which is going to be here there is a bunch of great studios a bunch of great developers I a bunch of great developers. I am so, so excited about this

because this isn't just a thing that I like, which is iOS games. It's also like they seem to have done a very good job at it, where they're bringing in the right developers to make these games. I was wondering, are we going to see the makers of

like clash of clans here and we're not because this isn't their business that's right you know i'm i'm really excited about the way that they seem to have done this um we mentioned the apple tv earlier so these will be on iphone ipad mac and the apple tv i'm not expecting every game will be but i bet a lot of games will be. And where possible, I'm sure Apple is pushing on that for them to do that. Well, keep in mind that at this point,

if you make a game, at least this fall, when this service is going to arrive, you should be able to make a game that runs on iOS and Apple TV and Mac, right? Marzipan wouldn't be a differentiator here because games aren't written in native iOS languages. Like you can, like, so for example,

the reason that Alto's Adventure and Alto's Odyssey are on the Mac is because they're just, they're written in Unreal or whatever, which the Mac supports. Yeah, but I would imagine that the work that is done to make it work on iOS, that one of apple's priorities for the fall would be to get it that you could take a game off of ios and play it on the mac

and that would be part of what would be marzipan yeah that makes sense um along your train of thought but i don't i just i i don't know if that does necessarily make it easier i don't know i since they have this thing game development uses different different technologies right but i mean i guess that's the question is will that stuff i i just i look at this and i think this is a reason why if you're building marzipan you prioritize the general concept of game over here should run over there right like because of this makes sense like i'm i'm completely on board with you that 100 percent makes sense not saying not saying that well of course marzipan will bring it but more like marzipan marzipan is a thing that apple has had to prioritize over this last year and

and before and i look at this thing and i go probably going to prioritize game compatibility aren't you yeah just because you're going to be charging people for this and uh it makes them the game service look better and it makes the mac look better so it's like even just fundamentally apple i'm sure will be pushing because they are trying to be pushing more people to make their stuff cross-platform in the future anyway if they're going to be involved in this service we would like you to do this right we want you to have this everywhere and part of this is i think because so apple made like a very quick kind of comment uh and i made a quick comment about kind of like helping these studios out i think yeah it was acting as publisher they are paying an amount of money to these companies to grant this exclusivity and also to help them kind of get along their way here which makes perfect sense and this is 100 the way they should do this this

one thing this idea of apple being publisher it's making me rethink the idea of the old adage apple doesn't get games i think this is Apple getting games, Jason. But it's very important that they do it this way. I want to hear from the developers about this. That is the next phase of this. And what we'll hear over the next week is we'll hear from some game developers who are deep down in this and their thoughts about this. But like you, I looked at this and I thought, oh, like that is such a better approach to say, we want this thing to succeed. Um, and we're going to, we're going to not just like scoop

up apps that get submitted to the app store and say, say, would you like to have this? And no, they're going to, you got to start way before that. And if you're going to start way before that, you're going to negotiate a deal. And if you negotiate an exclusive distribution deal, um, part of that is probably, uh, you know, to kick in some money. And maybe, you know, you're a publisher at that point. But the idea here is, Apple is going to create a service that's going to throw off a lot of cash to developers. But it costs a lot of money to develop these games. And a lot of these developers are small indie developers. So it may change over time, but I like the idea of Apple saying, we want the catalog to be good. We're going to have more than a hundred of these games

and we've seen your track record and it's really good. And we're going to be your business partner here. And by business partner, we don't mean you do all the work, upload it to the store, we approve it, and then we take 30%, right? That's not the kind of business partner. This is, we're going to sign a deal with you. It's going to be exclusive. Maybe we're going to get you money upfront so that you can actually build this game, and then it'll be exclusive in our service. So I want to hear from the game professionals about how they feel about this compared to other kind of competition. But iOS games is a pretty great place to be. And I think there's potential and most of the greatness now is free to play within app purchase. But I love what they showed

on stage. I love that they showed Monument Valley, for example, and they had a screenshot of Alto. And it's like, I love those games. Those are the best games on iOS, right? They're not the most lucrative games, but they're the best games. And if Apple does this right, what they're going to get is this second set of successful games on iOS that are really great. And I'm sure they wouldn't say it because they do make a lot of money with the free-to-play and app purchase games. But in a much nicer environment where you don't have to build your game to be a money machine. Instead, you can just make a beautiful game

and people will play it and love it and they'll make a lot of money. And I'll tell you, if Alto's Odyssey was in this service and they paid out based on the amount of time spent, they would have made a lot of money for me. I know that for sure. They would have gotten all the money

from my account for a few months for sure i'm really excited about this i'm really really excited about this because the games that they showed again like the trailer was great the stuff that they've got on their website was great i know so many companies in this that are great companies like it i'm very enthused about who apple's deciding to work with how how they're at least publicly positioning themselves as a partner with these companies. I think that this feels, as an avid player of iOS games, I'm excited about this.

I'm excited that when I open the App Store, I can go to the Games tab and I can just get a new game. And it's like, all right, I'll try this next one. And there's going to be over 100 of these games at launch, is what they're saying, right? I'll try and play as many of them as I can. Why not? I go to the App Store every couple of days, see what the game of the day is, see if I'm interested, and maybe I buy a couple a week. Well, now I'll go to the Arcade tab, and I'll download one of the new games that's there, and I'll play it. Why not? I have it available to me. I'm really, really, really excited about this.

This is, I think, the thing that speaks the most to me and what I like. The TV stuff is obviously an interest to me, but I like the business of the streaming services more than I like TV. Right? Like, I don't know why exactly, but it's the reason Upstream... One of the reasons Upstream is... Well, I think the reason is you are a passionate, avid viewer of television. And for some reason, I am interested in the way that TV stream companies work. I don't know why this is, but I find it really interesting. It's a new kind of avenue for technology and technology media.

But I am a gamer. I love video games, i love ios games and now i'm gonna have access to more great ones by great developers and i am such a big fan of indie game studios and a lot of the companies that they worked with that i really hope that it helps uh like it be like a big boon to them and i really hope that there is going to be i really hope that it's not a problem for the companies that aren't in the service uh but my feeling is kind of like if you make a game that you have to pay for you already have such huge market focuses going against you yeah is this really going to make it worse than it already is i don't know

about that i don't know i think um if this is successful it's basically going to push the app store to be you're either in the subscription or you're free to play with in-app purchase like that will be the strong incentive if this is successful that there are two ways you do games on ios and if you want to be outside and charge $6 or whatever, you can do that too. But it'll be a lot harder to get there, right? Yeah. Yeah, it will be. Because if you're a subscriber to this service, you're probably just going to look at that tab, look at the arcade tab and say, here's what's next.

And if there's some app that's not in the arcade, are you going to see it? I don't know. But the question that I would counter that with right now is, are people seeing them anyway? I don't know, right? And I think that might be why Apple's felt the requirement to move in on this, and this is something that they can have a real positive impact for a lot of companies. And I really hope that it's something that will continue. I'm very intrigued about this one,

and it's interesting that they've announced it right now. Because it's not out for a while. Fall, again. So it's intriguing. But we'll see. Yeah. Do you want to talk about Apple Card? Well, of course.

How could we not? I am also really interested in this. Apple are making a credit card. They've partnered with Goldman Sachs. They've integrated into the Apple Wallet. this was stuff we kind of knew about before right this was what this was what the rumors were from bloomberg but we didn't really understand what any of that meant right because that on its own doesn't really seem to make much sense as you would expect the credit card can be used online it can be used in stores worldwide it's primarily through apple pay but apple will be mailing their customers a titanium credit card that has no numbers on it,

no signature on it, nothing. Because of course, I kind of love that. Because Apple. One of the bits, there's a few big things about this. Like one is like quick applications. You just apply, I think like in Apple Wallet, and if you get it, you get it, and it's immediately available to you.

One of the big things is something called daily cash. You get 2% cash back on purchases, 3% if you're purchasing something from Apple. And you get this every single day in cash deposited to your Apple Pay Cash card. I was like, wow, okay. So lots of credit cards do. And I think this is something

that's going to come out over the next week. And I tweeted something to the extent that, oh, well, I guess I'm going to spend some of my time this week doing research about what the best credit cards are and stuff. Because people do a lot of research on this. And it really depends on how you live your life and what your priorities are about what credit card you should get. It's not bad, although I understand, like somebody was tweeting at me, like Amazon has a credit card that gives you 5% back on Amazon purchases. And so if you buy all your Apple stuff from Amazon, then you get 5% back and that's a better deal.

It's like, well, yeah, if you spend a lot on Amazon, that's the right card for you. If you don't, it's not. What's interesting about this is that these percentage cash back seem decent. Um, and there are immediate, like we have a discover card here and we get like certificates that we have to cash out at various points of the year, uh, for certain stores, or we can get it in cash, but it's actually worth more if you have a partner store. And it's just like that's nice but then i look at this

and i think this is way better because my application my apple pay cash balance which they called apple cash so i feel like maybe apple pay cash has is becoming apple cash now and then they're gonna get rid of that pay part um it just goes in there and it goes in there every day. And, you know, I see the psychological benefit of having that there because some of the companies that do the cashback, put it on your balance. Some of them send you a check. Some of them send you a gift card. Some of them, you have to do some work in order to get the result and that's not as good and then again you know you may be somebody who flies on southwest airlines all the time and you got their card and by i read an article that said that was the best credit card deal in the u.s

if you fly them because you can earn so many points that you can qualify for their two-for-one pass and at which point you get essentially 50 off every single airfare it's like it's a great deal if you fit there for people who listen to this show i look at this and i think well a lot of people who love who love apple products this is probably a pretty decent deal even if all you're doing is using it to buy everything you buy from apple because you probably buy a lot of stuff from apple and you'll get three% cash back right there. And that's pretty cool. So the physical card is a 1%, which is, they're not providing a great incentive to use the physical card,

but they're like, well, we have to give you one and not every place takes Apple Pay. So we're going to do that. But it really does seem like a product designed for Apple Pay first and as a physical card last. So one of the things that I like is clarity. And it's not so much the money, it's like the clarity. And I think there's a lot of clarity throughout the entire product. So the fact that you're seeing the cash back in cash and it's arriving with you on a daily basis, personally, as a consumer, I prefer that than many of the other myriad ways

that this stuff can be done, whether you get it back like a month later, or as you say, you get it back in this like weird thing that you have to cash in somewhere. At the end of the year in a certificate. Yeah, it's no, it's, I get like why they do it that way. I don't like it. It's like clipping coupons.

It's extra work. And they're trying to create a barrier between you and your money. And I don't like that. You won't get it. And like, so I would give up a percent to have clarity because that's just a decision that I would make as a consumer. And I like a lot of the other stuff that they're talking about.

So Apple are targeting low interest rates and they're also doing a lot of stuff that I like about trying to inform you about how much interest you'll pay on a thing. And they're also trying to show you kind of like charts of your spending habits and things like that. There's a lot of the design of the app where there are a lot of kind of like internet first banks in the UK and in Europe. And I'm noticing a lot of design stuff, how like they said they would break down, they use machine learning on your transactions to try and assign some kind of code to an actual retailer.

And then you can kind of see how much was spent with a specific retailer. There are companies like Monzo and TransferWise and there's a couple of things. There's Starling. There are a lot of these banks in the UK and in Europe where we do a lot of this stuff. They have really nice apps and they break all this stuff down for you. I think that kind of stuff is really great. No fees at all for anything, which is for a credit card company.

Wild. Yeah. And privacy focused. Like, I think this is amazing. I am super sad that I won't be able to get this. And I don't think I'm ever going to get it. Well,

but Jason, like Apple Jason, Apple Pay Cash still is not out of the US. I think that my hope would be that some credit card company attached to a bank in the UK sees this and they're like,

we want a piece of that action. So then they might help Apple establish themselves with the card and with Apple Pay Cash in the UK. That's what I hope will happen with this. And or I also hope that the credit card is such a success that Apple accelerates its efforts with the pay cash stuff and the credit card outside. We will see. It's launching in the summer in the US.

But like I personally, I would be immediately on this. This would be great for me. The way that I spend on credit cards, I pay my credit card off every month. So the interest rate stuff is never that much of an issue for me because I don't... I went through all this when I was a much younger man. And I don't like to get into debt in these ways

where I can avoid it. And I don't like to get into debt in these ways where I can avoid it. But I think that this is a very interesting play for Apple. This is something else. I tweeted this when this happened. This is not your grandparents' Apple. This is not. This is a very, very different company.

This is a company who wants to take your money, and they want your money to flow through them, and then they're going to give you money to spend on their stuff like this is again like if you have a trillion dollars in the bank or like however much money they have in the bank you're a trillion dollar company this is what you do because you have so much money what else are you going to do with it all by the way if you have a trillion dollars in the bank you are literally the bank um they are the bank now they they are kind of the bank now this is um also apple's apple's rationale here for this product is not um the rationale that almost anybody else has a credit card for and that is powerful for them because they have all of this influence that they can,

they can do this. And this, you know, we made a deal with Goldman Sachs and all of that. It does have, it feels a little bit like the early days of the, uh, of the iPod and the iTunes store where, um, Apple was coming at it from a different angle and they got a partner to go along with them, or even the iPhone and singular to a certain extent, it feels like that where it's sort of like, well, we need a bank to be a partner to do this. But we have all of these priorities that are not anybody else's priorities in the financial services arena

because we're Apple. Our priorities are different. Our priorities are we have a business with lots of devices and we want to take, we'll just take our cut out of all the transactions that are going to pass through. And that works for us. So we don't want, and what we want in exchange is,

we want the bank we're using to agree not to take any data and sell it, which I don't know if people know this, but almost every bank will resell your personal data. They do that. That's part of their business model. So we're not going to let them do that. And Apple's going to keep stuff on device and not even analyze a whole bunch of stuff that you do. And, and they put up that slide. It's basically like, there are all these things about your

transaction that Apple just doesn't even know. And, and it's all kept on device and, and yes, they extended the wallet app to do some stuff too, which is nice. But, um, and some of that they could probably do with every card that's an Apple pay. And it's a little disappointing that they're like only our card, but it's their prerogative. But, um, you know, because their priorities are different, their product is a little bit different and it fits in with the story they're trying to tell. And I think for a lot of people, this will be a very good option, especially since, you know, Apple is not trying to necessarily be the best available deal. To go back to my coupon clipping metaphor, I'm positive that an expert would show you

any number of credit cards or sets of credit cards that you could sign up for for various things and work out a whole program where you could sign up for for various things and work out a whole program where you could maximize the amount of savings. And if you take flights on this airline, you should get that card and make these kinds of purchases with it. I have no doubt that if you put a huge amount of effort into it, you can maximize the amount of savings you get from various credit cards and the ones that have fees and the ones that don't and that whole thing. However, Apple's not playing that game, which is not surprising since Apple also doesn't play the low, low price game when it comes to product prices. What Apple wants to do is create something that's simple, that has very clear direct benefits to you, that is a pretty

good deal, even if it's maybe not the very very very best deal in credit cards and has this whole layer of like features and uh in software and security and privacy layered on top because what apple wants to be is um make a good enough product to solve enough product that people are like oh i'll just get the apple thing that's the easiest thing and it's good and it's fine it's not ripping me And like, that's sort of the bar is it's, you know, the experts say you could get some better deals, but it'll be more effort. And, and, and, and you might have to like be a change your buying patterns a little bit. That's fine. Apple, Apple is not, I think even shooting for that. Apple just wants that the,

the credit card equivalent of the app installed on your device. That's what they want to be. It's like you have an iPhone. It's so easy to sign up on your phone for this credit card and use it to buy all your stuff. And you get cash back. And you can see the cash coming back in. A push notification appears saying, you just got $8 back for that thing you bought. I totally see

what they're going for here. And it could be very successful for them. Even though it's not for everybody, because again, it doesn't have to be for everybody. And I do think we'll be inundated in the next week with a lot of people and a lot of stories about how it's, oh, no, this Apple thing is not for everybody. Now, of course, it's not like, you know, I'm interested in it myself, but I've been meaning to research that Southwest Airlines credit card too, because I've heard and I use them a lot, that that might actually be a great deal. Because I, you know, since I use them, their big discounts would go further for me. If you're a heavy Amazon user, the Amazon card, which I'm a heavy Amazon user, I've never even considered using Amazon's credit card, right?

So, you know, it doesn't have to be for everyone, but it's got a lot of stuff wrapped up in it. This feels, for a totally weird non-Apple product, because it's a financial services product, it actually feels like an Apple product to me in some ways. I don't know what it is. There's something very Apple-y about this product. in some ways. I don't know what it is. There's something very Apple-y about this product. Just in the chat says,

I think Apple's main incentive is that if people get the Apple card, they will be less likely to transition to another mobile phone vendor. Yes. Could be. No, but like that's all of this. That's what all of this is. Everything we're talking about today,

all that, that services, that's what services is for them. It's the lock-in and getting extra money out of their customers. It's not always right. The TV app isn't lock-in because it'll be on other devices, but there is this virtuous cycle of being a part of the Apple ecosystem and having access to these nice things. I'd say it's also very similar to their whole privacy thing

that they're pushing now. It's sort of like, yeah, Apple stuff's a little more expensive, but it's just nicer. And even the credit card is nicer. And like, that's their core audience, right? That's their core appeal in the end is, yeah, all this Apple stuff is nicer. And once you're in the Apple ecosystem,

using their stuff is nicer and easier and better integrated. So you might as well just use their stuff and use their credit card and all of that. Like that is, we can debate those points, but like that is what they're going for and that they've had a lot of success and this doesn't have to be a bad thing and i don't think that joe is necessarily saying that it is a bad thing but it is a realistic thing like the the point of the services stuff is to give apple another avenue to go down and it's two things

you want to get more money where you can get it. And you want to give your customers more of a reason to want to stay with you. And these are that like, it doesn't have to be like the lock in idea. I think a lot of the time is met with an idea of, oh, that's a bad thing. It's like, no, it's like, lock in is a phrase that can be used. It's just like, it is making you feel better for the choice of phone that you made. Right. Like you decided to get an iPhone and now look at all this stuff you can do and all of this other stuff that you will be able to do. Like good work on your choice. And that's how I feel as a customer of Apple, that like I has a bunch of benefits that I get.

And all of this stuff, when I'm in the right country for it, is available to me. And I think that that is a good thing as a person who decided many years ago that Apple was the right platform for him. And now I'm continuing to reap the benefits of that, where when I look at my friends on Android and in other ecosystems, I feel like that the overall that you get in that world sometimes, a lot of the time, isn't as like wholly inclusive of giving you all the services and things that you want for a price that you're happy with in a way that meets your own sensibilities. And I think that this is another example of that. Like I would want this product because I think that it's a cool product and it would tie into the things that I use every single day. because I think that it's a cool product and it would tie into the things that I use every single day like I think that for me personally the the arcade and the card are the two things that I think resonate with me personally the most out of these as a consumer I really want to be able to

access both of these services I am very intrigued about the content that Apple is making and but I and I'm looking forward to seeing more and I know that I'm going to be subscribing and watching that but like I would take the card no question right now and I cannot wait to give Apple my money for Apple Arcade. Fascinating. Alright we the Upgradians have been reaching out with their questions and we should

definitely try and help them where we can Jason but I want to thank our final sponsor for this week's episode and that is Luna Display. I is Luna Display. I love Luna Display. I love that with my Luna Display, I can have extra screen space whenever I want it. And that is what, when I'm on my Mac, and that is what it does. So it takes your iPad and your Mac, and it puts them together in a glorious harmony. I love Luna Display. I've been such a happy customer of theirs. Having extra screen space when you're working at your mac is so useful it can make tiresome tasks more enjoyable it can remove the requirement to

be switching spaces or even if like i know that uh steven hackett your and my uh co-host and co-founder of relay event does this where he has audio hijack when he's recording a show on his ipad on luna display so it's just off at the side and it's just like well it's there it's just like a thing that you can see it when you need it. And I think that's a really clever way of using it. It's just like have a thing that needs to, you need to sometimes glance at, but you don't need right in front of you. And it's a way you can't accidentally click it.

Like it's just simple. It's off on the side, right? Like it's brilliant. And I think Luna display is great for stuff like that. Our iPads have such wonderful displays. Wouldn't it be great to be able to take advantage of all of that beautiful screen real estate when you're sitting down and working at your Mac? Whether you have a Wi-Fi connection or not, you can connect with USB. It's super simple. The lunar display provides crystal clear image quality, reliable performance,

and wireless flexibility. You just pop a little piece of hardware, a lovely little dongle straight from the great area of dongle town into your Mac, and you're good to go. It makes your setup so portable. Like if you are using a laptop and you have your iPad with you, maybe you're traveling, maybe you're at the office, maybe you're in a coffee shop. This way you can have multiple screens without having to lug around an extra display. There's no way you would want to do that, right? Like you just take like a Thunderbolt display and your MacBook down to the coffee shop. You don't need to be one of those people if you have a Luna display. It's also a complete extension of your Mac. It will support your external keyboard. It will support Apple Pencil, touch interactions. With the swipe of a finger, you can be using your Mac and you can be tapping around

with your pencil. It's super, super awesome. And they've just updated the Liquid Video Engine, which brings significantly reduced latency and a faster screen refresh rate as well. which brings significantly reduced latency and a faster screen refresh rate as well. Listeners of Upgrade can get an exclusive 10% discount on Lunar Display. Just go to lunardisplay.com and enter the promo code UPGRADE at checkout. That is L-U-N-A-D-I-S-P-L-A-Y.COM

promo code UPGRADE at checkout. Don't put this off any longer. Go there right now. Lunardisplay.com promo code UPGRADE 10% off. Our thanks to luna display for their support of this show and all of relay fm so good so good mike i have a segment

before we go to ask upgrade oh a new segment yes it is um not a recurring segment but something i wanted to put in here which is just a moment to think to pause to consider what didn't get announced at this event that could in the future? And what I'm thinking is that plus, that plus, Mike, the plus that's not on the arcade, but that's on TV, that's on news. Where else might it go? And I have a few suggestions that I'm just going to mention here. I'm not saying these are going to happen. Some of them, it's probably less likely they're going to happen.

But I want to, I think it would be useful for all of us over the next few weeks to consider what else Apple could make a service and slap a plus on. And I have a few suggestions. One is Apple Music Plus. I'm not quite sure what they would do, but is there something they could do with exclusive? They could do it with quality. They could take exclusives like they did with the iTunes sessions, and they could put up a bunch of live albums and acoustic sessions and stuff like that and brand them as Music Plus. I mean, you're already

paying for Apple Music, so you probably not, but I wonder about that. Books, Apple Books Plus, so Kindle Unlimited, and there's a Prime Reading. Amazon has got a few different kind of like subscription book reading services. I'm not sure how big that business would be for Apple. I'm not sure how big it is for Amazon, but I'm just going to throw it out there. That's an example of a subscription service that provides you with basically free books that you can read. And I don't use that service, but it's there. And I think that's kind of interesting. So I'll throw that out there. And the one that put a little chill down my spine, but we talked about how so many companies like Spotify are investing in original audio content that they're calling a podcast, but is limited

to their app. And I don't know if Apple has any designs to do this, but Apple Podcast Plus, right? Like what if they did a subscription service for original podcast material? I think what's working against all of these things is Apple has bigger fish to fry and that they would rather focus on these more, we've seen the ones that are the biggest opportunities for them, but I still have this,

and maybe it wouldn't be in podcasts. Maybe it would be part of music or it would come with music. But I keep have this, and maybe it wouldn't be in podcasts. Maybe it would be part of music or it would come with music. But I keep thinking Apple's position in podcasting is so powerful. They are still number one in terms of the playback environment. And they haven't made any attempt to make a service out of it yet. I don't know if I can really put my mind to that thought about the podcasting thing right now. Just watch for the pluses.

Keep watching for pluses. Think about the pluses. What could get a plus stuck on the end of it? Because plus means recurring revenue at the services line. And they like that. Let's go to hashtag askupgrade. Our first question comes from Wayne.

If you bonded all of Apple's services, now that you know them all at least, how much would be a reasonable price for you? So how much would you pay? comes from Wayne. If you bonded all of Apple's services, now that you know them all at least, how much would be a reasonable price for you? How much would you pay? So we know that one of them is $10 a month. I'm going to assume that Arcade would probably be $10 a month. I reckon they're all going to be like $10.

So I reckon we're going to get like, at that point, we'll have four of them, right? Including music. So it'd be like 40 dollars would be the total price um i would like to see 25 i will pay 30 for all four of those all right so it'll be 35 then yeah that's how it works mike you want it to be 25 you round it up and then it's more than that

that's that's how you do it well do you have numbers do you have different numbers i i don't i haven't had time to think about it um if you think a video is being in the in the um 7 to 15 range uh probably more likely 10 music is 10 or 15 sort of the family you know one price for families is not something they do for music. You have to charge it. They make you pay extra for families, but it's, you know, 10 or 15, you start to add it up and yeah, you end up in 50 a month. And is there a, what's the deal that makes you take those services that you don't want? Because if the average person only buys two of them, well, that so a 30 bundle or 25 bundle doesn't really work for them everyone in the

chat room is saying iCloud yes yes iCloud iCloud could also go in there sure sure same price economics sure if you wanted to um so yeah i i don't know i don't know exactly but i still think a bundle makes sense and i really it turned out to be Oprah, but for a while I really thought they were leading up to the big last thing being, how do you bundle this? But they don't have prices for these things, so they can't bundle them. You can't bundle them if you haven't announced prices for them.

That doesn't matter. That's like, why would you even bother? And also you can't sell the bundle because they're not available, right? Like the bundle, if there's going to be a bundle, the bundle will probably come in September, which is when TV Plus and Arcade will be available as well. Yeah. And so that's my guess is that we'll get it and there will be.

I have a hard time, again, seeing there not being a bundle. It makes too much sense. They will get more subscribers into all of these things by offering a little bit of a discount. But I don't know what that price is. Probably more than you want, though. Brian asks, this was a services event. There were four services, if you count the card in those announced today. Only one of them is available. Why did they announce Arcade, the card and TV plus so far in advance? All right. So TV, I said earlier, I think part of it is just to get it out there. They're, they're planting a stake in the ground. They got their name. They know other services are

being announced. They've set a date to it. It means all of the people who are making the shows don't can stop complaining that, that nobody has heard anything about what Apple is doing. It lets Apple do a freeze Apple up to continue to promote them whenever it wants because the cat is out of the bag. So that's the reason for that one. I would say globally, by the way, it made this a coherent presentation. I think there's value in that, in having a presentation about services, that if these services were tacked onto the end of hardware announcements, it would be, you could do it, but I think there's value in Apple having a very

straightforward, like, let's talk about all the services we provide and all the ways that they're similar. And if you do that, they're not all going to be ready at the same time. And they don't want to delay the ones that are ready. Card, I don't know, other than that it probably financially you know like all the details were going to leak out at some point anyway and it's part of the services conversation so you might as well get it out now arcade is interesting um because it could have been a wwdc announcement and um i i have at least an indication from somewhere that will remain nameless from a note jason picked up on the ground he picked up a note that's right on to be fair it was at apple park that i found that note so it could be legit um no it's a um that this may have originally

been intended as an app store announcement or a WWDC announcement, which would make sense because it's developers, right? But I could see it being in either event. It really is appropriate for either event. And maybe tipping it over the top is the fact that Google announced GDC, their whole big Stadia initiative, which is a Google subscription streaming games service. And I wonder if that might, you know, I don't think that's the only reason because I do think it fits.

Very different services. And they are different, but I could see how that maybe tipped the balance toward including it in this presentation rather than sitting on it until WWDC.

I think it makes way more sense here because I think it's pretty clear that at least for the time being this is not a thing that anybody can just decide that they want to become a part of with arcade right developer they're not going to evangelize to wwc like hey we have this game subscription service um don't call us we'll call you like that's you know even if that's true now it also frees them up at wwdc to answer questions about the subscription gaming service and maybe even say here's you know here's how this works and talk to your if you're a game developer talk to your developer contact or however they want to do it

or or forget about it even it lets them communicate that it lets the questions kind of queue up over the course of the next few months instead of it being dropped on developers especially since as you put it you know this isn't the sort of thing where you just sign up and so to roll that out of wwdc actually would be maybe a little more awkward uh mike wrote in to ask this is not me will apple cars require approval and i looked through apple's website and it will so they spoke about the fact that you can sign up for it and you'll have it in minutes that's true but they are still doing a credit check on you and your approval is subject to a credit check passing credit checks can be instantaneous these days um it is not a long process so uh so you can have it in minutes but you will need to pass a credit check to be able

to use apple card and if you've frozen your credit you may have to unfreeze it and then do the credit check then but they're trying to make it easy but it's still a credit card yeah yeah ultimately there's still risk that you know they're not taking fee that you're gonna have to pass a credit check we have no idea how strange an apple's gonna be um and your interest rate as normal will be within a range depending on your credit history but uh yeah also pay off your credit cards don't don't don't the interest rates are too high you get a credit card pay it off pay it off if you can colton has written in to ask do you still think that apple tv plus could be on android or

at least the web i do not anymore jason i think we've seen everything we're going to see for it well this is the counter argument, which is a little bit of a hybrid of the two options we have been given in the past, which is Apple wants it to be available on every TV, but on other devices, it's only on Apple devices. And that could be the scenario. Could be is the question here. And I'd say, yeah, I think it still could be the scenario uh could be is the question here and i'd say yeah i think it still could be i think there is it is still possible that apple will make this stuff available on the web or on android or both down the road because they you know it will increase the number of devices that can watch it but i think clearly their number one priority was tv on an infinite time scale of course but like i think that if we're looking at like within launch period i don't think so i

think we've seen i think we've seen what we're going to see there yeah presumably if they were going to launch with a web browser they would have done it they would have said so they didn't it didn't and i think that they have actually made it available to more people in more ways than i expected like no like i'm not saying like you need to buy a new TV, right? That is one way. But the other way is two products from two companies that make relatively inexpensive sticks, Amazon and Roku. Like that is making it very available to a lot of people.

And really the best way to get this content is always going to be on a television, right? It's going to always be the best way to view this content is on a television. And if you don't have access to a television, then you probably want an iPad. That's probably what you want to do for this type of stuff. Steve asks, is this the weirdest Apple event that you have ever covered? Not even close. This is why I wanted to put this in there, because I was hoping, Jason, that you would be able to provide a bit of context i don't think this was a weird apple event at all if anything i thought that this was a much more appley feeling apple event than even i was expecting it to be

yeah other than the the part where the individual uh tv people came out on stage and talked like the screen went black the the stage went black and then they they magically appeared right i think that they handled it really well. Everyone was interesting and entertaining you know like I actually think they did an interesting job Kamil Nanjiani was the very clearly the polished public speaker of the group

right? Yeah. Did a good job too though. I thought that he was pretty good. He told a good story. Yeah it's just you know actors like to read their lines. So the, I'm sorry, Jen, just saying it as like it is. Anyway, the. I still love you, Jen.

I just still love you. Glad to be in the room with you. The, there was like a QuickTime event back in the pre-jobs time, which was one of the bizarre. Cause it was like, we're showing you quick time is like the future dude. And it's like VR and, and, uh, cool, you know,

codecs. And it was so strange. I still have like a note. Was this the event that you went to where you kind of said, please stop inviting us to these events. Was that the one? No, there was the one right before the iMac,

which I don't even remember. It was so not memorable. But there was something that was like, let us tell you about our products that you already know about. And we're like, okay, stop inviting us. And then the next event was the iMac and one person went. Because we're like, you fooled me once, shame on me. Fool me twice, shame on you. And then it was the iMac.

And we're like, oh, and I've been to every Apple event since then. It was shame on us? Off rule. Yep. Turns out Steve Jobs actually had something, but the previous event was nothing. And in the jobs era, I would say there was that Macworld Expo,

New York event where they obviously had a product that fell out. And so they brought like, Oh, who was it? John Rubenstein, maybe Avita Vanian. They brought somebody out to explain how processors work and the Megahertz myth and why G4s were better than Intel processors.

And it was like time stopped. That was, I mean, was that weird or just bad? I don't know. It was super weird that they were doing it. There is a part of Jason still in that room. I am still at the Javits Center listening to Avi Taveni and talk about the processor cycles. Or was it John Rubenstein or both or none or a strange fusion of both of them that was inside a processor inside an Intel bunny suit. By the way, somebody asked if the guy who was demoing Apple News was the first person on stage at an Apple event wearing a jumpsuit.

person on stage at an Apple event wearing a jumpsuit. And my immediate response was, it depends on if you count the Intel bunny suit, because I think there was a guy in an Intel bunny suit on stage at some point. And then the last Macworld Expo keynote, which was Phil Schiller, I think they didn't have anything to announce specifically. And it was weird because it was like a Steve Jobs keynote without Steve Jobs, which during that era didn't happen. But it was weird because it was like a steve jobs keynote without steve jobs which during that era didn't happen but it was like you know you don't get steve jobs you just get phil here he is and you know phil's fine but it was very much like nope don't nobody come nobody come we're leaving this show nobody come so there have been other weird apple events and i agree with you mike this was actually more normal than I thought it would be. And finally today, MikeNotMe asks,

will I be able to stream iTunes content to my Roku when the TV app launches? And I think, yes, that's the point. So the TV app will have access to your iTunes content because I think that's where it's all going to be. They said they were adding the entire iTunes movie library to the TV app. So basically all the iTunes media stuff should be in the TV app.

Because it's all going away. iTunes is going away. This is where you're going to buy it from. You can buy in the TV app now, which you couldn't do before. You'd have to go out to iTunes. But that's coming in the TV OS update. This is the screenshots on Apple's website. You just buy and's coming in the tv os update like this is the screenshots on apple's

website you just buy and rent right in the tv app um real-time follow-up from zach in the chat room it was rubenstein jason it was rubenstein okay avi tovanian's ghost was walking through the down the down the middle of the aisles trying to scare us alive no well it was his apple apple employee ghost is what it was. Yes, John Rubenstein would like to tell you about these. There's little animations of little commands being sent into the processors

and parallel and risk and yeah, part of my soul remains there. We did it, Jason Snell. That was the services. We did it. That was the services event. Yeah, I guess you could say that this podcast is a service that we provide.

I would agree with you. And if you would like to read about those services, relay.fm upgrade.238 for information about this episode, including show notes, and hopefully your podcast app of choice will have show notes in it. I am sure Jason will have many articles that he will be panning about today's information.

Go to sixcolors.com and you'll be able to read those there. Jason is also on Twitter. He's at jsnl, J-S-N-E-L-L. I'm at imyke, I-M-Y-K-E. I did this before, and I did it again on Instagram. I kind of published what it's like

to be Mike on a day like today. And I'm going to create like an Instagram highlight. So if you want, if you are at all interested what it is like to be Mike Hurley on a day like this, trying to kind of wrangle the information and get ready to record upgrade very late in the evening, I will have a link in the show notes where you can go and see what that's like on my Instagram page. So that's my version of live blogging. Like, what is Mike doing today? That's that's kind of my Instagram page. So that's my version of live blogging. Like what is Mike doing today?

That's, that's kind of all I have. Jason man's to bleed six colors. Um, is that, is that six colors events, right? Is the six colors event Twitter account for life?

Yeah. I don't want to pollute everybody's Twitter account if they don't want it. Yeah. That's what, that's what, that's what Jason's doing. And I'm just posting on my Instagram stories. So,

you know, so to each their own, really. I think Jason's work is a bit more important than mine, but it's okay. We made it. We made it through, Jason Snell. I want to thank Simple Contacts, Bombast, TextExpander, and Lunar Display for their support of this show. And most of all, I want to thank you for tuning in, and we'll be back next time.

Until then, say goodbye, Jason Snell. Goodbye, plus, Mike. Goodbye plus.