Upgrade - 472: Step Aside, Bob!

Episode Date: August 14, 2023

For years, rumors about Apple and Disney combining seemed ridiculous--but in light of Apple's transformation and Disney's difficulties, suddenly it seems a lot more possible. Myke and Jason examine Disney's business and try to imagine what portions of it Apple would actually want. Also: What would be in an Apple Watch X?

from relay fm this is upgrade episode 472 for august 14th 2023 this episode is brought to you by express vpn and zoc doc my name is mike hurley and i'm joined by Jason Snell. Hi, Jason Snell. Hi, Mike Hurley. I dated the show today, which is a new thing to try. I don't know what you think about that. I mean, that's today. You're right. Is it good? I mean, it means that if somebody listens later,

they won't be confused about what we're talking about and think that it's a current episode. Yeah. We'll try it out. Sometimes I might say it, sometimes I might not. Summer of fun, you know what I mean? Sometimes he puts dates on the episodes. You know where you can find the summer of fun?

In a calendar. Let's start with a Snow Talk question. It comes from Kevin. Kevin wants to know, Jason, if you were a baseball player, what would your walk-up song be? Didn't we do this already? I feel like we did. I feel like I'm going to make the same jokes here.

We are 472 episodes in. We've probably been doing Snow Talk for like 300 episodes at this point. There are going to be questions that come up more than once. It's just life. I'm waiting for Kate, the official historian of Upgrade,

who has just said that they feel like we we did this here's the thing if neither if neither of us could be sure and neither of us can remember like no one can remember except you what it was then it's a perfectly good question to do again but the listeners could do it so the short short version is my favorite answer to this question is my friend phil michaels who said that it would be the uh national anthem of the soviet union i just think that's amazing it's a i think an old wrestling reference but like whoa what what satirical majesty that would be uh i believe i established in the macworld pundit showdown podcast of many years ago that uh uh don't dream it out don't dream it's over by crowded house is a great uh walk-up song uh also a song you can have played at your funeral

so you know double duty there um but what I really want to say in this segment, since we reused a question is, uh, there's been a little humidity over the weekend. It was warm, but the extra humidity here made it feel even warmer. And I went to a baseball game yesterday and it was warm. Uh,

and, and living in the Bay area has completely ruined me to withstand high temperatures. So, um, anyway, it was just, just a little extra humidity. I think some of the monsoonal moisture is coming up from the south, making it a little bit moister here in the Bay Area. And that's my weather segment that happens when we repeat a Snell Talk question. Well, here's the thing.

So here's the thing, all right? So there's been some detective work occurring in the Discord. Zach Knox has consulted underscore David Smith's pod some detective work occurring the discord zach knox has consulted underscore david smith's pod search and search for the term walk up and it has not returned an answer now what you got to say for yourself i what i got to say is that probably the whisper algorithm changed it to something like waffle yeah potentially but what i'm saying is there's no there's no uh history of it but like as i said i'll hang on a second hang on stop stop the presses underscore david smith has appeared in the discord oh no he said his name and he appeared and episode 187 where i just searched

for walk i work i search for walk dash up and there it is 187 and and here we go at two minutes and 20 seconds i think about my friend philip michaels has explained that his war cup music would be the soviet national anthem which would just be hilarious i think that's a reference wrestling reference mike wow that's wild okay so it's in there and it's got to be don't dream it's over by crowded house right like i think that would have to be it that's my war cup music for the pundit showdown podcast when we did that. See, so what I did is I didn't remember

for sure, but I remembered what my answer was and that's how I knew. And that's why I have to tell you, thank you, first off,

thanks to Underscore, thanks to Kate, proven right yet again, and again, a little humid this weekend. That's what I'm saying. Humid. I'm standing by my inclusion of this weekend. That's what I'm saying. Humid. I'm standing by

my inclusion of this question. Okay. Because I just feel like only you are the one to remember that it's been like you answered it before. And it was like

and as I said this was this was like 250 episodes ago. Nearly 300 episodes ago. 187. So I think it's okay to ask again all right so is that the statute of limitations especially if i give the same answer uh-uh nope there is no statute of limitations because i won't allow it denied well no but it would it would work in your okay let me explain this it would work in your favor if there were a statute of limitations because we could say after 200 episodes, they all reset and they can be asked again.

Right, but I don't want it to be fixed to that because what if I want to ask you a question that was asked 150 episodes ago? So I'm not going to put a number on this. I'm just going to do it every now and again. That's the rule. Okay. If you'd like to send in a Snell Talk question of your own,

could be new or could be old, go to UpgradeFeedback.com and you can send in a Snell Talk question of your own, could be new or could be old, go to upgradefeedback.com and you can send in a Snell Talk question to help us open the show. I have some follow-up for you, Jason Snell. Oh, that's great. Brian writes in with a question. Regarding the technological 23rd century Star Trek thing

comment from the university president, did you potentially consider that he may have been referring to the technological pitch that Apple was making, not necessarily the financial innovation? Maybe Apple was pitching the Vision Pro and filming and showing games in VR and AR in the near future

and using the PAC-12 as a testbed. The university president may have seen that as part of the presentation and equated it with technology from the future. So this is Michael Crow, the president of arizona state university who apparently has quite a reputation in academic circles uh not necessarily a great one um but i so brian i think he was referring to streaming honestly not the not the fact that they were going to do a rev share deal but that they had a streaming plan and they were going to take everything and build a streaming package about it

however i now that you mentioned the idea of the vision pro it wouldn't surprise me if that certainly is star trekky right like right you know would not surprise me that they were saying look we're going to be able to do some vr with your games we're going to have immersive game stuff that you're going to be able to do uh over the next five years of the contract or whatever it was and that that was part of their pitch too so again technological 23rd century star trek thing we don't actually know but yeah honestly if i were apple why would i not pitch that like this is part of our pitch to you is that you're going to be our test bed for this amazing breakthrough stuff and you're going to put the competition to shame with how you know that first super immersive sideline view of a football

game is going to be one of your you you know, it's going to be Oregon versus Washington or something like that, which at the time were part of the pitch. And then, and then they would be like, uh, this is great, except two of them didn't and it all fell apart. So yes, maybe so maybe that is part of what Michael Crowe was talking about. I just, I enjoy that quote. I love that quote because it's this incredible combination of enthusiasm and lack of knowledge. I just think it's kind of amazing, right? Like, I'm not going to get into the detail, but suffice it to say, like, he doesn't say he was blown away by it, but he was obviously blown away by it because he referred to it as a 23rd century Star Trek thing. So obviously he was very impressed.

And I will say Michael Crowe, big on being seen as an innovative thinker in academia. That's his thing. They did a whole like new leadership model for athletics that fell apart, did not work. But like he was innovating. And so he's exactly the kind of person to whom that pitch would be addressed and that would work for. And it did work for him.

He was ready to sign on the dotted line. Just didn't work out that way. So, so Brian, I, I do think that, uh, I,

I would not be surprised if vision pro and being part of the VR future was part of the pitch. Um, but it could have also, I'm, I wouldn't put it past him that he was just sort of saying, we're just going to be on streaming and it's going to be very futuristic in that way.

Instead of being on, you know, ESPN, like everybody else. MLS season pass subscribers have doubled since Messi joined Into Miami. This came from Into Miami owner Jorge Mas. Quote from 9to5Mac, Industry sources have indicated that MLS season pass was close to reaching the 1 million subscriber

milestone before Messi's arrival. Factoring that in today's announcement of subscribers doubling would suggest that mls season pass now has more than 2 million paying subscribers a little quick math there one times two hey look someone's gonna do it you know what i mean uh what do you think about 2 million as a number for uh i think it's twice as good as 1 million 1 million i mean here's the thing is i don't, I don't know the size of the MLS audience. $1 million for everything is interesting. Apple said they were happy with it. MLS seemed to be happy with it. It's a starting point. starting point. But I do think that if you look at that PAC 12 negotiation, that was one of the things that was part of the argument is, are we going to get to a million or 2 million or 5 million? Because if we can get 5 million, then we're making a lot of money. But if we get 1

million, we are not. So I don't know. I honestly, I don't know. I think what it does show you is that Apple being involved in the signing of Messi was a good idea. Right? Yeah. It's a really good idea. Yeah, it was a great idea. Because, I mean, look, will these sustain? Probably not. Like, the churn rate on this, I reckon, will be pretty high.

But, at least they got they're gonna have more than they would have had otherwise right like that it's not going to go back down to a million most likely maybe it's like million five or something like that and that would still be a great reason to have brought him on i would imagine the metrics are also pretty interesting right because i think messy has obviously fans in the u.s but has fans all over the world and so is there you know are is this a much more international audience than was in the first million like maybe yes i mean i think i think part of that is true uh i believe that must said that when we've spoken about this before uh that it was there was a lot more spanish language than before outside of america i think

um and so like there's been a there's been a shift there as well and all the broadcasts for those who don't know all the broadcasts on MLS League Pass are in English and Spanish. And then the ones in Canada are also in French. And this is really good, right? Because they've got Spanish language broadcasts available for Latin America. I mean, not Brazil, but like Argentina, where Messi is from. Spanish-speaking country. So they've got it like done.

Like you can watch on Apple, uh, Apple's platform and see the games in Spanish, which is huge. Plus throughout the rest of, um, Spanish speaking Americas and Spain. Uh, it's, it's good. There's a, there's a big audience in Spanish speaking Americas for, uh, for uh for messy i would think and it's accessible and for mls right and it's accessible because they went to the trouble of generating the spanish language version in parallel with the english language version it's great and then following on from this apple is working on a documentary series about messy coming to america this is now the second documentary project featuring him uh the first was a previously

announced project of his road to a world cup win spoilers for the world cup uh or for the lano messi documentary he's his team he was on the world cup winning team uh the catawba cup so they were doing that already um and now they're doing one about him kind of like how he's settling in i imagine him eating lots of waffles and stuff like this is what i think is going to happen right it's like going to his first walmart stuff like that that's what i think it's gonna be sure messy in america yeah right yeah yeah i'm sure he's down with the people and not like just chilling in his uh palatial miami estate no no i mean he's got to fly so you know he's got to fly to like d. And then he's like looking at cows and having a steak.

To be honest. And pumping some oil out of the ground. And, you know. Cowboy hat. Yeah. Riding a horse. Could be. He probably knows how to ride a horse, right?

He's probably out on the Pampas and out in Patagonia doing cowboy stuff, right? He's from Argentina. i mean i couldn't i literally know nothing about him other than his soccer so i i couldn't say if he's got my apologies to argentina those are the facts i know among the facts i know about argentina so he could potentially have written learned to ride a horse in argentina he might be a cowboy type or he might be a more refined gentleman i don don't know. I honestly don't know. This one's probably, I don't know if this is going to make you more

mad than you already were, but just like as a point to wrap around, the upcoming $130,000 electric Cadillac Escalade will not feature carplay, GM confirmed to The Verge. Obviously this is the case because it's a GM vehicle and they've already said this is going to happen but it's worth pointing out

this is a new EV announced post that announcement and they confirmed directly to the Verge that it will not feature CarPlay or Android Auto but will be the Google backed system which includes Google Maps and stuff like that. But it's their own entertainment system.

Good luck. It's a lot of money to not offer people all the options that they might want. And made by RelayFM Discord member Spole, inspired by our chapter shuffling conversation from last week, is a service called PodShuffle. There's a link in the show notes to PodShuffle.

It's a little bare bones right now, and Spole did say, they said I could talk about it on the show. They have not confirmed that it will work when put under load from listeners. But basically, you can give the URL of an MP3, so you can

right-click on the URL on any of our shows, and you can submit it to this service, and it will take the MP3, reorder the chapters, and give you something out for you to download at the end of it. So you can take any show with chapters in, put it into the service and it will put the chapters back for you in a random order for your listening pain.

Seems like a bad idea. Yeah. That was the whole point last week is that it was a bad idea. Not that we wouldn't do it as a summer of fun at some point because it would be funny to do it that way but now you can just do it with anything yeah and be terrible to yourself and others so great thank you spole for yes uh it's amazing that you did this terrible thing yes i this seems quite complicated i don't know how it works and i i'm convinced it's going to spit out either a large hosting bill or make a server break. But I did confirm I could put it in the show for that reason.

So I guess get it while it's hot, I suppose. Okay. This episode is brought to you by ExpressVPN. I don't know if you've ever noticed when you open an incognito window, but there's this little note that says that your activity could still be visible to an employer, your ISP or something like that. But if you want to make sure

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Our thanks to ExpressVPN for the support of this show and RelayFM. Rubber Roundup, Jason. Yeehaw! Yeah. Mark Gurman had a pretty

chunky newsletter. His Power On newsletter went out. And we're going to talk about the two main stories from that. The first being Apple's big plans for the 2024 Apple Watch, according to Mark Gurman. This would mark 10 years since the watch was introduced. And Mark refers to this as Watch X. I guess this is Watch 10.

I don't know. It is unsure to me if this is something that Mark is saying or if... Yes. It feels to me like... You think he's saying it? A Mark Gurman original. Yeah, that's what I... I don't think...

They could be talking about it internally as the iphone 10 equivalent for the apple watch i could i could see that sure yeah yeah but i don't know i don't know i really i don't want that i don't know right i just want no i wouldn't i would be that i would think it would be series 10 that way i think that'll be what it is yeah now the only argument I would make is because some of the changes that they'll potentially be making. And so one of them is a thinner case,

which could potentially see a change to quote, the way bands are attached to the device. Continuing, people involved in the development of the new Apple Watches say the system takes up a considerable amount of space. This is like the band system. That could be better filled with a bigger battery or other components. Apparently, Apple has considered switching to a magnetic system

for attaching Apple Watch bands, but Mark Gurman is not sure if this will make it to the Watch X. Now, what I was going to say is, you know, the Apple Watch series, sorry, the iPhone 10, right? That was like a very large departure from from a design perspective right and so changing the bands and like maybe the way like that fundamental thing about the apple watch i could see is maybe like wanting to draw a line in the sand kind of naming wise and move on but i still don't like the idea of watch x so i don't know

yeah i mean let's leave the name aside because i think that that's no point pointless but like the idea that this is a big change is interesting um the way he phrases it is fascinating it reminds me of the conversation we had about iphone buttons right they were rumored that they were going to remove the moving buttons from the iphone the side of the iphone this year and replace them with pressure sensitive ones that don't move because there's a lot of advantages to not having a button that, that moves because it's like, there's less ingress and less failure theoretically, right? Because it's just, it doesn't move. No moving parts. Apple loves that when there are no moving parts and they built it in a test version and it failed. And they're like, all right,

in a test version and it failed and they're like all right let's go back to the old way and the way german phrases this and you know is they're not sure if they're going to do this or not because it will break compatibility with existing bands and will it work right like you are the existing bands are not just something that many of us have spent a lot of money on it's tried and true technology right like whatever weaknesses it might have like they haven't replaced it there haven't been big gates about it right it works so i that's it's just it's a risk it's a risk changing to a new system and you want to test it out i can totally see their point if you look at an Apple watch from the side, especially if you have a band that is not the same color as the body of your

watch, like I've got the orange sport band on right now. I know it doesn't look like a lot, but like that band insert by percentage is a large, surprisingly large. It's like whatever, 10%, I don't know.

Percentage of the volume is being handled by this band mechanism right so i totally get them saying uh we want that space back because they have so much limited space and if they're trying to make it thinner there's even more space pressure so i i can see it and like, as somebody who has lots of bands, there will be an outcry. But like after 10 years of band compatibility, I thought they'd break compatibility after like five years.

I mean, we could probably go back to early episodes of Upgrade and find out what I actually theorized about it. But I have been saying for a while now, I was very much on the idea that they wouldn't break compatibility for a while because they're going to want to make people feel like comfortable in the ecosystem and easy to upgrade and all of that but after 10 years i feel like if you break band compatibility i might complain about it but like i don't have much of a leg to stand on at that

point it's like we i gave you 10 years also I wouldn't be surprised if what they do is what they did with the iPhone X, which has come up with a new high-end design that's cutting edge, that breaks compatibility, and also have a Series X or a Series 9. Well, I guess there's a Series 9, Series 10. And then there's this other thing. And like, it's clearly the future and that's where it's going.

But if you want to buy an Apple Watch today and keep your bands you can do that we'll let you do that the iphone you know eight am i trying i was like i had like three different ideas at the same time my brain okay because i think it's complicated to add another one because of the ultra and like so what if they did this to the ultra first but then i wonder if you would want magnetic bands on the apple watch ultra because it's meant to be extreme so like it should be more rugged and i feel like the apple watch ultra i don't know if that would be able to go to a magnetic band system right given given the way it's pitched so i i think they could do it i think they could totally do it where they still sell old style i mean mean, maybe it's not a new generation, but maybe it is, but certainly they'll

keep around an old style watch in the product line. And then they'll have this new watch and maybe it is more expensive, but not an ultra. And, and there's just a little added complexity in the line, but they're giving people a chance to either make the step or not and have that. What I'm saying is that I thought the iPhone 10 was a pretty good transitional thing where they're like, look, I know this is way more expensive, but we're also making a traditional iPhone for you. And this is the future, but we know that right now, not everybody's going to do it. And we still want you to be able to buy a phone. And then, and then over time, the old model sort of fade into the background. And then it's sort of up to the user to decide when do you let go of those old watch bands for this shiny new thing and you know because

it's gonna come they could they could bring the edition branding back right like apple watch series 10 edition and the addition could be like this fancy like my point is that they've had like the series 10 could have uh different products within that series and one of those could be the more like future facing like i'll just put mine in my kind of like point uh how i feel about this if it means they will change the design of their apple watch i will rebuy bands as many as they want like i desperately want the design language to change right and so i would look as well no one expected it to last this long that these bands would continue like when they changed the physical sizes of them for like the series four that felt like the obvious time they still didn't do it like i get if you have a big like stack of

apple watch bands but like no matter like i'm talking to you listen no matter what you put aside what you want to happen do you really expect that they would never do this like like in all of history that they will never change the band connection of the apple watch like you must know that it's going to happen like i understand if you invested a lot of money into this system but like it was always going to happen just because it hasn't doesn't mean it would never and so like i feel like this is i feel like any time is as good as any to change it but if they're going to come along with like a brand new design it's like yes please change it and i like the idea of a magnetic system to be honest.

I think Apple has shown that they really understand how to make strong magnets at this point with MagSafe. And I use the magnetic band on my Apple Watch, like the magnetic link. It never comes off. It only ever comes off when I want it to. It never falls off. I never catch it and pull the watch off or anything.

So I think it could be kind of interesting as a way to like, you know, take the watch off, pop it on a new one. Like I think it could be kind of cool. Mm-hmm. I can go back. I'm on a pod search from David Smith. Watch band compatibility.

We have been talking about since episode 112. Jeez. So when was that that like what year was that uh well that was what that was probably 16 uh 112 you said that was yeah october 2016 2016 is post the the um draft for that event right and we were debating whether they would keep watch band compatibility um that was a very early draft in fact so so yeah i mean i i agree with you i i will feel the pain like everybody else if they break band compatibility but i feel like it's been a good run. Right. It's a,

it honestly, it's a little bit like saying this just happened the other, the other week where somebody was like, so-and-so tragically died of old age at 92. And I'm like, tragically, like, like they had a really good run and they died in their sleep of old age in

their nineties. It's like, I don't know. I don't know. I don't know. He had a good run, right? They had a good run and no one lives forever. So that was a pretty good, like sign me up for something like that.

That super longevity and then gentle farewell. That's how I feel about the Apple Watch Band thing, honestly, is we've had a great run. It's been way longer than I ever anticipated. I am still wearing this orange watch band that I'm wearing is really old. I've worn it on many watches for a very long time. I feel fortunate to have gotten to this point, but if they come up with a super snazzy new watch that looks different and works different and has a different connection, and works different and has a different connection,

I will be sad. Remember, you know, don't be sad that it's over. Be happy that it happened. And by it, I mean your watch bands. It's better to have watched and banded than have not watched and banded at all. You know what I mean? Yeah. Also, just keep the watch that you have

of all the that you have all the bands you have like three more years and don't buy any more bands right and then also that by then by then somebody on amazon will have made a magnetic connector two band connector adapter that will be deeply unsatisfied no you know what it will be it will be like you know you've ever seen those like apple watch rugged cases have you ever seen those Apple Watch rugged cases? Have you ever seen those that you can get like a case to put on the Apple Watch? Like it would be one of those with

the lug things on the ends. So you would put it in a little plastic box and you could connect your watch band to it. All that thinness that you got from this new fancy watch, gone. Forget about it. Watch band. But this isn't all that's coming in the watch 10, uh,

micro led display, which would see better colors and clarity and apparently blood pressure monitoring as well as part of this device. The, uh, I love the argument that, um, Apple tests a lot of new cutting edge features on the apple watch

um which i think is true the idea that you um you know they started with oled on the apple watch it eventually came to the iphone right it's going to come to the ipad the lpto is that is that it ltpo the the the the display that allows for always on was also came on the apple watch first yeah and there are lots of other examples there was a piece about this that i can't find now that that somebody wrote about this that basically said the test bed for apple's tech is now more the apple watch than the than the iphone and i think that there's some truth in that and and it's because it's a smaller number it's a smaller thing and they can try this stuff out so micro led like we've been hearing about micro led for a long time it is superior

it's literally um led controls pixel by pixel so it gives you that oled like control over the image and the blackness and all of that um and is in many ways superior to oled um but is a cutting-edge technology that just sort of isn't there yet and so if apple would roll it out on a display their smallest display right which is the apple watch and start it there and then uh see where and learn right they'll learn they'll ship it and learn and grow and then end up with maybe moving it to other devices down the road. Apple or iPhone, Apple Vision, who knows what else. So that's fun. And just like we were talking last week about the new iPhone Pro and sort of got ourselves excited about maybe this is that sea change where it really feels like a very different phone than the last couple of years as we talk about features for this

rumored watch upgrade that mark german wrote about i get that same sort of feeling which is like okay you put enough of this stuff together and you really can make a case like this is a very big upgrade and every so often you need to do that you can iteration is great but every so often you need to say we're making a break we're taking a quantum leap here's this big new thing i think that gets people excited so there's some questions in the discord so i have no doubt that uh listeners will have the same of like how enough does blood blood pressure monitoring like analysis work on a device like this because we've all been to the doctor and they put the big cuff on you and squeeze your arm, right? So I remember Samsung back in 2020 introduced this to some of their watches. I'll read from their press release. The device measures blood pressure through pulse wave

analysis, which is tracked with the heart rate monitoring sensors. The program then analyzes the relationship between the calibration value and the blood pressure change to determine blood pressure to ensure accuracy users are required to calibrate their device at least every four weeks it's not to say they will use the same technology exactly that samsung uses but just that like this idea exists right the idea of blood pressure monitoring on a smart watch also if you break band compatibility you once again open yourself up to the the possibility that you could offer at least not if every brand band was a smart band but if some bands were smart bands where there is an interconnect beyond the the thing that holds it on the watch that is

providing power to a sensor that's in the band because then you have potentially more coverage and i don't know how that works and yeah maybe that band is maybe it's untenable but like i'm just thinking out loud here the idea that you have the ability to to do some other stuff with that watch band if you want to even if it's some simple stuff to aid in the accuracy of your blood pressure sensor or whatever i don't even know i was thinking right like when i read the blood pressure monitoring thing and i was just like in my mind i was like can you imagine if that for this watch just like big watch if they could also have nailed or do nail the glucose monitoring thing that we spoke about at the same time

can you imagine one this would be like they would not be able to stock enough of these things. That's Apple, right? That's Apple's goal, whether they can reach it or not. I mean, it's very hard to do that kind of technology on a device like this, but that's certainly Apple's goal is they, if you ask them, what does this look like in 10 years? What does your health initiative look like in 10 years? They're like, we should be able to non-invasively monitor

so many things about you in order to warn you or keep you on track or make you healthier or pass information to your doctor and that's why glucose monitoring is something that they've invested a huge amount of money in and it just sort of hasn't panned out yet but it may at some point sometimes i wonder about like would they either work with partners or build some of their own sensors i think about the airpods sometimes about like, would they either work with partners or build some of their own sensors? I think about the AirPods sometimes about like, we've talked about using AirPods as temperature sensors and other putting other sensors inside AirPods. So when you're wearing your AirPods, you've got a second point of monitoring on your body in addition to the Apple watch.

I don't know. It's all, I think this is their dream. I have not seen any reporting that their glucose monitoring tech has actually come to the point where they can do it. But like, I'm sure they desperately want to do that. No, there was that report that they made a leap, right? Like they made some kind of breakthrough, but not to the point where it was like, oh, and it's going to be ready in a couple of years. But they're getting closer. They had some kind kind of breakthrough they've gotten closer to doing it last thing on this apparently there are some discussions in high places at apple about moving the watch away from an annual refresh due to the incremental annual upgrades that they've seen for many years right this is i would say fundamentally a marketing question. And I know that producing

a new watch every year is a manufacturing and product design question, but it's also, I think, it's quite a marketing in the big market-seeking, market-defining version of the word marketing. Because I think what you have to ask yourself is, what does it cost for us to iterate the Apple watch every 12 months instead of 18 or 24? Okay. What is the cost? There's absolutely cost. You've got to, you've got to go through a whole product cycle and upgrade at least some of the components and change your marketing and do all of those things. Right. And I know that it's incremental, but it's still an upgrade. It's still a new model. what does that cost to do that at 12 months instead of 18 or 24

and then on the other side what is the benefit in terms of trying to sell a product to users that's new and do marketing about a new model and how much sale does that generate that you might lose if you can't do that marketing as often or if the product that's in stores is perceived as being old? And that is a question for a team at Apple that has, you know, hopefully they're getting paid pretty well and they're going to make that decision. But that to me, that's the core of the decision, because clearly they don't need to do an Apple Watch every year. They don't need to do an iPad every year and they don't need to do an Apple Watch every year. They don't need to do an iPad every year. And they don't. They don't need to do...

Most Mac models are on like an 18-month cycle. The iPad's definitely on an 18-month cycle. They don't need to. However, if it's worth their while to, if it's a better decision to keep it annual than a year and a half or two years, maybe they will. I will also point out the problem with the 18

month cycle with the watch is that the watch is an iphone accessory it is and so it really benefits from being announced with the with the iphone like i it it should ideally always be announced with the iphone because they go together yeah so that would say you're talking about either an annual or every two-year cycle. I can't see the future of the Apple Watch, obviously, because Apple doesn't talk about future products. I keep getting reminded of that every analyst call. No way.

But if we look at the last few years, it's actually hard to look at the last three or four apple watches and not say they could have gotten away with a two-year cycle right like it's been so the movement slows so much that i think it's worth having that conversation internally and saying do we you know do we really and looking forward then you look at the you look at the uh the strategy and what's on your product roadmap and you say do we really need to do this in this way or do we just is there just not enough here we're not moving this forward like there was a period in the iphone where it was like moving forward incrementally every single year with huge features and the apple watch sort of did that for like four

years and then since then not so much so maybe. But in the end, my answer is the same as when people ask about the iPhone coming out every year, because most people don't buy a new iPhone every year. And the answer is, it's worth it for them, because there's a new model, and there's buzz about it, and there's marketing about it, and that some people are going to be resistant after having a phone for four years or three years to go buy a phone that's a year and a half old because there's another phone coming soon so i'll wait and you bat a lot of that down if you release every year just that's the truth of it as wasteful as it might be in some ways it can be useful as a sales tool yeah i just you know it's obvious right in that like you can just do more in an iphone on an annual basis than you can do in an apple watch like with the changes that you can make i think if we see that right like the years where iphones are

considered to be like small upgrades is still much more of an upgrade than the apple watch sees on a year-to-year basis most of the time yeah like the question that i would wonder and i guess this is what they're battling is there is surely just an inbuilt cost of there being a new version right that like yes what it takes to to have a new version and the the cost of like not being able to take advantage of a longer term production cycle and like the the reduction in cost that that would take over time because like the longer you make something the cheaper you can make it for and so like there's got to be a balance right of like how much money would we lose if we did it every two years instead of every year and how much would we save right and i assume these are the conversations that they're trying to have that that's that's exactly it is is the

the argument is if we didn't do this we would save x and they could probably guess like what does it cost to iterate from series x to series x plus one not not iphone x or apple watch x uh series n okay we'll say two and plus one yeah and it's like we well what do we add to it we added like one thing we added a sensor like all right and and they've done that right so they could do that math and say well it still costs all of this design time all this production change time we got to update all the all the packaging all the marketing all those things and then the more squishy question is and then what do we get out of having an apple watch series n plus one on the market for a year instead of having the series n stay on the market for that for year two what does that look like And I'm sure there are spreadsheets and models and they've tried this stuff out and they maybe looked at other products like the iPad pro or, you know, other products where they can sort of say that and come up with a guess. And that's, you know, I think, I think the moment that they look at it and say, oh, we can save a lot of money. It's not necessary, right? Look at how much money we would save

if we didn't do this. Let's just not do it. Then they'll do it, I think. But I'm not entirely convinced that that's the case. And that's why when Mark Gurman says there are discussions, these are the discussions that they're having.

I mean, it also doesn't surprise me that the conversations would start now, right? Like, I feel like it's been enough time now. It's kind of like, especially if they're talking about, like, we have this huge one on the horizon. It's like, should we just maybe do that every couple of years instead of, like, the little ones? Yeah. Also, you could talk about what if you have a new one that's amazing and you've also got your ultra and you've also got maybe your classic one um like the ipad line right there are ipad refreshes all the time because there are multiple

ipads a watch every year not all of the watches every year but not all the watches yes so it gives you the opportunity to talk about them all you know like you could say like you know we've added this watch to the existing lineup which includes these other watches right so you could talk about it every september if you really want to but it's not necessary to like rep them all in the same way that they don't you know like the apple watch se doesn't get a revision every year it's every couple of years so maybe that's the way to go. Maybe so. Mark Gurman has also laid out the information he has about the M3 chip lineup. There's a lot of numbers here.

I'm going to try and burst through these as fast as I can, and then we can pick on anything that you want to. I recommend as well, I'm not including all of the information that Mark has in his report, so you can go and read it for more of that. But the M3, so this is the M3 chip lineup, all of the four chips that we are aware of. These are what Mark has been able to gather. So the standard M3 will be an 8 CPU core, which is split into four performance, four efficiency, and 10 GPU cores. This is the same core count as the M2 completely. But I guess because of the 3nm process,

we are expecting faster cores. The M3 Pro chip, the base configuration will be 12 CPU and 18 GPU. That's up from 10 and 18. The top configuration that you would have in the Pro is currently a 14 CPU core. Sorry, that would be a 14 CPU, 20 GPU. That's up from 12 and 19.

The M3 Max, the base config, is a 16 CPU, 32 GPU core. That is up from 12 and 30. The top configuration is 16 CPU and 40 GPU. That's up from 12 and 38. So these are all like, there's a couple of cores here or there. In the M3 Ultra,

the base configuration would be a 32 CPU, 64 GPU core that is up from 24 and 32. And the top configuration would be a 32 CPU, 80 GPU core up from 24 and 76. Yeah. A lot of numbers there it's in it's interesting so what they're doing is they're keeping the cores the same on the low end but we would assume that there'll be some leaps in energy efficiency and or speed for the m3 generation and then for the higher end models, everything is getting cranked up a little bit. So in Pro, more CPUs and maybe incrementally more GPUs. In Max, which is, you know, Pros are the binned versions of the Max, right? what they're doing is they're taking the max up to a maximum of 16 12 performance and 40 gpus right so that they're they're increasing their cpu and gpu count a bit and then ultra is double

so you know you're gonna get you're gonna get twice as. So it goes from 76 to 80 because you went from 38 to 40. This is incremental. I think that there will be improvements here, but it's pretty incremental. So the benefits are going to come in the pure speed of what the CPU and GPU cores are like on the M3. The biggest jump is the base configuration M3 Ultra,

the GPU, because that goes from, oh, sorry, I think I said it wrong. I said 32, it's actually 60. It's 60 and 64 and 76 and 80. So there's bigger GPU cores there, or more of them, I should say. Right, but those are just double of the max, right? Because it's just two of those.

So you're going from 30 in the base and 32, then it's 60 and 64. So you're doubling. But in the end, these are four more CPU cores, presumably, right? And they're all performance. So that's a um although what he's reporting more efficiency cores on the pro than on the max so i don't know it's interesting to see how they how they tell the story of what they did because it feels like the m3 is going to be a storytelling

thing too where they're going to say we really you know we made some changes to the architecture based on you know sitting with the other architecture for two or three years uh so what that ends up looking like yeah i think this is going to be very interesting because it's going to be this this nanometer change and then also giving more of them in a lot of cases it's i'm very intrigued to see like what kind of jump are we going to see here like that's that's going to be the interesting story but if you want numbers mark german's gone for you yeah so yeah i do think um it is it is fascinating this difference between the pro and the max because either they're binning um cpu cores

because we're talking about like 12 performance and four efficiency in the max but in the pro it's eight and six or six and six so i guess my question is is the max still um the source of the pro and those are like bins so they've got things that they have to you know they can't rate it all those cores so they they downgrade it and they call it a pro and they sell it for cheaper um is that what's going on there? Or are they making a pro configuration chip that's different from the max? Right? And I don't know.

Because that's a lot. The idea that you're making them all to be 12 performance and 4 efficiency cores, but you're selling... Well, you've got down to 6 efficiency cores in the pro, right? If that's the case, then they're different chips, presumably. That's what Mark Garner said. Yeah, so that's a change. Because what you're saying is the way that it's done right now is Apple produce the Max chips and then take from the Max chip a Pro chip, effectively.

They cut one out, let's just say, right? Right. Is what you're saying they're currently doing which is different to the ultra chip where they take two max chips and just stick them together right which are the high-end ones but if there are mark german reports uh six efficiency cores on the pro so unless they're doing something to like convert uh efficiency core performance cores into efficiency mode or something uh which you know i don't know whether they could do that or not but otherwise it feels like this is just you know they're making a different chip for the pro than they are for the

max and i wonder surely they sell more pro chips than max chips right you'd expect i would think because it's the macbook pro right like yeah i mean you can get max configs but they're they're they're way higher end they're very expensive um so i wonder if they looked at this and said we'd be better off not making lots of expensive mac chips and then binning them all down to pro and we'd be better off kind of making a custom chip for the pro line and then having the max chips be lower uh manufacturing totals uh and doing it that way i don't know i mean like if you think about it now compared to how it's been in the past there is now a larger proliferation of ultra chips than we've had in previous generations. The Ultra is available in multiple computers now,

which it wasn't before. And so maybe there is, as you say, maybe Apple are making an M3, an M3 Pro, and an M3 Max, which also becomes an Ultra. Maybe, I don't know. Because I agree with you, the numbers don't add up anymore, right? Like, you can't, in theory,

you can't take four efficiency cores and make them six like how would you do that right exactly exactly so that's a different dynamic and either yeah either they've got a new method of binning maxes down to pros or they have taken the pro and made it a uh a different maybe instead of binning it's recycling you know like they're not they're not throwing them away anymore they're like moving them around so this isn't they're not bin chips they're recycled chips we'll go okay they move they move them out of the out of the they took them out of the garbage and into the recycle bin they're in the recycled them it's like a compost it's composting it's it's it's silicon composting that's okay we found all

right well it's it's if these details are are if these details are true, it's very interesting. It's shaping up. Now, we won't know probably for a year, right? Because the M3 rollout will be like the M2 rollout, where we might see some initial M3s this fall, but then it's going to be rolling into next year. Remind me with the M2. What came first? Like what chip came first? Do you remember? The2 what came first like what chip came first do you remember the m2 was it just like the m2 and that was in the macbook air right yeah and the and the mac mini right

and then it then it was pro and max next in the macbook pros and then the old i came in the in the and the ipad and then the ultra came in the yeah so and then the Ultra came in the... Yeah, so it did go in logical order. The base M2s were last year, other than the 15-inch Air, and the Pro and Max were part of the MacBook Pro announcement, and then later the Mini in the studio in 2023. The reason I ask that is because on some of Apple's other products,

they don't do them in logical order. They've released some iPad chips, which have the higher configuration before they're done on the iphone i believe if my memory is serving me right it's like i was just i know it seems logical you would do like the base one and then go up but uh that is what they have done okay this episode is brought to you by zoc doc look confession time raise your hand if you you can do this like if you're sitting on the train or whatever just raise your hand raise your hand if you've ever caught yourself listening to so-called health experts that you may find online maybe they say something about what you should be having for breakfast in the morning and you you know you think to yourself is this related to any of the symptoms that I have?

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It's time for a summer of fun topic, Jason Snell. Summer of fun! So I know that there's been a lot of talk about this. In fact, you wrote about it on Six Colors. Indeed. The conversation is back again. What if Apple bought Disney? And I know this is like so exasperating as a thing to people, right?

Like this conversation. But the actual situation right now is actually more plausible than it has been in the past. I think in the past, both me and you have agreed, it didn't make any sense, right? Why would Apple buy Disney? Same as when people were saying, oh, Apple should buy Netflix. Didn't make any sense at the time, right? Why Apple should buy Netflix. It didn't make sense for Netflix.

Didn't make sense for Apple, realistically, considering where the companies were. But it is maybe easier to make a case now for apple buying disney and disney seems to be more concerned with where they are as a company right now and you know people downstream listeners will notice be talking about this right like bob eiger has been making a lot of statements about like getting rid of or looking for partners of, we were talking about the ESPN partner on last episode. Can you give like any more detail of this of like what could potentially be happening to Disney or what Disney might be doing right now, which can make it seem like they want to be acquired? Right. So the core thing to understand about Disney

is that one of the fuels for Disney in terms of profits, in terms of cash over the last while, last few, last decade, is ESPN. So ESPN and ABC, the American broadcast company, the network in the US of broadcast TV,

have been owned by Disney for quite some time. ESPN, because it is the worldwide leader in sports, as they say, is a must have on local cable and satellite systems. So the way that works and it's tied to ABC, right? Because you, you, there's a it's like a package deal. They own all this stuff. So if you want to be your cable company locally and they want to carry the ABC station and ESPN, right? They've got to make a deal with Disney. And because ESPN has huge amounts of sports, Disney says you can't carry ESPN on a higher tier.

It basically needs to be on all maybe you've got like a like your special like super cheap locals only tier but like for your regular cable you can't add a sports pack and put espn in it so only sports fans get it it's got to be part of your main thing and you got to pay us $8 or $9 per person for it. And what percentage of people use of cable viewers uses ESPN? Less than half, certainly, probably a lot less than half, but guess what? A hundred percent of them are paying $8 a month to ESPN inside their cable bill. That's just what happens. It's, it's, it's a great racket to be in. If you're ESPN, you build up must-have brand and they can't not have it and this is true for a lot of the you've got a hundred channels on your cable system but there are only

about eight or whatever that are must-haves and the rest of them are part of the package with the with the eight must-haves um so uh so like cnn you're not gonna you're not going to have a cable company without CNN. So, CNN is making money per subscriber because they're not going to make that a special package. And Fox News is the same way. MSNBC is probably the same way, right? And you end up with these sort of must-haves, and that's where your cable bill money goes. Well, cord cutters are meaning that the number of people subscribing to cable are going down. Well, cord cutters are meaning that the number of people subscribing to cable are going down.

And while some of those people are ESPN viewers, potentially, most of them aren't. So you're losing people who were never really your customers, but still gave you a lot of money. So they made huge profits on this. But what's happened recently is the cord cutters are bringing that number down and sports rights are getting more and more expensive and so you look at espn and say this is still throwing off billions of dollars in profit but it's going down and it's going to keep going down simultaneously to this disney has launched disney plus because they want to be in the direct-to-consumer market and spend billions of dollars on content for disney has launched disney plus because they want to be in the direct-to-consumer market and spend billions of dollars on content for disney plus so what's happened is they've been losing money in order to establish disney plus and hulu which they also own in the u.s uh most of that

content's on disney plus everywhere else they so they're losing money in order to establish themselves um and their big ass that ESPN is going down. So that puts a huge amount of pressure on Disney. They transitioned from Bob Iger to Bob Chapek as the new CEO. This all started happening. They fired Chapek and brought back Iger. But Iger still has to deal with this reality. So Iger is out there now making weird deals like he made a deal uh that

they espn had said they were never going to do where they they made a deal with a uh a gambling company to brand their sports books as espn branding which they they were like no no no no no that's a that that's we're family friendly and gambling is not going to be and then they're like no actually you're going to pay us how much please give us that money we're family friendly and gambling is not going to be. And then they're like, no, actually you're going to pay us how much, please give us that money. We need that money. Right. Yeah. So they're,

they're, they're in a little more desperate state, I would say. So one of the conversations that's going on here is, uh, and prompted by Iger saying he was open to it is, do we get a strategic partner for ESPN and what parts of our business are not core to us,

including, you know, ABC. Um, and people are reacting to that saying one, he not core to us, including, you know, ABC. And people are reacting to that saying, one, he's looking for cash. If he sells some stuff off, that helps because he gets money back to pay down debt or deal with things like having to buy out the last portion of Hulu that they don't own, which they're going to have to do next year. And there's some speculation about, is he prepping potentially

for a sale? And to bring it all the way back around, Mike, when we talked about Apple buying Disney for many, many years, the reason I roll my eyes is that it just seemed like it was a non-starter, that it didn't make sense. There were so many parts of Disney that didn't make sense for Apple or that Apple wouldn't want to be in that business but when eiger starts to talk about selling off parts of disney i start to think is he is the goal here to sell off all of the impalatable stuff for a tech giant so that a tech giant um would buy them yep and the reason i say that is one apple and disney have a relationship going way back eiger was on apple's board steve jobs was once the uh biggest single shareholder of Disney after he sold Pixar. He obviously, Steve Jobs' connection with Pixar to Disney

from back in the day. A lot of connections there. They still, they had him, Iger was on stage for the Vision Pro announcement. Like, there are so many ties between these two companies. I saw this recently. In Iger's memoir, he said that if Steve Jobs hadn hadn't died he assumed that disney and apple would merge yes he just felt that that would have been a natural thing that would have occurred so okay so all this is out there but there's one other piece that i want to put in here because even so you're like yeah but disney selling out at all seems so strange um and it does it seems very strange however this was all this conversation prompted by an article on hollywood reporter where they

did a very good job of of covering the ways it doesn't make sense in the way ways it does make sense and how it seems to make more sense now than maybe it did even a year ago so really good article by kim masters and alex weprin uh we'll put a link to it in the show notes. That made the point. One of the points made in that article is, I think, really good, which is some people in Hollywood strongly believe that the entire industry is going to be swallowed by tech giants, that the tech giants have all the money. And in the end, uh, these entertainment companies that seem big to us because they loom large in our minds are actually so much smaller, especially in something like market cap,

uh, so much smaller than the entertainment companies or than the, than the tech companies, these little entertainment companies that than the than the tech companies these little entertainment companies that it seems almost inevitable that they're all going to get swallowed and if they're going to get swallowed they think it should be uh by apple right disney thinks it should be by apple because they are the most kind of like aligned. They have so much in common. So the quote, I wanted to say this from one industry veteran who said, there will end up being three

or four platforms and everybody else gets hollowed out and acquired. There will be Apple, Amazon, Netflix, and one other. If you could put together NBC, Universal universal warner and paramount you probably would have enough to survive and this is you know the s they would need to be federal approval of mergers like that and they might not be but the funny thing is apple and disney have very little overlap so so what i'm i'm not saying that this is going to happen but i am saying it feels way more plausible than it has ever before like going leaving the realm of being a non-sequitur and entering like we we could at least think about it as a possibility and if you accept that industry veterans premise that it's inevitable that tech money will swallow the

entertainment industry whole if that's true disney and Apple are actually the best pairing. So if that's true, I think it follows that Bob Iger would, if Bob Iger really believes that, that he would be selling off all the assets that Apple doesn't want so that Disney looks really good to Apple and that then they can sell out to Apple. And not impossible, for sure. Not impossible. If you believe, if you are Bob Iger and you believe that this future is coming, even a little bit, sell it. Because the longer you wait, the worse it's going to get.

You don't have to tell me. I'm a fan of the Pac-12 conference. Don't wait. Don't wait. They had an offer last year from ESPN for $30 million per school. And they're like, oh, we'll wait. And then they're like, well, they're gone now. They blew up.

So yes, if you're Bob Iger, you think the clock is ticking. ESPN's revenue stream is only going to get lower over time. So it's got more value to a venture capital firm now. One of these firms that'll swoop in and take ESPN and make it as profitable as possible by bleeding it of all of its expenses and cutting it and cutting it and cutting it and taking all the value out of it. If you're going to do that, now is the time to do that, right? Not when ESPN no longer has any of that sweet, sweet cable money coming in. So in the spirit of the summer of fun, what I want to do with you here, Jason, is take a look at some key parts of Disney portfolio and work out what we think Apple would keep,

how it could make these things work, or what it would get rid of. Disney's portfolio, I was looking on Wikipedia, is massive, right? Like it's huge. Ever since they bought most of 20th Century Fox, right? They got even more of it than they had before. So I've taken what I think are some of their key assets and we're going to talk about how they can make those work. And we'll start off

by just talking about film. Film will include Walt Disney Pictures, Walt Disney Animation Studios, Pixar, Marvel, Lucasfilm, and 20th Century Studios. This feels like the, I think, probably the easiest part, right? This is the reason, right? Like this is the reason you do it. You've got your own studio. You've got huge amounts of intellectual property. Yeah, exactly.

That's, that's the easiest piece of all right. Apple is trying to build something from the ground up, which is great and admirable. And I think they've done a really good job with it, but you have this, um, opportunity potentially to get the whole shebang.

And it's not just the intellectual property, but it's the actual studios. And yeah, I think that's an easy one. And you might say, where does Apple want to be in the film business? It's like, they're already in it, everybody. This is why that studio executive says it's inevitable, right? It's because Amazon and apple are already

in it they're already already part they're already part of the am btp right like they're yeah they're already in the in the negotiations and the strike negotiations right they're already there so this is just a logical extension of that yeah i'll include in this there was another section that i had that i didn't put into the film part, which is Disney Studio Production Services, which I assumed was like all the lots, right? Like all of that stuff, which is just like, oh, imagine having all of Disney's lots, right? Like way more space than Apple would be able to find in Hollywood, right? Like they're finding their spaces and that, you know, we were talking about that ages ago, they've bought some space but like imagine all that plus disney yep yep like as you say this is the easy one right because this is like the biggest franchises in the world they're now yours and you

can you own that ip and if you own that ip like if you talk about pixar marvel and lucasfilm it's not just the ability to make film you now own these characters you can do whatever you want with them right like right you can make pixar phone cases right like you know what i mean like you can make toy story apple watches you don't need to work you just do any all of this stuff it's there now your spider man give me a spider man apple watch mike give it to me but like they have the ability to then do all of that and like they don't even need to do the work of trying to build their own uh ip i want to throw in disney music group is another part they didn't have a lot of music stuff this again just

was like an easy one right it's like great like apple music is now you can now do you don't you don't need to worry about the fees anymore i would have to i would just have to look at that business and say do we yeah that one might be like well we don't we're going to throw that overboard because we want to be running our music streaming service and that might be a big conflict of some kind maybe or or you know i i that that in me to me that's in the category of i would need to open the books and like see what that business looks like and decide whether that's something that apple wants to keep or wants to get rid of it's kind of on the fence on on that one a lot of it is i mean things i haven't heard of like there's disney music publishing which is like the music labels for the movies right which obviously

you would want to keep but then it it's like Buena Vista recordings, Walt Disney Records, like a lot of their stuff, the Disney Music Group portion seems to be like a lot of the music for the movies. You look at the future value of that and decide whether it's better off selling that to somebody

who you can use as a partner rather than doing it yourself. And that's just a, yeah, that's a super insidery kind of question, I think. TV. I think this one might be the most complicated of kind of question, I think. TV. I think this one might be the most complicated of all of these, but we can see.

ABC, Hulu, potentially. I'm moving Hulu. We're going to talk about Hulu and the streaming services? Yeah. Alright, so let's do ABC Freeform, which is their free ad-supported fast thing, right? It's a cable channel. It's a cable channel. All's a cable channel all the kids

programmers so disney channel all that stuff yep fx and national geographic i'm gonna say with the exception of abc which we're also going to need to talk about in conjunction with espn but more generally what i will say is sell sell apple doesn't want to be in cable tv what about but like fx and national geographic so what so okay so here's the issue is like the studios and the channels right yes so like i would say what you would want to do split out fx and national geographic right that you're going to keep the split out FX and National Geographic, right? That you're going to keep the shows that they own. Yeah, so this is what I would say is,

I want to keep the content that is being generated, the video content that's being generated by FX and National Geographic, and make a deal with whoever buys it that they can have a license to the content for some period of time that they will pay they will pay me basically for content that will for for linear rights essentially is what we're talking about for streaming content so you'll say to FX look we're taking John Landgraf and the entire FX studio and

you can't have them but we will um you know you will have a license to the linear rights for the these shows ongoing for some period of time i believe some of this actually happened in the fox disney sale because fox as it currently is constituted you know doesn't own the simpsons anymore but it's on the fox network and this this is the concept, right? Which is, well, we are parting and we're taking the studio and our property with us, but your channel is still an outlet for us. So the Simpsons are on Disney plus, but they're also on Fox. And I would imagine that they would try to make a deal with whoever bought their cable channels. That was similar where for some period of time for the shows that are existing that you would continue to broadcast them and we would get to put them on streaming and

they would make it work in some way so there's some complexity there but yeah i would take the studios you can't right like i'll take the creative side of fx and nat geo um but not the cable channels i would take them like even the magazine national geographic i mean you're buying marvel comics right you've got some publishing things you have a publishing group don't worry about it forget about it don't just don't worry about it but i wouldn't i wouldn't want the cable channels i will actually ask you that now because you've brought that up and talk about that a little bit more would you keep the publishing like would you keep the publishing? Like, would you keep the comics? I would. Um, Warner has kept DC comics,

even though they're subservient. Um, I would keep them. It's a small business, but it's also where you're generating a lot of your new intellectual property. You could license them out, right? Like you could say like we're, we're buying,

I mean, I find that hard to believe. Like the idea that you'd sell you essentially sell marvel comics to somebody and then say you can have the license to our characters but like the advantage that they have okay this is esoteric but the advantage that marvel comics has as a standalone entity is that they can coax comics creators into creating new intellectual property for marvel yes if it was a license i think you wouldn't right if you it was a license and they're like oh image comics is now making spider-man comics well that's great but are they going to spend money creating new characters

that will then feed back into marvel movies probably not probably not the game that they want to play there so the advantage of keeping it in your territory is that it's like, it's where they're growing new intellectual property. Right, you need it for that. Like Gwen Stacy and Miles Morales

are both relatively recent creations of Marvel Comics. They're still generating new intellectual property for Disney. So I think you keep them around and you've got a publishing group and they don't cost very much and you just let them go. And if you want to do that with National Geographic, you could, or you could just license it out, whatever. I mean, I'm sure there's a way to make it work. ESPN. Well, this is the question. ESPN. So ESPN is cable, but going down and ESPN is sports rights and streaming.

I'm not a negotiator. So I don't know what the, all the in-depth details are. I will say off the top of my head, I look at ESPN and I say, I want the sports rights. The future of sports rights is streaming with a linear partner. Future of sports rights is streaming with a linear partner future of sports rights is streaming with a linear partner so my question is do i sell espn to somebody and like i just said for fx and stuff like that and abc potentially you are our linear partner so we're gonna sell those rights over the top we're gonna we're gonna sell those rights to a streaming service where you can get all those those sports that you want to watch but because some people don't want a streaming service and they have cable you will be our licensee our linear partner for that you espn

or espn and ABC. I don't know whether that negotiation works or not. I don't know if that makes the people who are buying ESPN potentially say, you're selling us an empty bag. You're selling us all your expenses and none of your successes because your successes are this. But I believe, and maybe I'm wrong. I don't know. I'm not in this business. I believe that some of those hedge funds, some of those investors who like to suck, you know, it's the private equity stuff where they suck all the value out of

properties and like newspapers and let them die. Yeah. I think they would view buying more like broadcast TV and cable channels, especially something like ESPN and having this partnership with Disney. And Disney's like, we don't want Apple. We don't want to be in this anymore, but we'll be your partner. Because the truth is,

is we learned in the PAC-12 negotiation, part of what the partners want is visibility. And if you put everything behind a paywall of a streaming service, there's no visibility. This is why the Premier League in the U.S. is not all on Peacock. Some of it is on NBC and the USA Network. This is why the World Series is on Fox, not just on FX or FS1. or FS1.

This is why all the big college football conferences and the NFL have their games on broadcast TV and huge cable channels. So you need that free or free-ish, cable TV-ish visibility that having ABC or ESPN as a partner will get you. So my gut feeling is if you can get away with taking the streaming rights and saying for the foreseeable future,

you'll be our preferred partner on linear, that's the deal that I would do is sell ESPN, keep the streaming rights to live sports and maybe even share the ESPN brand brand which is why sometimes that's what i think that bob eiger is talking about when he talks about a strategic partner is can he find somebody to be his partner on linear and let him walk away and and and like set up you set up a license where they're paying a percentage of what you're paying for your sports rights i don't know it's this is this is the most complicated one and i would say even this is

why i said abc is part of the equation is um there is also advantage to being on over the air broadcast which is free if you can put up an antenna and and i feel like there's a trend toward more sports on free broadcast because it helps you get eyeballs. It helps you sell ads because lots of people are watching those big events. So ESPN is great because it's on all the cable systems. ABC is also great because it's a broadcast network. It's very high profile. And I'll give you an example.

Monday Night Football was a stalwart of ABC over the air TV for years and years and years. And then at some point it moved to ESPN and is less successful on ESPN than it was on ABC. It's still successful. NBC, another network, started their own primetime Sunday Night Football. It's the top rated show in America. Recently, ESPN has been experimenting with putting some of their Monday Night Football games back on ABC. Or in addition to ESPN, there's a different game playing at the same time on ABC. So they're already sort of feeling this like there's potential there.

So there's power in having those things, but also they're going down, right? Their value is going down rapidly. So in the end, long story short, I would try to make a deal where I keep the streaming sports rights for ESPN and ABC and make them my preferred partner. But my partner is going to walk off with basically the linear channel rights to those things. So if it's me,

right, I agree. It's just a complicated one. I would sell it all and just play the long game. Get rid of ESPN. Gone. And if I'm Apple, I'll wait until I can get the deals

that I want. NFL's going to come around again. MLB's going to come around again and I'll wait until I can get a deal like i have with mls with the other leagues like that's that's how i would that's what i would do just wait it out it's going that way anyway because i think it would be complicated to get that deal right to sell the channel and keep the streaming well yeah you want you just want the rights if you can afford it right you want the rights but the other way to go yes is to let it go and then start bidding for rights

and then choose your linear partner because i think you still want a linear partner right yeah but you could say well i've done that before right if i'm selling you espn and abc and you're like oh i don't know i really want to all control the sports rights you got what i would say is no forget about streaming the deal here is that you are hedging on the cash cow of broadcast and cable that's going down but making money on the interim and we're taking the streaming piece and walking away but the other way to do it is to say okay fine you take it all but here's what's going to happen next we're going to bid for the nfl and we're going to get it, and then we're going to choose a broadcaster cable partner,

and maybe it won't be you, or maybe it'll be you, but you're going to pay us more money than you would in this deal. And that's the counterargument there. Yep, I like that. I think we're going to get these next three. There's two in one category, and one on its own. I think these are the easiest. Two in one category category disney plus and hulu the streaming services uh that those are keepers but so yes they're keepers but it's all in tv plus that's what i would do it's just all in tv plus right i

yeah maybe i mean there's a branding conversation to be had about that well have a disney like how i get hulu and disney right you just get disney and apple tv plus right so it that well have a disney like how i get hulu and disney right you just get disney and apple tv plus right so it's just like a disney tile yeah i could i could argue the other way which is that you keep disney plus because it's got more subscribers and you have an apple tv plus tile inside it that's your hbo although that said hulu is also your hbo or at least fx network is also your hbo They're making some great shows over there. I watch Hulu more than any other streamer.

I know. They are great. So, all to be worked out, but basically, this is a deal for streaming content. So, yeah,

I want it all. I'm going to put it all in one place. Maybe it'll be a bundle. Maybe you can subscribe to Disney Plus separately, but also it's bundled inside of, you know,

for an extra fee inside of Apple TV Plus or something like that. They'll have to work that out out but i think that's the whole point of this is to take that stuff and create a uh a product or a package of products that people are going to give you money for uh disney interactive which is like video games keep that like this is taking the ip that you have and put making it into Apple arcade games and stuff like that. I like Disney.

Disney has never been successful at video games. So part of me wants to say what there is in Disney interactive. I mean, you could keep it around, but like, I think with your intellectual property, you want to find partners or you want to build a studio yourself. So maybe that's another initiative for Apple is to really just take something like Disney Interactive and say, we're going to just start building a game studio with our intellectual property.

There's one element of Disney Interactive, which is Marvel Games, and Marvel Games is doing it right. So Marvel Games, they don't make the games. Marvel Games pick who makes the games. Well, that's what I'm saying is that kind of a strategy. But that's a place where I know we say Apple's bad at games. Disney also bad at games. So figure something out. They got to figure something out there.

But I would say you keep it and rework it. But the idea of you have a team that decides who's making video games for you is like good. Of course. All right. Of course. This is probably the one that people have been waiting for.

Theme parks. I'm gonna maybe surprise some people. Absolutely keep. I 100% agree. This is an easy one to me. Keep the theme parks this this feels i know it feels weird and i i said on another podcast last week about this like would this is all about like with the apple of 2008 a lot for a lot of us apple of 2008 is what's in our minds

apple of 2010 when steve jobs died apple was a much smaller and different company than they are now apple of the 2020s is just not apple of 2010 it's just not and and if you think of it as a computer company like i get it but it's not it's not the computer and iPhone company. It is this huge services thing. It is a motion picture and television producer. It is a sports rights holder. It is just not what it was. And I think that Tim Cook and company do think big picture. So if they were to acquire Disney, like theme parks, first off, they can be very profitable. They are expensive.

There's some nice high margins there. Well, Apple's really good at that. There's a huge tech investment that Disney makes in theme parks in terms of things like the customer experience. It is a controlled experience. I would argue like Disneyland and other Disney parks, like they're very Apple-like in lots of ways in terms of trying to delight the consumer and control the consumer. And get as much money from the consumer. And I would throw it to something like Imagineering, the people who build the technology behind the theme parks.

Like that couldn't be more Apple because it is the merger of creativity and technology it's right there that you know the imagineering building is also on the intersection of technology and the liberal arts it's the building across it's like caddy corner from the from apple is the same it's the same yeah they they use the same starbucks right it's also on that corner you should see the foam on the lattes at that starbucks whoa it's amazing because they're right there at the intersection of technology and liberal arts is a very busy bidding busy intersection so i think that it's actually culturally a pretty good fit and so of course a reformed apple that includes all the disney intellectual property of course you keep the parks like you'd have a different division

and it would be let me if i went back in time and explain to you that there's a division of apple and santa monica that is a motion picture and tv producer and they're these two guys down there and they report to eddie q up in cupertino but they just stay in la and they work in la and they have produced dozens of tv shows and movies now if i went back in time and did that you'd be like depending on what time i went to like you mean carpool karaoke or you'd be you just look at me like i was i was crazy right like what is that but that's that's the reality of apple now so you can't come to me and say oh apple will never do theme parks because it's so far out of the realm because like apple is so far

out of the realm already that uh the apple that trust me the apple that most of us have in our minds is not what apple is now apple is one of these giant companies with huge revenues and money who is eating all sorts of aspects of our lifestyle especially when they are adjacent to technology and you know it's actually hard for me not to get more enthusiastic about it when we talk about theme parks because i think it's actually intuitively depending on what you're thinking a bad fit i actually think it's a great fit no i 100 agree with you i think this is something that when we last spoke about this it we couldn't conceive of it right like it just didn't seem like it would fit but now it's like if you now just take away all of the pain points

because as you say apple's so big they have so many of them anyway just add more of them right but and then take all the benefit like and there is a lot of benefit here like especially if you buy disney and don't take the theme parks you probably shouldn't buy disney i agree i mean it there's a real argument to be made that and this is very apple actually which is don't rely on somebody else for things that are key to you right one of the key values of your intellectual property honestly if you're disney is the theme parks and and they have learned in buying marvel that they have lost you know they didn't have control over a bunch of the marvel intellectual property because marvel had licensed

it to universal or other places so i i think that it's it's part of your core it's like we're going to keep the publishing business even though it's not what you think of as our business because the intellectual property is part of our business and we're going to keep the theme parks um i mean we can make jokes about like disneyland looking like an apple store and all of that but but fundamentally there is a lot in common in terms of the the customer experience and the control and the money making that happens and it just it seems like a fit cruise ships i don't know i don't know enough about the business i'm going to put that in with the music business my guess is that they'd probably be better off with a partner but somebody can prove me wrong the better off to you know to have somebody buy

like with the cable channels have somebody buy them out yes and uh and have a license that you know you are our partner for this. But we're not. It's Disney Cruise Lines operating. In fact, I'm actually a little surprised that that's not already the case. Does Disney own all those ships instead of just subleasing them? Licensing the content to Carnival or something? I believe they own the ships.

I believe they own the ships. But that is a cool part of the Disney experience, what they own, but I don't think this will make sense all right let's recap mike and jason's disney apple okay this is so me we're apple we're buying this is what we're buying we're buying the film production studios and like the actual production services the spaces. We are keeping the content from the TV networks. We're keeping the publishing. Yep. Streaming rights for sports if we can get them,

but we probably won't, so we'll just let those go. We're keeping the streaming platforms. We're keeping the games and we're keeping the theme parks. That's our Disney. That's our Disney. Apple Disney.

To wrap this up, I just want a simple yes or no do you think Apple will buy Disney is there a time frame on this five years oh wow

I think it comes back I think it's the core question which is what that uh industry veteran said in the in the hollywood reporter article which is do we believe that the tech industry is going to eat the entertainment industry whole keeping in mind that a lot of the the money that has has kept the technology or the kept the entertainment industry going has been like the sweet, sweet cable stuff that's all going to go away. We're entering a market where everything is direct to consumer. So you've got to get them.

You don't get all those people who paid you for ESPN anymore because they don't want ESPN. So you have to convert them into an ESPN subscriber if you want their money. It's a lot harder business to be in. Everybody in the entertainment industry is struggling with this. Oh, in five years, if you ask me, will somebody buy Disney in the next five years? I think I'd say yes. And I think Apple is the most likely of all of those. I think there's truth in what that industry hand said about just because of, again, not that it makes sense emotionally, but it makes sense economically. and as we've gone to streaming the entertainment industry has appeared more and more to be a subsidiary of technology essentially um so i would make a small bet on it i wouldn't make a large bet on it but i would make a small bet i would love if you can give me some good odds i would probably

make a bet there because i think that there's definitely a chance that it will happen i think it will happen i feel pretty confident that it will happen because like building on what you were saying i think if disney sell they probably only sell to apple like i i don't really see it happening within five years that i can't imagine the situation getting so bad in five years that they had to. Like, this is more just a case of, like, let's do it while we should do it. Like, within that time frame. Don't forget that Disney's a public company. So, like, if Apple wanted them and could make an offer, like, I guess we saw with Elon Musk and Twitter.

Like, if they want it and they can make an offer at a price that the shareholders like the shareholders have may value disney as an independent brand but ultimately what they value more is money well i imagine this is the only way it happens right it's like apple have to come in and make an offer like that well sure but like it could be bob eiger you know doing a handshake deal with apple and saying, this is what we're going to do, and we've got the number, and then you have to go to the shareholders anyway. But I don't think it's going to be Apple coming in and saying, step aside, Bob.

It's ours now. It's Tim's Apple. I don't think that is the way that it would work. But I do think it will happen. I think there's a lot of logic to it and in the last week since this article came out i've seen a lot of commentary where people like oh this again and like i believe me i understand the tendency to say i can't believe we're having this conversation

again it'll it'll never happen and all i can say is as somebody who has tried to keep my eye on what apple is becoming as a company and what is going on in the entertainment industry right now with companies like disney keeping those two things in mind i cannot shrug this off this is serious and i would ask you if you roll your eyes at the whole apple disney discussion uh to update your priors a little bit about what Apple is trying to do in the 2020s and where Disney is sort of located right now in terms of their assets and in terms of their liabilities. And I'm not saying it will happen, but like if you look at this and just poo-poo it and say, oh, that would never happen. Update your priors because you are making... I'm not saying you're wrong. I'm saying that if you dismiss it out of hand, you don't understand where these companies are right now.

Because if you understand where these companies are right now, you can't dismiss it out of hand. You could say it doesn't fit. It's a little too far. It's not going to break that way. I'm totally open to that. I don't know if i would say that it's greater than 50 likelihood a boy it's so much more likely than it used to be because these companies aren't what they were and the environment isn't what it was and the world has changed that's the bottom line like you know you were saying about the eating entertainment thing like that i agree with

right that like it's obvious that the technology companies have decided they want to be in the entertainment business and the technology companies have so much more money like just so much more money and so it's kind of a situation of like well they're just gonna do it and you've seen it if we're watching it happen in front of our eyes right netflix is included in this of like they're just going in and they're giving all the money to all the people need to get the money to they're making a lot of stuff that isn't good but they're making a lot of stuff that is really good and so like they're taking the pie they clearly polluted the minds of all of the existing entertainment companies to the point that they all decided they needed to have their own streaming services,

which I think history has shown was a bad idea, right? That they all have one, right? They shouldn't have all had one, right? Like Peacock shouldn't exist. Paramount Plus probably shouldn't have existed, right? Like there are a bunch of these streaming services that like they shouldn't have done it, but they did it

because they all thought they had to do it. Well, they were trying to be one of the last ones standing, right? That's always what you do. You lose a lot of money up front because the goal ultimately is not to make money in the first five years. That's the problem is that they've all pulled back now. The goal was to spend a huge amount of money like Netflix, but end up as one of the giants who is established, one of the four, right? You want to be one of the last ones standing. The problem is that Apple and Amazon especially, and Google is involved to some degree too with sports rights and may be more involved down the road. These companies have more money than the entertainment

companies can ever do. Disney is not going to be completing. If Disney owns ESPN in a few years, they're not going to be competing with ABC and CBS for sports rights. They're going to be competing with Apple and Google and Amazon. And guess what? They have more money than Disney. They all have more money than Disney. And if they want to play in that game, you know, it's the giants are on the playground, right?

Like you can't compete with them. So you're basically left to join with them. And I think that's the truth of it. Because it's like every time we talk about one of these tech companies not winning a war, it's probably because they just decided not to go higher. Like they could have. They just decided not to. The one thing we haven't talked about in this conversation is why would Apple do it? And we've gotten at it sort of from the side.

Apple would do it is because Apple clearly sees entertainment as sports and services and relate relationships with customers who are giving them money on an ongoing basis as one, a huge growth area, a huge area of success for them. And two part of the ecosystem. And this is why it is arguably inevitable that a company like Apple will invest even more in entertainment and services is because Apple is not doing the math of Disney of like, oh my God, we need money from ESPN and money from parks and money from Disney plus subscriptions in order for us to make a profit. Apple is like, we get them in with the iPhone. We sell them a service. We get them an Apple watch. We sell them a fitness service. We upgrade them to the bundle. We put, they open the TV app. We put our content in front of them. We sell them another service. They are, and Amazon is playing

a slightly different game than that and Google as well, but they're all playing like at a higher level where, where the entertainment industry is just a little piece of the puzzle. If a pure entertainment player, it's a lot harder to make that, right? It's a lot harder to do that because you don't have all of those other aspects. And now there's an argument to be made that that's not really right or fair, that you're leveraging your success and your money in selling smartphones to take over the entertainment industry. Yeah, I mean's a fair argument that's not the world we live in unfortunately that is not where we live they have the money and money talks well now we're going super long on this but this is really interesting there was one other thing i wanted to bring up about the like eating entertainment thing like the idea of like entertainment and tech uh one of my favorite

podcasts the town uh by Matt Bellany, he had an episode a couple of weeks ago about, and he had an agent like on who's like been in Hollywood forever about like why are all the executives in Hollywood so old, right? Compared to how they've been in the past. And basically this guy, Rick Nesita,

who was the former head of caa um was saying like oh because back in the 60s and 70s and the 80s hollywood was like the best place to go like it was the most exciting but now it's tech tech is where people go like all the top executives all the top minds. This is like the people that don't, that just want the best jobs or are the smartest. They'll just go to tech now where they used to go to Hollywood

because it was where the most exciting, most money could be made. But that's not the case anymore. And so like, that's one of the reasons why there are fewer and fewer younger executives now in Hollywood because the talent pool is different. I thought it was an interesting perspective. Yeah. Matt Bell needed to follow up in his newsletter at puck.news about this,

where he talked to a bunch of interns and stuff about their perspective as members of Gen Z about this industry. And yeah, several mean, several of them pointed out the same thing, which is, you know, the fact is modern medicine and the fact that the Hollywood of the 60s and 70s was maybe more hard living than as we went on in time a little bit that you end up with these people who are the executives surviving and being very, very old in some cases and still doing it, which is fine on one level, but it does end up being a roadblock, an additional roadblock, which is why would I want to get into this business? Politics is the same way right now in America where everybody's in their seventies and eighties or nineties. It isn't just that those

people aren't, I mean, it's not like those people aren't distinguished and maybe even knowledgeable about what they're doing, but it puts up such a barrier that if you want to make a name for yourself as a younger up and coming executives, you're like, well, I can't do that. So I'm going to go over here. It's an interesting idea, but it does, right? It does make you think if it's exemplary of a shift in attitude that goes along with a shift in money, right? We get back to that same thing, which is, has the time come where the big tech money is just going to take these little morsels and say, you know, literally Amazon looks at something like Paramount, the studio that's been around for ages. I would say this about the Pac-12 conference, right? It's been around for a hundred years. It doesn't matter.

Money talks. In the end, it doesn't matter. If they look at Paramount, somebody looks at Paramount and says, oh, I'll have that, right? Like it costs what? And I get all this intellectual property and stuff like, great, let's take it. And that whole legacy of what that brand stood for, um, may stay in some form, but probably not because the, the eater of Paramount doesn't have those priorities.

They're thinking about a big picture. So yeah, could Disney, this amazing company that lives in the minds of so many people worldwide, end up being an ancillary part of an iPhone strategy? I know that sounds ridiculous. The answer is yes, it absolutely could. We went long today. We'll come back to upgrade plus next

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