None of the shows they announced spoke to me. It all seems like the same kind of stuff you can find in droves on AMC, NBC or any other number of networks. They also didn’t announce pricing or show...
None of the shows they announced spoke to me. It all seems like the same kind of stuff you can find in droves on AMC, NBC or any other number of networks.
They also didn’t announce pricing or show any previews of the shows, which was odd.
At this point, the number of niche genre services I subscribe to adds much more value to my life than something with the broad appeal of Netflix does. I find myself watching Shudder much more than Netflix and it costs half as much.
Leading with names instead of content set a very weird tone. I guess I'm sort of at a remove, but do people care about that? The pitch-centric format almost seemed like it was intended to speak to...
Leading with names instead of content set a very weird tone. I guess I'm sort of at a remove, but do people care about that? The pitch-centric format almost seemed like it was intended to speak to other Hollywood people, rather than consumers -- like, "here's some of your peers giving our thing their imprimatur".
With that said, I'm pleased they got through an entire event discussing media without bringing Eddy Cue on stage.
That might be the smart move for them honestly. They're trying to launch a prestige service rather than a mass-market one, so that's something that's best sold through word of mouth. HBO sells its...
The pitch-centric format almost seemed like it was intended to speak to other Hollywood people, rather than consumers -- like, "here's some of your peers giving our thing their imprimatur".
That might be the smart move for them honestly. They're trying to launch a prestige service rather than a mass-market one, so that's something that's best sold through word of mouth. HBO sells its digital service almost entirely on the back of Game of Thrones. If they decide that what they need is one monster-hit that becomes a cultural touchstone, then it makes sense to target "taste-makers," like critics and culture writers and filmy-types. Get them on board and if they like something, they'll write articles about it until people check it out. That's how the critical darling shows like Game of Thrones, or Breaking Bad, or LOST got big.
It’s the worldwide developer’s conference, so it’s focused on showing the product offerings as products. The marketing for the services to make you want to buy them comes later.
It’s the worldwide developer’s conference, so it’s focused on showing the product offerings as products. The marketing for the services to make you want to buy them comes later.
You're right about it not being WWDC, but this doesn't actually change my point much. It's a press event to announce their services, not a marketing push for any specific product.
You're right about it not being WWDC, but this doesn't actually change my point much. It's a press event to announce their services, not a marketing push for any specific product.
Yeah, it's weird that they gave so few actual details. Recode's article about it is pretty good: We still don’t know what’s in Apple’s streaming service, how much it will cost, or why we should...
I'd be really curious to hear about the germination of the Apple Card. A lot of people within Apple are aware of the optics of Apple launching a credit card in partnership with fucking Goldman....
I'd be really curious to hear about the germination of the Apple Card. A lot of people within Apple are aware of the optics of Apple launching a credit card in partnership with fucking Goldman. They're not idiots -- they knew people would have thoughts like the ones that are already in this thread.
So I guess I wonder if they really planned on having the privacy angle be the answer for all consumer objections. It really seems like it, but they didn't give the impression that they'd privacy that hard in the messaging. Certainly not as hard as they'd need to override all the "apple make a credit card? they take money huhu lol" stuff. I just don't know what else it's bringing to the table. The notion of a privacy-centric "financial product" sounds as appealing to me as an Apple credit card sounds distasteful, so I'm sort of on the fence.
The messaging is just mystifying, though. They continue to succeed in areas where they've always succeeded, but a credit card feels like the move you make when you're short on moves -- the glint in the eye of a public company that has begun to devour itself to appease shareholders.
Kind of a bummer from an ethos perspective, too. In the same way that "Don't be evil" died years ago, a credit card really seems like the coffin slamming shut on "bicycle for the mind". You can still make awesome tools for fun weirdos... but now you're the company that has a Goldman card.
I think the main push is meant for international travelers, especially in East Asia. I was just in Southeast Asia and services like WeChat seem to be the preferred ways to do commerce there. Ben...
The messaging is just mystifying, though. They continue to succeed in areas where they've always succeeded, but a credit card feels like the move you make when you're short on moves -- the glint in the eye of a public company that has begun to devour itself to appease shareholders.
At WWDC it's a more Western audience and they need to provide a more focused pitch. On the side, it might also a gambit to do an end run around big retail's slow-rolling of contactless/digital payments. I'm sure there are wheels within wheels here on what they hope to achieve with the corporate strategy. If they have a physical card in your hand in addition to Apple Pay, they can make up for the lack of coverage on digital/contact-less payments. It also lets Apple get leverage over credit card companies since Apple card users will presumably be more loyal to Apple than to MasterCard. If they get enough buy-in from people, they might be able to bully Visa and all of them to give Apple a bigger piece of the pie in payment processing.
And having you in their ecosystem for your financial management is potentially an important strategic first step to goosing their services revenue. If they get to a point where people are doing all of their bill-pay and a significant amount of financial services through Apple, they can probably use subtle design patterns to make it much easier to manage subscriptions through Apple than through anyone else. Maybe even an integrated subscription management service to control billing across all the recurring payments you make. From there it's not that hard to put little psychological nudges to encourage people to keep TV+ and dump Hulu if they're looking to cut expenses.
Something like this might also enable them to build a function I've fantasized about online for a while now, which is a no-friction tip-jar. Imagine if, instead of needing to cross a paywall to read an article, you could literally just run a button and pay $1 without registering an account or putting in CC information. The technology is already there, but there isn't yet a single tech company standard that can work directly with content providers to build something like this out. Amazon and PayPal have tried, but it doesn't seem to take. Apple has better contacts with publishing and media, so maybe they could succeed where others have failed.
In the same way that "Don't be evil" died years ago, a credit card really seems like the coffin slamming shut on "bicycle for the mind". You can still make awesome tools for fun weirdos... but now you're the company that has a Goldman card.
In their defense, their version of a credit card really does seem like a far more customer friendly and ethical kind of credit card business than others. The billing statements are actively designed to encourage maintaining a low/minimal balance and minimize revenue from interest. They're building in financial planning tools to help you reduce your spending and expenses. They claim interest rates are low compared to others (but from what I've seen it's still 13% to 25% depending on your credit rating which doesn't seem THAT low). And they're not relying on predatory fees to engage in adversarial revenue extraction. Most of this stuff are things we would ideally be forcing credit card companies to do through regulation anyway if we had a half-way decent government. But absent that, we must rely on the beneficence of our Neo-feudal corporate overlords instead.
Part of me wonders if it's a prestige thing, i.e. passing that Apple card across the counter at swanky locations. Maybe an "Apple Space Gray" card for the ultra-wealthy, like an Amex Black. But...
Part of me wonders if it's a prestige thing, i.e. passing that Apple card across the counter at swanky locations. Maybe an "Apple Space Gray" card for the ultra-wealthy, like an Amex Black. But with more and more places accepting touchless payment, meaning no one would see the card anyway, that seems a bit backward thinking for a company like Apple.
Live stream is over now, but the recorded video can be watched on the site still. The Verge had a live blog available here. Edit: here are the official releases on the Apple site for the major...
i'm sure this has valid applications, but i cannot help but immediately cringe and balk at the idea of fucking apple being the company which handles my credit card, of all the companies that could...
They've also already announced the Apple Card credit card.
i'm sure this has valid applications, but i cannot help but immediately cringe and balk at the idea of fucking apple being the company which handles my credit card, of all the companies that could possibly do that.
When has Apple ever indicated it wasn't serious about the privacy of consumers? I'll never understand such blatant cynicism. Typically credit cards have both a late payment fee & interest on any...
I'm sure.
When has Apple ever indicated it wasn't serious about the privacy of consumers? I'll never understand such blatant cynicism.
Is that not an obvious contradiction, or did I miss something? How is this not an indirect fee?
Typically credit cards have both a late payment fee & interest on any payments made past the intended billing cycle. Apple card has interest, but no traditional late payment fee.
The comment isn’t about Apple’s commitment to privacy (which is only a relatively recent stance, mind you), but the fact that Goldman Sachs is perceived as the epitome of immoral capitalist...
When has Apple ever indicated it wasn't serious about the privacy of consumers?
The comment isn’t about Apple’s commitment to privacy (which is only a relatively recent stance, mind you), but the fact that Goldman Sachs is perceived as the epitome of immoral capitalist behavior. While Apple can say that they have an agreement that Goldman will do nothing to further monetize user’s data, all that amounts to is an indemnification clause in their partnership agreement and no real ability to enforce the assumed-to-happen exploitation of finances that Goldman has become infamous for.
The fact that the optics of using Goldman for such a high profile announcement could not be ignored, shows that Apple is either tone deaf at this point, or that they got a great deal from Goldman vs. other banks. I can’t imagine Goldman would make such a deal out of the goodness of their heart, but have alternative methods for receiving further revenue from supporting Apple’s infrastructure.
Here's a more compressed summary. A "news" service (for $9.99 a month, US/Canada only so hard for me to have an opinion on), an Apple credit card (?!? how do antitrust laws even work?), Apple...
A "news" service (for $9.99 a month, US/Canada only so hard for me to have an opinion on), an Apple credit card (?!? how do antitrust laws even work?), Apple arcade (honestly, the most interesting announcement, a quality-focused mobile subscription avoiding the usual F2P content), Apple TV Plus (very little information, basically nothing new).
Just out of curiosity, where do you see an antitrust issue? You're able to use competing financial instruments to pay for things on and with Apple devices, you're able to use the Apple Card to...
an Apple credit card (?!? how do antitrust laws even work?)
Just out of curiosity, where do you see an antitrust issue? You're able to use competing financial instruments to pay for things on and with Apple devices, you're able to use the Apple Card to interact financially with competitors... the idea feels intrinsically gross to me, but I'm not getting an antitrust issue.
There could be some argument that having the balance management stuff built into the Wallet app was an Essential Facilities Doctrine matter, but Apple could probably say that competitors are free to build that information into their own app (as they do)...
Vertical integration down to the planet's core? I mean, I assume their lawyers thought this through but how can this be okay? Any purchase made over an Apple device would be affected by this.
Just out of curiosity, where do you see an antitrust issue?
Vertical integration down to the planet's core? I mean, I assume their lawyers thought this through but how can this be okay? Any purchase made over an Apple device would be affected by this.
Vertical integration is not a de facto antitrust issue in the US. It certainly can be, however -- as a consequence, when one says the word "antitrust", that has a meaning and one then needs to...
Vertical integration is not a de facto antitrust issue in the US. It certainly can be, however -- as a consequence, when one says the word "antitrust", that has a meaning and one then needs to demonstrate consumer harm. Antitrust laws are focused on abuses of corporate power to reduce competition. How does its existence harm Chase/Wells Fargo/whoever and their customers? Are Apple subtracting from the choices available to consumers, or adding another? How does Apple Card compel consumers to submit to supra-competitive pricing?
I realize that viewed from some jurisdictions this can seem wild, but fundamentally we're talking about a US company subject to US law offering a service to US consumers. Corporate financial arms have been a thing here for over a hundred years. Although I find the Apple Card very distasteful, when measured against something like carmaker-owned car financing companies it seems almost benign.
Again, I agree with you that it feels icky. With that said, I think it's important to be careful with terminology when describing corporate animals precisely because the regulatory environment is so permissive. Change isn't driven by framing accusations in a way that the law understands and doesn't support, but by demonstrating that the law as it sits is not sufficiently defining the terms of those animals' environment.
To draw a comparison to a sort-of-related issue, to me it's the difference between saying "the rich don't pay their fair share of taxes", and saying that "taxes on the rich are not high enough". They can be used interchangeably, but one carries an implicit legal charge that's generally not supportable (modulo Wesley Snipeses), whereas the other frames it as an issue to which the law itself is subordinate and made malleable.
None of the shows they announced spoke to me. It all seems like the same kind of stuff you can find in droves on AMC, NBC or any other number of networks.
They also didn’t announce pricing or show any previews of the shows, which was odd.
At this point, the number of niche genre services I subscribe to adds much more value to my life than something with the broad appeal of Netflix does. I find myself watching Shudder much more than Netflix and it costs half as much.
Leading with names instead of content set a very weird tone. I guess I'm sort of at a remove, but do people care about that? The pitch-centric format almost seemed like it was intended to speak to other Hollywood people, rather than consumers -- like, "here's some of your peers giving our thing their imprimatur".
With that said, I'm pleased they got through an entire event discussing media without bringing Eddy Cue on stage.
That might be the smart move for them honestly. They're trying to launch a prestige service rather than a mass-market one, so that's something that's best sold through word of mouth. HBO sells its digital service almost entirely on the back of Game of Thrones. If they decide that what they need is one monster-hit that becomes a cultural touchstone, then it makes sense to target "taste-makers," like critics and culture writers and filmy-types. Get them on board and if they like something, they'll write articles about it until people check it out. That's how the critical darling shows like Game of Thrones, or Breaking Bad, or LOST got big.
But the first step in that process is to, you know, show us some footage from the show...
It’s the worldwide developer’s conference, so it’s focused on showing the product offerings as products. The marketing for the services to make you want to buy them comes later.
You're right about it not being WWDC, but this doesn't actually change my point much. It's a press event to announce their services, not a marketing push for any specific product.
Yeah, it's weird that they gave so few actual details. Recode's article about it is pretty good: We still don’t know what’s in Apple’s streaming service, how much it will cost, or why we should pay for it
Is it weird? Seems like Apple to me.
I'd be really curious to hear about the germination of the Apple Card. A lot of people within Apple are aware of the optics of Apple launching a credit card in partnership with fucking Goldman. They're not idiots -- they knew people would have thoughts like the ones that are already in this thread.
So I guess I wonder if they really planned on having the privacy angle be the answer for all consumer objections. It really seems like it, but they didn't give the impression that they'd privacy that hard in the messaging. Certainly not as hard as they'd need to override all the "apple make a credit card? they take money huhu lol" stuff. I just don't know what else it's bringing to the table. The notion of a privacy-centric "financial product" sounds as appealing to me as an Apple credit card sounds distasteful, so I'm sort of on the fence.
The messaging is just mystifying, though. They continue to succeed in areas where they've always succeeded, but a credit card feels like the move you make when you're short on moves -- the glint in the eye of a public company that has begun to devour itself to appease shareholders.
Kind of a bummer from an ethos perspective, too. In the same way that "Don't be evil" died years ago, a credit card really seems like the coffin slamming shut on "bicycle for the mind". You can still make awesome tools for fun weirdos... but now you're the company that has a Goldman card.
I think the main push is meant for international travelers, especially in East Asia. I was just in Southeast Asia and services like WeChat seem to be the preferred ways to do commerce there. Ben Thompson at Stratechery has a whole thing about how WeChat is a major impediment to Apple being able to grow its business in emerging markets.. If they want to compete in China, they're going to be need to be able to compete with WeChat on being holistic and all encompassing.
At WWDC it's a more Western audience and they need to provide a more focused pitch. On the side, it might also a gambit to do an end run around big retail's slow-rolling of contactless/digital payments. I'm sure there are wheels within wheels here on what they hope to achieve with the corporate strategy. If they have a physical card in your hand in addition to Apple Pay, they can make up for the lack of coverage on digital/contact-less payments. It also lets Apple get leverage over credit card companies since Apple card users will presumably be more loyal to Apple than to MasterCard. If they get enough buy-in from people, they might be able to bully Visa and all of them to give Apple a bigger piece of the pie in payment processing.
And having you in their ecosystem for your financial management is potentially an important strategic first step to goosing their services revenue. If they get to a point where people are doing all of their bill-pay and a significant amount of financial services through Apple, they can probably use subtle design patterns to make it much easier to manage subscriptions through Apple than through anyone else. Maybe even an integrated subscription management service to control billing across all the recurring payments you make. From there it's not that hard to put little psychological nudges to encourage people to keep TV+ and dump Hulu if they're looking to cut expenses.
Something like this might also enable them to build a function I've fantasized about online for a while now, which is a no-friction tip-jar. Imagine if, instead of needing to cross a paywall to read an article, you could literally just run a button and pay $1 without registering an account or putting in CC information. The technology is already there, but there isn't yet a single tech company standard that can work directly with content providers to build something like this out. Amazon and PayPal have tried, but it doesn't seem to take. Apple has better contacts with publishing and media, so maybe they could succeed where others have failed.
In their defense, their version of a credit card really does seem like a far more customer friendly and ethical kind of credit card business than others. The billing statements are actively designed to encourage maintaining a low/minimal balance and minimize revenue from interest. They're building in financial planning tools to help you reduce your spending and expenses. They claim interest rates are low compared to others (but from what I've seen it's still 13% to 25% depending on your credit rating which doesn't seem THAT low). And they're not relying on predatory fees to engage in adversarial revenue extraction. Most of this stuff are things we would ideally be forcing credit card companies to do through regulation anyway if we had a half-way decent government. But absent that, we must rely on the beneficence of our Neo-feudal corporate overlords instead.
Part of me wonders if it's a prestige thing, i.e. passing that Apple card across the counter at swanky locations. Maybe an "Apple Space Gray" card for the ultra-wealthy, like an Amex Black. But with more and more places accepting touchless payment, meaning no one would see the card anyway, that seems a bit backward thinking for a company like Apple.
They also incentivize not using the card - doubling the rewards.
Live stream is over now, but the recorded video can be watched on the site still. The Verge had a live blog available here.
Edit: here are the official releases on the Apple site for the major announcements:
i'm sure this has valid applications, but i cannot help but immediately cringe and balk at the idea of fucking apple being the company which handles my credit card, of all the companies that could possibly do that.
they're already experts in taking people's money. now they're just skipping the middle-man.
When has Apple ever indicated it wasn't serious about the privacy of consumers? I'll never understand such blatant cynicism.
Typically credit cards have both a late payment fee & interest on any payments made past the intended billing cycle. Apple card has interest, but no traditional late payment fee.
The comment isn’t about Apple’s commitment to privacy (which is only a relatively recent stance, mind you), but the fact that Goldman Sachs is perceived as the epitome of immoral capitalist behavior. While Apple can say that they have an agreement that Goldman will do nothing to further monetize user’s data, all that amounts to is an indemnification clause in their partnership agreement and no real ability to enforce the assumed-to-happen exploitation of finances that Goldman has become infamous for.
The fact that the optics of using Goldman for such a high profile announcement could not be ignored, shows that Apple is either tone deaf at this point, or that they got a great deal from Goldman vs. other banks. I can’t imagine Goldman would make such a deal out of the goodness of their heart, but have alternative methods for receiving further revenue from supporting Apple’s infrastructure.
Here's a more compressed summary.
A "news" service (for $9.99 a month, US/Canada only so hard for me to have an opinion on), an Apple credit card (?!? how do antitrust laws even work?), Apple arcade (honestly, the most interesting announcement, a quality-focused mobile subscription avoiding the usual F2P content), Apple TV Plus (very little information, basically nothing new).
A bit disappointing.
Just out of curiosity, where do you see an antitrust issue? You're able to use competing financial instruments to pay for things on and with Apple devices, you're able to use the Apple Card to interact financially with competitors... the idea feels intrinsically gross to me, but I'm not getting an antitrust issue.
There could be some argument that having the balance management stuff built into the Wallet app was an Essential Facilities Doctrine matter, but Apple could probably say that competitors are free to build that information into their own app (as they do)...
Vertical integration down to the planet's core? I mean, I assume their lawyers thought this through but how can this be okay? Any purchase made over an Apple device would be affected by this.
Vertical integration is not a de facto antitrust issue in the US. It certainly can be, however -- as a consequence, when one says the word "antitrust", that has a meaning and one then needs to demonstrate consumer harm. Antitrust laws are focused on abuses of corporate power to reduce competition. How does its existence harm Chase/Wells Fargo/whoever and their customers? Are Apple subtracting from the choices available to consumers, or adding another? How does Apple Card compel consumers to submit to supra-competitive pricing?
I realize that viewed from some jurisdictions this can seem wild, but fundamentally we're talking about a US company subject to US law offering a service to US consumers. Corporate financial arms have been a thing here for over a hundred years. Although I find the Apple Card very distasteful, when measured against something like carmaker-owned car financing companies it seems almost benign.
Again, I agree with you that it feels icky. With that said, I think it's important to be careful with terminology when describing corporate animals precisely because the regulatory environment is so permissive. Change isn't driven by framing accusations in a way that the law understands and doesn't support, but by demonstrating that the law as it sits is not sufficiently defining the terms of those animals' environment.
To draw a comparison to a sort-of-related issue, to me it's the difference between saying "the rich don't pay their fair share of taxes", and saying that "taxes on the rich are not high enough". They can be used interchangeably, but one carries an implicit legal charge that's generally not supportable (modulo Wesley Snipeses), whereas the other frames it as an issue to which the law itself is subordinate and made malleable.
Apple TV app launching on smart TV, Fire TV and Roku is bigger news than the channels itself.
I think the apple card is a bad idea. I don't like the idea of buying something from apple and paying off the balance on my apple card. Seems weird.