Apple's Reinvention as a Services Company Starts for Real Monday
bloomberg.com
bloomberg.com
> divide up the revenue between developers based on how much time users spend playing their games
So they're going to spy on their users, huh? Of course, it's perfectly innocent, but they will quickly find that with deeper metrics they can better model what games to fund, etc etc. And before you know it they'll have a tab in their account page just like Google with a list as long as your arm of all the things they know about you.
I remember a story from the tail end of the Jobs era when they were trying to get their ad network going that their sales force was using as a selling point to advertisers the fact that they had metrics such as how many minutes a day users spent using various apps etc. They just don't share this data outside of Apple and also (according to their public statements) don't access the private data that you create.
So, Apple having aggregate data is interesting, because it's certainly a monetization, but if they're truly honest and statistically aggregate numbers, I think that might be a fantastic strategy.
Basically: Select * from AppleDB where userID=Me should never be allowed and failure to prevent such access should result in heavy fines
Google doesn't either. It doesn't stop them getting heat for it.
>Apple has a lot of knowledge regarding its users,but what it doesn’t do with that data is share it with advertisers very freely. That makes Madison Avenue very mad.
>rather than offering a cookie-based ad-tracking and targeting mechanism, it essentially requires partners to tell it what kind of audience it needs to reach, and then trust that Apple will handle the rest, AdAge says. And it’s well worth noting that Apple prioritizes customer privacy here over a big potential upside in ad revenue.
>what it doesn’t do is hand over the keys to all that data and let advertisers plug into it directly with their own data-mining and targeting software. That’s not standard for the ad industry and that’s likely the reason a few Madison Avenue feathers are ruffled over their approach.
https://techcrunch.com/2014/02/18/advertisers-not-thrilled-w...
I'm not sure why you think that Apple has had a change of heart since then, especially given their recent decision that these sort of privacy protecting policies provide Apple a competitive advantage.
By offering iPhone up to a 4 years terms and bundled with AppleCare+ Thief and Loss and iCloud Backup. With Optional Apple Music, Apple News Magazine, Apple TV and Apple Game. All paid via an Apple Branded Credit Card within Apple Pay backed by Goldman Sachs.
You could have the iPhone Services starting at ~$35/Month even for an iPhone XS Max. If you add up all the other "Services" pack. That is roughly $75/month for the Full Apple Experience.
~$40 to even $100 a month is affordable to a lot of people. And my guess this could be part of the reason why Apple has been pushing the prices of iPhone.
There is another advantage to Apple, this strategy requires huge cash flow and can not be easily copied by its competitor. Apple would be effectively trading its immediate return of cash from selling product for long term customer lock in.
Often plant and equipment is financed this way - photocopier for example are seldom purchased outright, and come bundled with service, support and consumables.
Of course, I am aware that _the_ most cost-efficient way is to accept that having the brand new and shiny every year is - for the most part - utterly pointless, but hey.
Any such program would instantly be set upon with demands for a low income version which in effect would be subsidized by those paying an elevate price. All the while the carriers and other phone makers would be off the hook and show no interest in following suit with similar programs
Corporations have been exercising massive influence over politics worldwide, orchestrating & supporting coups, stealing natural resources, bribing, doctoring data etc. for centuries, but now there's like 3 newly elected congress people not taking PAC money and talking about this a tiny bit and suddenly we should feel bad for the poor multinationals?
Spare me.
https://www.apple.com/au/iphone/
> Get iPhone XR from A$849 when you trade in your iPhone 7 Plus.*
> Now you can get 0% interest for 24 months on iPhone XR when you trade in your current iPhone at an Apple Retail Store. Monthly payments required.
It's the first thing you see on the page, even on mobile, before you when see a picture or any details about the phones themselves. It's also pushed very heavily throughout the entire site as you browse.
Apple will look to replace with its own version, whatever is making money in its App store. Like Google did and is doing by keeping clicks to ads or Google services.
This is where I get slightly lost with this strategy. There doesn't seem to be a discernable advantage to me as a consumer bundling all of these together versus the amount of lock in.
Something like iMessage is unique to iOS and a big benefit - music, news, TV I can get at least as good elsewhere often for less.
Branding. Spotify had a hard time getting people to streaming, and Apple Music helped pushed the world into Music Streaming Services. So together they have grown the Music Streaming Market by ~5 times since launch.
People don't want the hassle and they want to have access to content. So instead of looking for 5 different package and doing comparison, they decide to let Apple do the job for them.
Considering how much utter crap Apple Music was when launched and still getting some much needed improvement today, the quality of services might not weight as much as ease of access to majority of the iPhone user.
A video streaming service that's only available on iOS and Apple TV will be inevitably niche, and no real competition for Netflix. This also means they will likely have to pay a premium for content (and a _much_ larger amount per user) as creators will prefer to be on platforms where more people will see their work.
But ultimately, supporting Android and 3rd party streaming devices goes against Apple's DNA. Apple still sees itself as a hardware company, and software and services exist to give people reasons to buy their hardware.
This just happened:
"Apple is putting iTunes on Samsung TVs" - https://www.theverge.com/2019/1/6/18170797/samsung-2019-tvs-...
Yep! Other examples include the Apple Music service and the AirPlay 2 protocol, both of which are available on multiple non-Apple platforms.
But Apple hasn't ever been quite as exclusive as they're painted to be when it comes to peripherals and services. They've had iTunes on Windows for a very long time (yes, it's kind of a trash fire, but it's still there), and that was mostly to support the iPod. They have iCloud for Windows. Apple Music has an Android app, is supported by Sonos and Amazon Alexa, and even has a web-based API (no official "cloud player," but there's an open source one out there which Apple knows about and is apparently okay with as long as it doesn't use the word "Apple" in its name). And, of course, a lot of non-Apple products can receive AirPlay, and they appear to have gotten fairly aggressive in the last few months at moving AirPlay 2 into the third-party market.
So, Apple Services have been on third-party devices for years; they've just historically been a lot less enthusiastic about it than companies like Spotify and Amazon have been. I would expect to see them be way more enthusiastic from here on.
(I think there's probably a good case along those lines for an open "Internet of Things" protocol that would let any IoT device work with any voice assistant or other controller -- probably by "publishing" a set of control terms for it, like AppleScript dictionaries and whatever the ARexx equivalent was on the Amiga -- but so far I'm not sure anyone's even proposed that.)
Then, the streaming service will be available to anyone with any apple device: any iphone, ipad, mac.
A large chunk of people have at least one idevice or mac in a household. For instance, many android users have ipads.
All of these can get the service, and all will be able to put it on a screen with airplay 2.
Don't know if it will compensate, but that appears to be the strategy for the dilemma you're describing. I think they may also make their exclusive content available on any apple hardware.
I agree that if most devices are cumbersome to stream to, then that’s too much friction for almost everyone.
1) Open the app
2) Make it start streaming
3) Make it full screen
4) Swipe up from the bottom of the screen (this is the part she never remembers)
5) Activate AirPlay and select the right device (in my house they are Apple TVs so they have good names, but if it were in every TV, they would have strange names
5b) If you've never streamed to this TV before, put in the auth code
At this point it will play to the TV. However, since I have an older iPad, it plays a 16:9 image in a 4:3 box on a 16:9 TV, so it doesn't use the whole screen. So then you have to go to the TV and change it to "zoom" mode to use the whole screen, which of course isn't at full resolution at that point.
Sure, Android has more but Apple has the best 2 billion customers available.
Sounds terrible for short indie games and good for long grindy games.
That's not a future I want for my gaming. Not that I am an apple customer in the first place but hopefully this won't affect what is delivered on the other platforms.
That is a trade off against being boring, but having developers optimize games to explicitly be as time consuming as possible and just not-boring enough that you don't quit them in disgust is not really a helpful incentive.
What would be a good system to determine a fair amount between games when a user is paying a fixed amount per month for all games?
You could ask for ratings (e.g. overall, originality) but these will be a lot more nuanced than time spent. You could ask users what split between games they think is fair (feels like a lot to ask especially if you're playing a lot of games).
Maybe something more like other content services - ensure there are multiple competitive fixed-rate game services that take risks and auction/bid on getting a specific game for a season at a time. It could include both an upfront payment and a performance payment.
Generate a pie chart based on playtimes, and then let the user adjust it to match their subjective experience. Pre-bias the pie slices by multiplying the default percentage cut by their rating of the game if they've given one.
It could be made relative to the time that needs to be spent to complete the game, and maybe a different category for open ended and multiplayer games.
Treating all games equal would be bad design, because "game" is often only the most generic category they share, they're digital experiences and should be treated as such.
Deduce how important a game is to people by introducing small amounts of artificial delay when playing it. This could be input delay, or maybe the game freezes up for a second every minute, or it takes a bit longer to launch or something.
Measure the dropoff rate. People should be really willing to keep playing great games even when inconvenient, and drop marginally-fun grindy games faster. With a large enough install base, you shouldn't need to degrade anyone's experience very much to get enough data.
This is pretty much how people A/B test for maximum revenue in “free” to play games monetised using micro transactions and other in app purchases.
It’s turned into pure evil there and it’s probably just as likely to spawn pure evil somewhere else.
Short and long are terms that make sense for games that have a natural start and end. Not every game has that story-likeness, so even a simple game that can keep people's attention (or get a lot of little slices) could do well.
The only one I've gotten into of that nature is the binding of isaac which would undoubtedly do well under this scheme. But we need the story driven games too and they are going to have a hard time under these conditions.
I have yet to see a game listed in the App Store that wasn't also on Steam, so I'm not worried about that either.
Apple may be good at many things, but games is not one of them. There's not enough bang for your buck on the Mac platform when it comes to gaming and you can't easily and cheaply mix-n-match your hardware like you can with Windows.
I love Mac for everything else, but if I going to seriously game, I will buy a Windows box and use it for that only (well, and running Linux in a VM - for reasons).
Just bought sekiro on friday and it runs like a dream without me having to configure a thing.
I agree, it doesn't seem feasible for narrative driven games.
It feels like the current Apple doesn't think of product experience as a service, with amortized costs built into the purchase price. In their eyes, at least insofar as it seems from my perspective, the relationship stops as soon as you decide to buy the product. Maybe a limited relationship exists afterward, if you buy AppleCare. But they don't seem to care one whit if the experience on their product sucks. Increasingly, Apple software argues with you instead of adopting the philosophy of "it just works."
I'm extremely unlikely to pay Apple for a content service, given its current track record of user-hostility.
>Apple plans to charge about $10 a month.
Is it just me, or is there no way this could possibly be worth it? Hacker News and Reddit already combine stories from newspapers and websites, and they do it for free. I have a hard time believing that a managed source selected from a few business partners could possibly be as valuable as a crowd-driven scan across the entire internet.
Text based media is not like movies, music, or video games. Especially when that text is at once fungible and quickly expiring.
(Not saying Apple also isn't collecting various metrics, but certainly saying that Apple isn't trying to collect every little data point and sell to advertisers, like Reddit. Disclaimer - I <3 reddit)
Pricetags aren't for do-able vs. not. They're for convenience.
Many people can't and won't learn to use Reddit and dig into the comments section on their iPad (their only daily conduit to the internet).
I am taking a different track towards digital minimalism: I don’t count time spend reading eBooks and listening to audio books. But I am monitoring and reducing empty non-productive time on my devices.
What possible content can they put in there to attract people that already have newspaper subscriptions?
I disagree with that. iMessage is perhaps the best IM service out there. iCloud works seeessly across devices, in a way im not sure any other cloud storage solution does
All this because they tried to transparently merge phone number and icloud account as well as SMS and internet messages. Between people that may or may not be using iOS , icloud, or imessage ( or any combination of the above).
As for icloud, i suppose you’ve never ran out of space as a user, nor as a developer have you tried syncing a core data db or keychain custom data over that service. I’ve been developping on iOS since iOS 3 and i still can’t give you a good forecast on how syncing will work in practice.
Or to put it another way, even if they offered the Apple services on non-apple devices, I doubt many people who don't already have an Apple device would sign up.
Their services make money in spite of how they work, not because of it. If they want to compete on services, they actually have to make good services and prioritize them internally.
That said, Apple service excel in certain ways: Apple Music with Sound Check, for example, is easily the best sounding mobile music streaming. iCloud Drive is the most seamless internet storage account for mobile devices.
Then it wasn't.
They removed much of its power in one of the annual updates. I think it happened in concert with the launch of their iOS version of Pages. Fortunately many of those discarded concepts found their way into LibreOffice.
I know a lot of people feel the same way about Final Cut.
Personally, I hope they waste a huge amount of money on this push and fail miserably.
I also hope they lose their anti-trust case and get forced to play fair because you certainly cannot hope to make any money in the smartphone app market while ignoring Apple/iOS. They do have a monopoly on paying customers as someone else in this thread pointed out.
If they do bundle it with News/Music, now that would be interesting.
I am 100% sure (infinitely sure!) that I will sign up for Apple’s service to try it out and I am ‘almost sure’ that Apple will face a lot of regulatory and legal challenges.
By personal preference I would like to see more open platforms and, off topic for this conversation, a more distributed web.
I don’t think we will get there though. Years ago author William Gibson probably ‘got it right’ in predicting what the future will be like: corporations become all-powerful, governments become a joke if they exist at all, and talented people align themself with a corporation as we self identify now as the citizen of a country.
I still don’t understand how this is any different from what’s happening in the Apple News app right now, other than it will cost $10 per month starting on Monday and is now free. Also, the Texture app requires that you _download_ issues of magazines, whereas magazines on Apple News are currently instantaneous.
> But there’s always the possibility that Apple starts with an “all you can eat monthly magazines” tier, then adds a pricier “all you can eat monthly magazines plus daily paywalled news” tier. This could give newspapers a way to make more money from the service — a reported sticking point to participation from the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Washington Post.
> The skeptical publishers point to the original Texture—it didn't work--as proof the concept is shaky. The publishers say the revenue was meager, and the app itself sputtered through several incarnations before being sold off to Apple.
In 2016 it was doing quite well (remember this is publishing money and not tech VC money. Success in publishing does not look the same in dollars as success does in SV tech): https://nypost.com/2016/06/21/the-netflix-of-magazines-is-ab...
Apple bought Texture this time last year and then it spread they had planned their own news platform. It's no surprise they were scaling back Texture as a company.
Makes one wonder if they will show a teaser for the Asimov's Foundation show.
So far, I'm not seeing a change in their business model so much as im seeing a change in how much focus is placed on the profitability of the latter.
If the rumors prove true and the streaming video content they produce in house will be free to those with Apple devices, but content they license from others costs money (with Apple taking a cut), this will definitely be Apple remaining true to form.
Is there anything that surpasses the quality of The Economist in this environment?*
*(not that The Economist is clearly non-relatively high-quality)
Tech news I don’t pay for and don’t expect I ever will (LWN excluded, I’ve been a paying member for years). Majority have no idea what they are talking about anymore and are just holding on for dear life in this ever changing landscape (like most Apple bloggers, for example).
I’ve come to realize the only journalism worth paying for comes from exceptional individual writers who are allowed to write about whatever they find interesting (and have something unique to say). Ben Thompson’s Stratechery fits into this category and is often the only person writing about tech who brings unique thinking and new perspective to whatever the topic of the day is.
It also makes sense from an environmental perspective: why have two different devices when you can view all content on one.
I suppose I'm not the target audience for Apple. Reading the news is something I do away from digital device. It helps me practise focusing and it helps me to relax.
Something is in decline at Apple.
Netflix has spent years negotiating TV rights to third party content and releasing its own. Apple has a long way to go.
Android is 81% of the US market.
Unless Apple Music comes to android, I don't see Spotify being threatened.
https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.apple.andr...
Android may be “81%” of the market but then you have to subtract China and you have to take into account where the paying customers are.
Apple has more than half the number of paying customers with a much smaller phone market share (https://www.cultofmac.com/605166/spotify-now-has-96-million-...)
It’s well known that Android users don’t spend nearly as much as iOS users.
Steve Jobs promised that FaceTime would be open source… eventually: https://www.cnet.com/news/steve-jobs-promised-to-make-faceti...
Any time now.
Does Apple Music have something similar (or as good as) Spotify Discover? That's a differentiator for sure.
It’s just like Facebook stopped the growth of Snapchat just by introducing Stories.
There are literally almost two decades of failures in the streaming subscription music space. Like Jobs said about DropBox. Streaming music is becoming a feature not a product.
What about all the original content?
- House of Cards: I only got a little into the second season before I got busy, but what I saw was high quality and interesting.
- Orange is the new Black: My wife still loves this series
- Stranger Things: An honest to god phenomenon. The second season was weaker IMO, but I'm not sure how it could be as good as the first. That's a high bar to hit.
- The Crown: I caught a lot of it as my wife watched. Pretty good, even if a blond Doctor Who was somewhat distracting.
- A Series of Unfortunate Events: The kids liked this, as some of them are going through the books.
- Altered Carbon: Refreshingly good science fiction. Main character casting a little odd, since it's more obvious now than it was when I was younger how odd and slightly off-putting it is to cast someone with the physique of Arnold Schwarzenegger as a science fiction lead. At the same time, it's now fitting (or a trope) because of all the science fiction he helmed in the 1990's.
- Lost in Space: Interesting, but ultimately spoiled slightly by the contrived plot. Better writing and this would have been extremely good rather than worth watching, but slightly disappointing.
- The Haunting: A nice interweaving of stories, and creepy series. I liked the ending. I have friends who didn't.
That's just from the drama section of the list. There's plenty in the other sections too, such as Maniac and Russian Dolls which I watched recently that were good, and documentary section has a bunch of good things I've seen as well. Some of he Marvel series' were pretty good too (season one of Jessica Jones was excellent on so many levels).
That's a small fraction of what they released. Looking at the list now, there's no way I would cancel Netflix before Hulu, and probably HBO also. There's things I want to watch on those (for different reasons), but now that I examine it, it's clear that I use and value what Netflix is giving me way more than the other two.
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_original_programs_dist...
A lot of Netlix's new content is downright bad.
Apple is incredibly bad at building services and has been for their entire existence. They cannot multi-task and things will languish for 2-3 years at a time.
I think this sentence speaks for itself. Apple's record on whether they will discourage competitors on their own turf speaks for itself.
Maps was a wakeup call for them, it'd be cool if they lit a fire like that across the board for their products.
True, but the tendency is for people and companies to push it out of their minds as an "aberration" and refuse to learn a thing.
I have worked on a music streaming service for a while and our iOS app was a big pain. We often had months long gaps where we were unable to get an update published.
The good thing about Google being this unfocused is that they are unable to do even think about doing the same and favor Play Music or whatever they are calling it now .. again, they are not strong on focus.
I kinda hope that at some point publishing an app will be considered an utility so it can't be so easily gamed by the platform owner.