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1/With apologies for long thread (feel free to mute!), my thoughts on the Apple Event, also known as “The End of Apple Exceptionalism” (1-25)
2/We are officially in a new era of Apple. I’m not talking about the hard lean into services. I’m talking about the fact that this is a company that is now comfortable putting on a big event to announce what is essentially an imitation of what others are doing.
3/The fact that Apple continues to use the languge of exceptionalism—positioning its services as distinctive, fresh, unlike anything else—now just comes off as a bit cringy, tbh. (The one exception was Apple Card. More on the Card below.)
4/My verdict on Apple TV Channels and TV+ : confusingly under-whelming. Almost as if they haven’t fully thought thru the strategy. No pricing info, no bundling info, nothing that AMZN/NFLX aren’t already doing. Apple Channels is basically your cable box, redesigned – sans netflix
5/Maybe they felt pressure to announce before they were ready. Perhaps bc Disney is announcing details of their streaming service soon, Apple needed to preempt, to protect the stock. (Also makes me wonder how long it will take them to reconsider acquisition as an alt strategy.)
6/Of course hard to evaluate TV+ offering without seeing the actual content. But..the only show announcement that seemed vaguely interesting to a mass audience was the Aniston/Witherspoon project...
7/...and even that project seemed like something from an earlier ABC/NBC/CBS era of “prestige” tv, rather than genre-defying or edgier stuff we’ve seen coming out HBO and increasingly NFLX/AMZN.
8/A little stunned by lack of creativity in pricing approach. What’s the point of being the most heavily-penetrated consumer brand in the world if you aren’t willing to play w cross-subsidization, bundling, cross-selling? AMZN does this so well.
9/Perhaps there is more to come on the pricing front as the year unfolds, but wow, nothing yet. Sometimes pricing—both structure and level—can create disruption in and of itself. HELLO.
10/Also: are people really willing to pay $10/mo for Music + $10/mo for News + $10/mo for Games + $10/mo for music + additional dollars for TV+? That’s maybe $50/month... or $600/year – compared to Amazon Prime @ $120/year.
11/The pricing issue reveals Apple’s size problem. Apple has 1 billion installed base. If it got a whopping 50% of that base to pay an Amazon Prime-type price of $120/year, this would generate “only” $62 B—impressive, but probably not impressive enough for a company Apple’s size.
12/At Apple's announced price of say, $50/mo for the combined set of services, they need 20% of their installed base (200 million) to subscribe to ALL of these services to get to $120 billion revenue. Whew. Tough challenge.
13/Yes I know they have an installed base of 1 billion, but remember, a big chunk of that is global – and price sensitivities (and willingness to pay a premium for ancillary services) are dramatically different around the globe.
14/Other notes: AppleNews + was ho-hum. Biggest Q is size of market. How many are willing to pay $10/month for access to a bunch of traditional mags that are barely clinging to cultural relevance?
15/The fact that content partners agreed to a 50-50 rev split with Apple News+ is a sign of how little heft these players have – they are literally begging for scraps at this point.
16/Biggest Apple News eyebrow-raiser was inclusion of WSJ, but my guess is people who want WSJ already have a subscription, which is probably why WSJ agreed to join – it is looking to further skim the casual reader of an occasional article or two...
17/...And because WSJ articles will be limited in terms of discoverability, WSJ is essentially offering a “trial sample” for readers, potentially a modest acquisition tool for its own subscription service.
18/Back to Apple Card. Offering a credit card is obviously not innovative—it's often the easiest way to generate a quick additional revenue stream, which is why every big retailer has a side business in credit cards.
19/BUT... Apple’s reimagination of the consumer experience appears to be the freshest thing we’ve seen in credit cards in a long time.
20/Altho Apple Card will get less attention than TV+, this may be the service that ends up generating the most traction... and in the process, ends up changing the way the traditional industry operates. Keep an eye on this.
21/Other random notes: Apple put a big emphasis on privacy in this event. I remain skeptical. Easy to tout privacy when you run a closed ecosystem with huge leverage over your partners and no ad business model. Much harder when you expand into areas where you have less leverage.
22/Case in point: the partnership with Goldman Sachs. Check out the wording in this slide, which is essentially eliding the fact they will share your info with GS, and GS will share it with others... just not for marketing? Whatever that means. 
23/Also: As an Apple Event, this was perhaps the most tedious ever. Trotting out a bunch of stars to talk abt story-telling as art..? Spielberg seemed from another era. And while i’m always happy to see Oprah, was there anything she said that made you want to subscribe?
24/All of this is to say that how apple handled this event doesn’t inspire confidence about their launch of a service that’s supposed to, HELLO, entertain us. Cheap shot, I know... but pls understand, as a longtime Apple lover, I want so badly for this company to inspire me again
25/Finally, Apple has officially lost its naming mojo. The company that brought us cool names like the “macbook air” and the “ipod” is now trying to sell us stuff like Apple Channels, Apple TV +, Apple News +, Apple Arcade, and Apple Card. Sigh. A new era indeed. /end
