Episode 107 - What to Make of Apple's Foray into News, TV, Gaming & Credit Card Services

This special episode of the iPhone Life Insider Podcast looks at Apple’s pivot from devices to services with the announcement of Apple News Plus, Apple TV Plus, Apple Arcade, and the Apple Card. Sarah, David, and Donna go over the details of each service, and help answer the question—are they worth the money? Stick around for the Insider exclusive portion, where they'll tell you everything you need to know about Apple's second-generation AirPods, including the details on wireless charging, battery life, hands-free Siri, and the improved chip.

Question of the week:

Are you planning to subscribe to any of Apple's new services? Why or why not? Email your answers to podcasts@iphonelife.com.

Articles referred to in this episode:

Transcript of episode 107:

Donna Cleveland:    Hi and welcome to a special episode of the iPhone Life podcast. I'm Donna Cleveland, Editor in Chief at iPhone Life.

David Averbach:    I'm David Averbach, CEO and Publisher at iPhone Life.

Sarah Kingsbury:    And I'm Sarah Kingsbury, Senior Web Editor at iPhone Life.

Donna Cleveland:    Today we're going to be talking about Apple's services announcement that just happened a couple of hours ago. We'll talk about Apple's new TV Plus subscription service and Apple's News Plus subscription service and what you should make of it. If it's something that we think is worth purchasing and we'll get into all the details of the other services announced today too, because there's a lot that Apple unveiled.

David Averbach:    A lot, a surprising amount really.

Donna Cleveland:    Yeah. So, we'll be getting into all of that in a moment. We actually do not have a sponsor this episode. So, I wanted to take a minute before we jump into the rest of the episode to talk about our own premium subscription service. Some of you already are going to be aware of it. We have a free Daily Tips Newsletter. So, some of you may already be on this newsletter which with that we send you one tip each day that teaches you something cool you can do with your phone. And if you upgrade to our premium service, this is our full educational service that really will help you get the most out of your devices. We know so many people have iPhones and iPads, but they have capabilities they're not taking advantage of and a lot of times it's just easy to hit a wall and not know what to do. So, that's where iPhone Life Insider comes in.

Donna Cleveland:    We have video guides included in that, that will teach you how from start to finish, how to use your iPad, how to use iOS 13 for instance. This fall we'll have guide that will teach you how to use the new operating system. So, you'll be among the first to know. You get a digital subscription to our magazine, iPhone Life Magazine has been around for ten years. You get a full archive of our issues and you're the first to get our new issues. You also get video versions of our daily video tips. So, you can learn to do something with your phone in one mindset a day just by following along on your device as you watch the video. Also, a feature called Ask an Editor. So, if you're having an tech problems, you just email us and we'll help you find solutions. So, it's a really amazing service.

Donna Cleveland:    Lastly, you get exclusive content from this podcast. So, today we're going to have an exclusive section of our podcast where we talk about Apple's new devices they just released. We talked about the iPads last week. This week we'll talk about AirPods. Apple has finally come out with a new set of Air Pods with upgraded features. Woe, we'll break down for you what these new AirPods have to offer and whether they're worth the extra money. So, stay tuned for that.

Donna Cleveland:    So, iPhone Life Insider is really awesome. It's how you also support what we're doing here. So, if you subscribe to any of our free services and you want to support iPhone Life, we appreciate you subscribing as well. For podcast listeners, we have a special deal. Go to iphonelife.com/podcastdiscount and you'll get five dollars off your annual subscription. So, we recommend you check it out: iphonelife.com/podcastdiscount. We have a couple of people who recently signed up with this discount. Paul H., Jonathan S., and Michael H., thank you for joining us.

David Averbach:    Thank you all for the recent Insider subscribers, to all our Insider subscribers, thank you all for tuning in and we appreciate the support for our future Insider subscribers. I feel like we're very on brand with the premium subscription service of our own today.

Donna Cleveland:    I know. I know. It's true. Yes. So, let's jump into the announcement.

Sarah Kingsbury:    All righty.

Donna Cleveland:    So, I guess let's just go in the order that Apple announced their services. First Apple talked about news. So, Apple News Plus is their premium service. It's 9.99 a month. It includes more than 300 magazines and it includes a subscription to the Los Angeles Times as well as the Wall Street Journal. So, those are the basics of what Apple News Plus offers. Am I missing anything, you guys?

David Averbach:    You know, I think certainly when you say a subscription to those two couple caveats. First of all, in general, how it works is you can read any article from any of the magazines or those two newspapers discussed. So, that's kind of the main thing. It's like the "Netflix" of magazines. For those of you who remember, this is basically Texture, which Apple bought ... how many years ago? A couple of years ago?

Sarah Kingsbury:    Yeah, sounds about right.

Donna Cleveland:    Yeah.

David Averbach:    So, they're basically rebranding Texture and adding a few more titles. Now, the Wall Street Journal is an interesting one, because the rumors are, and I guess this isn't quite confirmed yet, you don't get a full Wall Street Journal subscription. You get access to a limited number of articles or something to that effect. So, it will be interesting to see how that all plays out.

Donna Cleveland:    Yeah. I mean, Apple didn't talk about this at the announcement, but they just said the Wall Street Journal is included.

David Averbach:    Yeah.

Donna Cleveland:    I was like that's so awesome considering that the Wall Street Journal is expensive.

David Averbach:    Yes.

Donna Cleveland:    It's something ... how much is it a month? It's like -

David Averbach:    Someone said $40 a month.

Donna Cleveland:    Yeah, it's a lot. It's definitely hundreds of dollars a year. So, it makes sense that the Wall Street Journal wouldn't want to give away their full service to people to be included with 300 magazines and all of that all for under ten dollars a month.

David Averbach:    Yeah, no. It didn't make sense for them to include it. But it was interesting that they didn't add that caveat in the presentation.

Sarah Kingsbury:    I know.

Donna Cleveland:    Yeah, because like ... so, right now with the Apple News app, you can read I think a couple of Wall Street Journal articles before you hit the pay wall and it'll make you sign up for that. So, really it's sounding like it's going to be a similar experience to what you have right now in the Apple News app where there's still going to be tons of free content on there, but they'll just be more places where you're going to be hitting to prompt to sign up for this Apple News Plus service. So, to me, it's sounding like it's going to suck for people who don't want to pay for it, because right now if you're using Apple News, you're going to be hitting a lot more prompts to upgrade all the time. So, I think that's like the first thing that I definitely, like I think that in general with this announcement for people who don't want any of these services, like Apple's becoming a little bit worse to use.

David Averbach:    Yeah.

Donna Cleveland:    You know?

David Averbach:    Totally.

Donna Cleveland:    But for people who are interested in them, I don't know 9.99 is a bad deal for what you get.

Sarah Kingsbury:    No.

Donna Cleveland:    I mean, it's a little bit hard to say without having used it yet.

Sarah Kingsbury:    There is a free trial, right? So, you can decide if it's actually worth it before committing.

Donna Cleveland:    Yeah, those are the other things that are available today apparently, although Sarah keeps checking back.

Sarah Kingsbury:    I just checked right now. It's still ... I mean, they might be ruling it out. So, it might be available to some people, but it's not available to me, which is all I care about.

Donna Cleveland:    Yeah. So, it's available today. You get a free month trial. So, it's nice just everybody can check it out for themselves without making any commitments yet.

David Averbach:    Yeah.

Donna Cleveland:    I do like that there's no extra charge for family sharing.

David Averbach:    Yeah. They did that across most of their services, which is nice.

Donna Cleveland:    I would like them to do that across Apple Music as well.

David Averbach:    I feel like they will. I fell like that's coming, because that seems to be their new strategy.

Sarah Kingsbury:    What's the family deal with Apple Music again?

Donna Cleveland:    I think I pay like 14.99 for a family subscription, which I think includes five or six people.

David Averbach:    Okay. Seems reasonable.

Donna Cleveland:    Yeah, I'm not, you know, I've been very happy with tit. I'm just like how come all these other ones have the family sharing?

Sarah Kingsbury:    Yeah.

David Averbach:    So, I think a couple questions. We've got a few questions for each of these. The first one is Apple came out with basically to summarize their value proposition we're going to say do we think that they hit the mark on that? So, what was their value proposition for this one?

Sarah Kingsbury:    That they are ... they didn't say that they are trying. They said they are creating the best mobile magazine reading experience ever.

Donna Cleveland:    So, they spent a lot of time showing examples of what the new reading experience will be like and they had something called live covers. So, it looks like there's a new tab in the news app that you go to and you can open up different magazines. Like, they have more than 300 magazine covers there. You can scroll through, pick one, and then it had moving ... it almost looked like a live photo, because it would only be like three seconds or something like that.

Sarah Kingsbury:    It'll just look like Harry Potter World.

Donna Cleveland:    Yeah, totally.

Sarah Kingsbury:    The pictures that you can talk to and the collectors cards where you know, they interact with you.

Donna Cleveland:    To be fair, it looked really cool.

Sarah Kingsbury:    It is.

Donna Cleveland:    Of course, the one they chose for their presentation is going to look really cool.

David Averbach:    Yeah.

Sarah Kingsbury:    Yeah.

Donna Cleveland:    So, it's a little bit hard to tell, like David made the point, how many publishers are going to spend the time to create like iPad and iPhone special versions of each issue. Like, as publishers we know how much of a pain that would be, but for the ones that do, it did look ... it looked really beautiful, which to me matters, like I've loved magazines for a long time, and part of the reason I don't like Kindle's magazines is the experience just isn't that great and I like you know, magazines are really visual and they put a lot of time into like the experience it provides for someone reading it more so than a newspaper. So, I like that it looks like they're putting a lot of thought into that and creating tools for publishers, but it really is ultimately on the publishers to be doing that extra work to present their publications through Apple News Plus. So, I am also a little bit skeptical, like you are David, that most of those magazines are really going to do that all the time, you know?

David Averbach:    Yeah. And I think they're hitting their mark in terms of it did look like a very well designed platform to read magazines. It looked very sleek. The examples they gave, like it was really nice. It felt immersive. I think unlike say the premium television service that we're going to get to later, where they have very clear competition with Netflix and Amazon and everybody else, this one, there's no one else out there really doing this on the scale. Like, there's no other Netflix for magazines. So, it wasn't that hard of a mark to hit in that sense, because they didn't have a ton of competition. You know? And it's kind of interesting watching them spin this, because they're basically rebranding something that they bought a couple years ago that already had a lot of this stuff. So, I think, yeah.

David Averbach:    I would sign off on the best digital app experience, you know? But to me, I think the value is how many magazines do they have? Are they the magazines people want to read? Are people willing to pay for that? Because I think that I'm skeptical that it's going to be so different as far as an immersive experience that people are going to pay for that as opposed to say a different service that were to offer the same magazines. Does that make sense?

Donna Cleveland:    Yeah. I mean, if they have really good magazines and we were just talking about how when kids do like the magazine fundraisers, I never want to actually subscribe to any of the magazines even though I want to help the fundraiser, because there's a lot of magazines out there I'm not interested in. So, it has to be something good. But I think what's going to make the difference for whether their magazines or news outlets that we want to read is how great it is for the publishers, because another claim Apple made was it's gonna be great for readers and publishers, but it sounds like Apple's one taking a lot of revenue and two controlling all access to the subscribers so you can't even like really track what your readers are engaged with so you can give them more of that.

David Averbach:    yeah, and you can't control the monetization very well in the same way you can with your own audience. So, yeah. That's definitely another issue. I'll give you my take as a publisher of a magazine. I think that it depends where your magazine is situated. I think that it makes a lot of sense to me that the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal did not participate in this and the LA Times did, because I think that if you view this as primarily a monetization tool, I think you're going to be disappointed, because Apple, of course, taking a high percentage of it and also you have a lot less control. You don't own your customers. But if you're viewing this as a customer acquisition tool, it's pretty intriguing.

David Averbach:    So, it sort of depends. I think the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, places like that, Washington Post, everybody knows who they are and so they're less trying to like get people to hear about them and discover them and more trying to get people to pay them; whereas, some of the other services if you haven't heard of them, I think it's pretty intriguing. So, I think in that sense, it depends what the publisher's trying to do and it makes sense who joined and who didn't in that regard.

Donna Cleveland:    Yeah, there's also I guess a lot of publications who don't have print publications, like digital subscriptions. The Skim and I can't remember the other ones, but I guess if that's the way to acquire more readers for them as well.

David Averbach:    Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. So, I think the next question we have here and we're going to have it for each of these is: A, would you guys be interested and B, we have the poll results, our instant poll on -

Donna Cleveland:    Yeah, I was just checking those.

David Averbach:    Our instant poll on was our audience interested. Do you want to update us on that?

Donna Cleveland:    Yeah. One thing I just wanted to mention. I remember a few of the titles. I wanted to throw out some of the magazine titles we saw in there. Wired, Time Magazine, National Geographic they showed a ton of, which makes sense, because they wanted to show visually beautiful things, which National Geographic does a great job of. Did you guys see any other titles there that looked intriguing to you?

David Averbach:    I will say that this was originally a program that was a partnership. I can't remember all the publishers, but I think it was Condé Nast, Hearst, Time. So, it was primarily a big brand partnership. A lot of the biggest magazines in the world will be in there. Like the ones you mentioned were huge, I saw the Atlantic was in there, I would imagine Sports Illustrated would be if it's a time thing.

Donna Cleveland:    [inaudible 00:14:23] was one of [inaudible 00:14:24].

David Averbach:    Part of the limitations, first of all, you're only talking about 300 titles total. And so I think-

Donna Cleveland:    It's not really that much.

David Averbach:    What you're not going to get a small independent publishers, and I'll tell you that because we're not in it.

Donna Cleveland:    One awkward moment was in there, like 3000 titles, I mean 300 like that's such a bad [inaudible 00:14:43].

David Averbach:    I know, especially because the guy was literally on stage for like two minutes. And that was the one thing that he was supposed to say, we mess it up. We talked to Texture a while back about joining and they were pretty exclusive about small to mid size publishers and that's one of the things. It's a little sad about this is that I think some of the most richness of publishing comes in either regional publications or niche titles, and all of that stuff is just missing. So in that sense, I think there's a real void and a real missed opportunity for Apple.

Donna Cleveland:    Yeah, that's a good point. I didn't even really think about that so much, but maybe over time, they'll add more, I don't know. But in terms of the poll results, overwhelmingly people were not [inaudible 00:15:29].

David Averbach:    Yeah I was surprised.

Donna Cleveland:    Because the 40 people voting no, that they didn't want to spend $10 a month on this, 10 maybes and five, Yes.

David Averbach:    Yeah. And these were very instant results because we just posted these polls. So some of our numbers are not that large, and we're not going to be statistically significant. That's a pretty large margin there.

Donna Cleveland:    It is. Yeah, I mean, that was interesting. I was one of the yeses.

David Averbach:    Yeah, funny enough, so was I. So we're really throwing our data there [inaudible 00:15:56] way worse.

Sarah Kingsbury:    I didn't vote because I hardly ever go on Facebook. But I would definitely at least try it. I mean, it's like 30 day free trial, you just set it to expire after 30 days. And then so if you forget your stuff, good, and then we have a tip on that. And then you can also just choose to renew it.

Donna Cleveland:    Yeah, I know that's actually ... I always set reminders for like days later, I didn't realize you can just unsubscribe.

David Averbach:    Yeah.

Sarah Kingsbury:    And then-[crosstalk 00:16:23]

Donna Cleveland:    ... still get it for that trial period.

Sarah Kingsbury:    Right. Exactly.

David Averbach:    I will say to me, it kind of depends on when I look through the titles I said, Yes, but I'm backpedaling a little bit, I want to look to the titles. I've been subscribing to New York Times for a while I just canceled because I just couldn't quite justify paying and then ... So I sort of have a little bit of money to spend on news, but I'm not sure that they're quite hitting that sweet spot for me. I'm not sure that the magazines, they have enough of them that I'm going to read them enough and it's going to be that same service that I was getting from New York time so we'll see.

Donna Cleveland:    To me it was the fact that they included newspapers is what made me say yes, when at first it was just like, it's only magazines, I didn't find that to be worth it. But that being said, I don't usually go to the LA Times or Wall Street Journal as new sources. If it had been the New York Times, I'd be more excited about that. But also I'm really glad they include both of those. And so assuming they do give enough articles away from the journal and from the LA Times, I think I will go with that. Because I have a few different magazine subscriptions. It wouldn't end up being as expensive as this is but this is probably a better value than what I'm getting now and I like to support journalism. And so I like the idea of doing that. To me with I think it's interesting so many people said No, and I wouldn't be surprised if it's that like a lot of people still don't want to pay.

Donna Cleveland:    It's like you can read so much online for free. I think there's going to be more resistance to the idea of having to pay for this.

David Averbach:    Yeah, I have big feelings about that, as somebody who clearly is trying to convince people to pay for content, I think it's important value that you're providing by doing that. But I think the publishers, and in this case Apple has provided enough in return. And the question is, are there enough magazines that people are interested in? Is this the right way of handling it? I think they probably got there because they got such big titles, but I don't know. I want to take a look at it.

Sarah Kingsbury:    Yeah, I mean, I'm a yes for the free trial.

David Averbach:    Okay.

Donna Cleveland:    So let's move on to the next service. Okay, we have two different sections to talk about with Apple TV. Because Apple first spent a long time just hyping their Apple TV app, they came out with a TV app with iOS 12. That sort of was the beginnings of what they're going to be doing now, which is, allow you to access all of your content, whether that's from Netflix or Hulu or another streaming service, iTunes titles that you've purchased or rented, cable content, all of that through one app. And so they were saying they're making that to be into a big deal saying that you can access everything from one app without having to bounce from app to app like you usually have to. How did you guys ... David, you seemed excited about this during the announcement.

David Averbach:    I've always been excited about this vision of being able to pull in all of your subscription services into one interface and integrate that with live TV. That always seems super appealing to me. That being said, I'm a little bit skeptical that they can pull it off because that's sort of what they've been promising all along. Now, they've added a few things here that I think make it a little bit closer to that reality. I think they're going to integrate with some live TV options which is nice with dish and Hulu, it look like they're also going to allow you to subscribe to third party services, which is nice. But I think the problem with the solution like this is it's a little bit all or nothing and unless you can play nice with everybody in that industry which Apple has not been able to do that well, it's hard. So for example, we were just debating whether or not an integrated with Netflix. It seems to be that it doesn't. So if you're watching shows on Netflix, and it doesn't get pulled into your one definitive interface, how definitive is it really?

Donna Cleveland:    I know yeah, it has to include Netflix.

David Averbach:    Yeah.

Donna Cleveland:    And we don't know, it's not coming out till the fall. Both Apple TV-

Sarah Kingsbury:    Actually, the app itself is getting the software update in May.

David Averbach:    Oh, okay.

Donna Cleveland:    Oh, okay. So the app you get their premium services until the fall.

Sarah Kingsbury:    Right.

Donna Cleveland:    But I guess we have to find out sooner about the app. Another thing they really hyped which I was skeptical about was that they were going to give you really great recommendations for content.

David Averbach:    Yeah.

Donna Cleveland:    Already Netflix and Hulu I think will have show recommendations for you based on what you've been watching. And Apple was trying to make it like put a special spin on how they were going to do this using machine learning to tailor show recommendations to you and then also have their editors watch tons of content and tell you what the best content is to watch. Already with Apple Music, they made a big huge deal about their music curation, which I ended up not like when I used to use Apple Music. I didn't really like a lot of the music they [crosstalk 00:21:30] for me.

Sarah Kingsbury:    It's still not great.

Donna Cleveland:    And so I just was skeptical as soon as I heard that.

Sarah Kingsbury:    I was too.

David Averbach:    What I would say yeah, I'm completely skeptical first of all, because these big services do a lot of that Netflix. I know they invest millions and millions in R&D to recommend the right show to you at the right time. And so it's like, okay, Apple, we're glad you're doing that too. I think the thing that appeals to me is the same thing. It's a unified interface because I don't know about you guys, but I have shows I'm watching on Netflix right now on HBO on amazon prime and then I have a few shows I'm watching because I have a paid subscription. I have a cable subscription that I'm watching it on like a TNT app or like NBC app or random apps and it's annoying to switch back and forth and having all of those in one interface would be awesome. And I guess you could get better recommendations by having a bigger picture of what I'm watching. But I also I'm skeptical. I'm skeptical that they can pull it off still.

Donna Cleveland:    Yeah, I think the way that I usually get around that right now is from the main Apple TV home screen if you just use Siri search, this the Apple TV remote it'll pretty much just like pop you right in [inaudible 00:22:35].

David Averbach:    Yeah, totally.

Donna Cleveland:    And so-

Sarah Kingsbury:    That's what I do.

Donna Cleveland:    ... it makes it pretty easy even though you still go through different apps. But I noticed watching my husband navigate it for some reason he like fight series search and just ever uses it. He does spend a long time going between the apps. So I feel like a lot of people just resist Siri and they shouldn't.

David Averbach:    Yeah, sounds like your husband problem [inaudible 00:22:58].

Sarah Kingsbury:    I think it's a common problem.

David Averbach:    Yeah.

Sarah Kingsbury:    Not just her husband. I was pretty happy, though, to see that they're bringing the app to Mac. And it's going to be available on some smart TVs and like Roku and Fire Stick.

David Averbach:    That was interesting. I think the thing that I was excited about is that Apple's focusing on this. Because this feels like a problem that if anybody's going to solve, it's going to be Apple despite my a little bit of skepticism on it. We're going to get to this later, original TV. That is not a problem that you point to App and Apple is perfectly situated to solve, but a hardware-software solution that involves large companies to work together. That's Apple strong suit, that's their wheelhouse. And I'm glad they're giving up on those types of projects in lieu of some of these other projects, which we'll talk about, but spoiler I'm skeptical.

Donna Cleveland:    Yeah. So I feel like this should be an improved experience for the free version for people but let's get into Apple TV plus now. So this is kind of this fall they didn't give a date they didn't give a price. I was a little disappointed I want to know. What are we talking here? So apple TV plus from ... it was a little bit vague the way they described it but they teach tease a bunch of original content they're spending $2 billion this year producing original content. Was there anything else to add about that? I guess that's pretty much all we know about it.

David Averbach:    They teased a lot of shows they had a lot of celebrities come on stage. Oprah was there Jennifer Aniston was there, Reese Witherspoon. So they clearly are going ... they're doing this big, this is not a half baked effort by Apple.

Donna Cleveland:    No it's not. But it's interesting because I feel like the way they were talking about it they're trying to make it sound like something really special and different but then we're all like, "Wait." But like pretty much it's just a Netflix competitor. Except for less it's like only original content from Apple. I think the way they're going to get people as if they have shows that sounds really cool, and people don't want to miss out. So they decided to pay for yet another streaming service, but it's not replacing any streaming services. Like they're saying it's ad free. And it's like, yeah, well, if you're paying for shows like da. The only thing that has ads left is it pretty much just live.

David Averbach:    Hulu, depending on your subscription?

Donna Cleveland:    Oh, yeah. Hulu does have ads? But yeah. It is a little bit like why is this so different? This is pretty much just like joining the ring with Hulu and Netflix.

David Averbach:    Yeah, totally.

Sarah Kingsbury:    Yeah, it's interesting, because like David was saying, and I was saying before this podcast, with each section they sort of like came up with their value proposition. Here's what we're doing with this cool thing. And what they said was the purpose of this seemed a little like uninspiring, even though they tried to make it very inspiring. It was like we're going to tell great stories that connect us. That's really nice idealistic idea but why does that make me want to subscribe to a streaming service?

Donna Cleveland:    Yeah, they have this whole promotional video, it's like directors and producers and actors talking about the purpose of storytelling and it's like those things are all true but you're wondering what ... already that's what TV and movies are doing and they don't really sell anyone on that, the entertainment business is booming.

David Averbach:    Yeah totally. And I think the thing I just kept finding myself wondering both leading up to the announcement with all the coverage of it and during, is like does the world need another Netflix? Why Apple? Why is Apple going to be the next Netflix? And is Apple positioned to be the right company for that? Because it just seems like such an everything about it just seems so unusual. They haven no clear value proposition as far as I'm concerned. They gave no clear reason why this is better than Netflix or than Amazon prime. The only value proposition they're giving is the have original content, which everybody has. So it's sort of like, Are there shows good enough to steal you away from the other services? And the answer is, we don't really know. But they don't have a ton of shows. So they're gonna be pretty amazing to steal you away, because Amazon has so many shows, and Netflix as well. So it's really confusing on all fronts. For me.

Donna Cleveland:    I know, unfortunately, with these services, it just looks like I'm going to be spending more money on stuff like it's not like I can buy this instead. And anything else, it's pretty much I probably would keep my Netflix and then also be buying Apple TV plus, which I might do if there are original shows that are interesting enough, but it's not something I'm going to be super excited. I'm not like, "Oh, yeah, I get to spend more money on another streaming service.

David Averbach:    And somebody made the comparison to the home pod. When Apple came out with ... something on our Facebook group did, when Apple came out with the home pod, they were so far behind Amazon, because Amazon had Echo for a long time. And I made the point on the Facebook group that, yes, that was true. But Apple had an inherent advantage and that it could tightly integrate the home pod with its ecosystem in a way that the Echo could not be integrated with Apple's ecosystem. And so even though it wasn't as feature rich, it's still had a lot of clear value propositions that the echo did not have on iPhone owner. Where's that is not true for this. There is no inherent integration benefit that Apple is getting from this. They're just directly competing with Netflix and in my opinion, failing to provide a clear differentiation.

Donna Cleveland:    We have people adding new entries into the pole because I asked people if they're planning to get Apple TV, plus. We had someone enter in, I have too many shows that I watch now can't get to them all. A few people voted on that. And then someone else put depends on price and more people voted on that. So I think a lot of people only one person said yes. And I think it's just hard for anyone to say yes, yeah, without knowing how much it's going to cost or really, how much original content are you going to be missing by not getting it.

Sarah Kingsbury:    Yeah.

Donna Cleveland:    So we had a listener question that I just wanted to ... someone just wrote in asking about Apple news plus, and asking, how would this be better than Flipboard which you get for free? So for people who don't know what that is, Flipboard is already a news aggregator app where you can basically read newspaper and magazine articles and blog articles and follow topics you want and aggregate it all together into one app, and it's pretty awesome. We're on there.

David Averbach:    Yeah we are on there. I'll attempt to answer this. My understanding having used Flipboard but it's been a while so maybe they've added stuff I don't know about. Is that they are basically aggregating free online content. Whereas so that's comparable to apples free Apple news. And in fact, a lot of people when Apple came out with Apple news accuse them of stealing Flipboard. [crosstalk 00:30:16]. Yeah. Whereas this with the paid service, it will be aggregating content that you typically would have paid for via subscription. So it's mostly magazine content, that either would be a digital magazine, you'd be paying for a print magazine, you're paying for it. Instead, they're aggregating it all within one app. Would you agree with that?

Sarah Kingsbury:    Yeah.

Donna Cleveland:    Same thing with the LA Times and the journal, which is also included, like you really can't get that free for it anyway. So yeah.

Sarah Kingsbury:    I just have to say, I mean, kind of like most things, when you pay for content or that means people are being paid to produce it and there's a lot more just production value, a lot more time and just hard good work goes into it because-

Donna Cleveland:    And accountability.

Sarah Kingsbury:    Right? Yeah, So that's an important difference. If you're happy with the free content you're getting and we do free content, but it's paid for by advertising.

David Averbach:    Yeah.

Sarah Kingsbury:    So it's really not free you're paying with your time and attention to ads. So to me that would be the value in it as compared to Flipboard is that I might have access to higher quality content. The question is if it's the high quality content that interests me.

David Averbach:    Yes, absolutely. Great answer.

Donna Cleveland:    Yeah, very good. Okay. So that was Richard Beal answering his question. Thank you for adding in. So we want to move on and talk about there are two other services and these were ones that were not as much hyped up in the rumors. There's Apple arcades. This is a gaming platform that Apple came up with an Apple card, which is a credit card, which is crazy. I was not expecting that.

Sarah Kingsbury:    I mean [inaudible 00:32:00].

Donna Cleveland:    [crosstalk 00:32:00] so mad.

Sarah Kingsbury:    [inaudible 00:32:04] did predict those things. And I remember, it's like editing it. And I was like, that's interesting [inaudible 00:32:08], that's a kind of random rumor that you're including in this article about the announcement. And he was correct.

David Averbach:    Yeah. And he was mad because-

Donna Cleveland:    [inaudible 00:32:17] all about it.

David Averbach:    Yeah. When some of us were surprised, which made him really mad because clearly we hadn't read his article.

Sarah Kingsbury:    I read it.

David Averbach:    Well, you edited it.

Sarah Kingsbury:    Yeah.

Donna Cleveland:    Let's talk about Apple arcade first. This is the gaming service that Apple is coming out with. one was it available? I don't have it in my notes here.

Sarah Kingsbury:    I have it in my notes. I believe it's coming in the fall.

David Averbach:    Okay.

Sarah Kingsbury:    And it will be available in 150 countries and they did not tell us the price.

Donna Cleveland:    They did not tell us the price. Okay, so but it's going to be 100 games. They're only going to be available through Apple arcade. And there Apple's actually backing these game developers to create special games for this service. I am not a gamer. And so I feel like I want to hand this over to Sarah because her daughter, she thought would be interested in this. You talked a little bit about like being excited about Apple arcade. So I thought maybe that's something you'd want to talk about a little bit.

Sarah Kingsbury:    I kind of wish we'd invite a [inaudible 00:33:16] on. Because I feel like this is the part of the announcement he was most excited about. And [inaudible 00:33:21] is very much a gamer. And I think it's because Apple was, in their announcement said, there are a lot of really great high quality games that you have to pay for. And it's hard for them to succeed because they're competing with all of these free games. And we want to help support these developers, we're making these high quality games really succeed. And so they're having a subscription service. And there won't be any in app purchases, and you'll have access to all the updates. And there's no ads and it's free family sharing, so you don't pay like more to include your family. And you can manage your kids access through the screen time app. Well, it's not really an app it's a setting. So I think for families whose kids play games, it's big deal because you can have control over the games and all of them are available offline, which is really important for traveling when David was mentioning, but I think as far as like adults who are really into gaming.

Sarah Kingsbury:    That's exciting too. I definitely will pay for they mentioned Monument Valley. I don't know if that particular game will be included in this but I will definitely pay for a good quality game. And I think and I'm not even I wouldn't really consider myself a gamer. So I think that any adults or older kids who really care about gaming will like this, which is why I'm guessing I will end up with the subscription because my daughter spends like a huge portion of her allowance and money she earns from working on like fortnight and stuff and if they can have a game that is compelling and interesting. I think that would be worth it.

David Averbach:    Yeah. I will say my partner's son used to have, he still has a Kindle fire, the kids version which comes with a similar service. And it's basically they have all these kids games and action movies too that you can download and TV shows that you can download. And it's free if you buy this, at least it's free for two years. And it was a great service. It's like he could sit there and you can view all the games he could download every one of those free and these were pretty high quality games. And then he's recently we've kind of typically uses an iPad now when he travels and so we kind of default towards buying him free games and it's really frustrating because the quality of the game often isn't very good it crashes a lot it doesn't work very well offline and then of course if it's free up front it means they're trying to ... we keep trying out all these services trying to monetize it somehow. Which means they're constantly trying to get him to buy things in the game. The whole game revolves around monetizing this person who gets invest in the game.

David Averbach:    So I like the concept. Of course, again, as with all of this stuff depends on what games they have, and if they're good, and how much it costs. And Apple didn't give us a lot of that. But there's an intrigu

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