Hi, this is Wayne again with a topic “Apple Is Finally Making Friends…”.
A bunch of news coming out of CES 2019 will ya. So apparently Apple is deciding to collaborate. Cola, they’re gon na make some friends. Things are happening. That is good news.
I think it’s imperative. I think it’s important especially right now. So here’s a story, LG’s new TVs, will support Apple’s, AirPlay and homekit. Also Samsung had their very own announcement in which they said that their TVs will not only have airplay but also iTunes, built-in that will allow them to deliver the inventory of movies TV shows and so on. That, for now have only existed mostly almost exclusively in Apple devices. Apple doesn’t do this kind of thing. You know called making friends no little sign deals. They don’t show up on Samsung TVs. Well now they do, and the reason it’s particularly important at this moment is because Apple needs to lean into their services business phone sales. We all heard about it, you read about it: Wall Street can’t shut up about it. The sales of iPhones, Apple’s bread and butter is slumping in China, prompting Apple to slash its revenue forecasts for the first time in more than 15 years.
Iphone sales are not what they used to be. People’S phones are good. They’Re chilling they’re hanging out hardware, isn’t gon na, be what it was until there’s some some gigantic shift in how we compute it’s not happening immediately. Smart phones are what they are. So Apple needs to become more like Amazon, Google and start really leaning into its services.
Business: this is a step in the right direction. Here: shake hands with Samsung, get on more screens, get your ecosystem out there and and allow people to start building their inventory of content that belongs to your services. Also, some recent news broke about Apple, investing a lot more money in content, yeah billions billions. They want to start a streaming service at the same time.
This happens. Apple starts to target, let’s say Netflix streaming, possibly even YouTube. They want your time.
They want your eyeballs. Well, who else wants that Amazon wants that Google wants that Disney? Wants that as well? Disney might even want this yeah a lot of players in this space for your attention will. My eyeballs are hot property glued yeah booth, the streaming service? Everybody wants those eyeballs! Well now this is uncharacteristic for Apple.
We all know Apple likes to keep things tight, the walled garden, their own space, their own environment. They can control all the various aspects. The experience that you have on their hardware, the only other way, I’m aware of to interact with purchases through Apple for content on a piece of hardware that doesn’t belong to Apple, would be on iTunes on Windows, and I don’t know how many people use that this. On the other hand, seems like a better move, because when you boot up one of these new Smart TVs, you have so many options for services that are sitting right there. Are you really going to go out and buy a separate box, an Apple TV box when you’ve already got Netflix coming coming on the TV to begin with, not to mention the Apple TV is like 150 bucks yeah that is expensive, especially compared to the competitors in That space, the Roku’s and the Amazon boxes yep and the airplay thing is just super convenient if you are an Apple user already, if you have an Apple device in fact right now, you are using airplay to broadcast to this display from your laptop and it’s super Seamless and to have that baked into the TV without the need for a separate box means, I think, a lot more people will use it, and I like that, because the TV still remains a relatively social screen yeah, you could be showing me, you know, photos of Otus, which I do from time to time right up here, yeah in a social kind of setting, you could be showing me pictures of your vacation. You could be showing me a sandwich yeah exactly I would now.
There is a question as to why Apple didn’t just go out of their way to make their own TV, I mean they’re, buying screens from Samsung for their phones. Why not just have a screen by a large scale screen for the home, put an Apple logo on it? Have it boot straight into an Apple TV like interface? Maybe they’ll do that one day, but I feel like this is actually more important right now. It signals a change, a shift in the company’s personality, and I like that, especially in an environment where Apple isn’t necessarily increasing their market share. So, in other words, new customers are coming on to the internet, especially in emerging markets, and they are looking for ways to potentially interact with all the things that Apple can do previously.
The only way into Apple’s world was via hardware, which is primarily fairly expensive yep by them. Opening this up, you start to wonder about the other ways in which they may shift their culture. Could we potentially see iMessage on Android yeah? That could be a big one. I mean I’m not saying that’s gon na happen, but this opens those doors, those kinds of conversations building an infrastructure that, if Apple, isn’t so strict about things like this. Maybe they start to play nice in the playground, make more friends and just be a little easier to get along with. If that happens, I think it’s a win for tech fans. I think it already is with this announcement right here, and it means that people are gon na, have more access to more content by these guys shaking hands every so often yeah, yeah .