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Apple's Reinvention as a Services Company Starts for Real Monday

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Re: Apple's Reinvention as a Services Company Starts for Real Monday

#151
post #125
post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Take the marketing pitch with a grain of salt. They've been keeping track of aggregate usage data pretty much from the beginning. Also, they already have to keep track of things like which apps/music/movies you have bought for accounting purposes at the very least. For subscriptions they most likely also have to track consumption (i.e. per access data) for royalty/revenue share payments. I remember a story from the t…

I think society is okay with some knowledge about individuals. And that information is valuable. But it's still unclear where the line gets drawn that becomes creepy and inverts its value. If you have the corporate structure and policies to be able to draw an arbitrary line, you're likely better suited to capture long-term value than if you have no line at all and willingly scrape all data just to have it (ie, Facebo…

I think the line should be drawn at allowing 3rd parties to search user profiles. I’m content with my content being one of billions on their servers but i’m not ok with my content being indexible for any other reason than what is required for the service to work.

Basically: Select * from AppleDB where userID=Me should never be allowed and failure to prevent such access should result in heavy fines

Re: Apple's Reinvention as a Services Company Starts for Real Monday

#152
post #19

I continue to wonder why they don't have or push iPhone as a Services ( The iPhone Upgrade Programme ) and continue to rely on mostly Carriers for Financing. 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. Yo…

> Apple Music, Apple News Magazine, Apple TV and Apple Game

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.

Re: Apple's Reinvention as a Services Company Starts for Real Monday

#153
post #140

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think the strategy is to make airplay 2 available on any smart tv or device that they can. 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…

I use my iPad to stream content for my mother in law to my TV using AirPlay. It's a huge pain in the ass. She can't do it for herself, I have to set it up because of the various steps involved. I don't see that as a viable workaround.

Thanks! I don’t know the difficulties involved; I have no TV, just a projector. What steps did you have to do?

I agree that if most devices are cumbersome to stream to, then that’s too much friction for almost everyone.

Re: Apple's Reinvention as a Services Company Starts for Real Monday

#154
post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They could even bundle in a MacBook, iPad, and watch at a higher price tier so that the hard core Apple fans could pay a single monthly subscription fee and always have the latest model of every device.

I wonder if a subscription fee for hardware would appeal to businesses.

It does. We lease all our laptops.

Re: Apple's Reinvention as a Services Company Starts for Real Monday

#155
post #47
post #19

I continue to wonder why they don't have or push iPhone as a Services ( The iPhone Upgrade Programme ) and continue to rely on mostly Carriers for Financing. 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. Yo…

They could even bundle in a MacBook, iPad, and watch at a higher price tier so that the hard core Apple fans could pay a single monthly subscription fee and always have the latest model of every device.

This sort of thing could not appeal to me any more, honestly. I've been trying to work out the most cost-efficient way of doing exactly this.

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.

Re: Apple's Reinvention as a Services Company Starts for Real Monday

#156

> This service will combine stories from newspapers, websites, and magazines into a new tab in the Apple News app on iPhones, iPads, and Macs. > 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…

If you're a uMatrix fan, just open up the tool in your favorite browser (Chrome, Firefox, etc) and see what cost you pay for that Reddit service. Hint - it ain't free . You pay in data. Reddit has a horde of remote JS embedded just waiting to read every single little thing you do on the platform (Not saying Apple also isn't collecting various metrics, but certainly saying that Apple isn't trying to collect every litt…

I lurk Reddit with JS disabled. It used to work perfectly, but recent changes made it so that you have to enable first-party scripts to see all the comments in threads with lots of comments.

Re: Apple's Reinvention as a Services Company Starts for Real Monday

#157

> This service will combine stories from newspapers, websites, and magazines into a new tab in the Apple News app on iPhones, iPads, and Macs. > 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…

Cal Newport’s new book ‘Digital Minimalism’ offers a good viewpoint on why this is useful: how much time to you lose mindlessly clicking around on HN and Reddit each week? (Unfortunately, I keep track of this and it is disturbing.) With a quality news feed the hope would be that you would get information you need with spending less of your time. I am taking a different track towards digital minimalism: I don’t count…

What do you use to keep track? I should probably start doing too.

Re: Apple's Reinvention as a Services Company Starts for Real Monday

#158
post #150

They're gonna need a huge internal cultural shift if this is going to work. Their entire company is built around hardware. Services are "just good enough". No one buys an iPhone because of the services offered -- you buy the services because you already have the iPhone and it works better than the third party services. But I don't know anyone who adores the Apple services. Or to put it another way, even if they offer…

Do they have any iconic software that wasn't appropriated from NeXT? Keynote is pretty good. Everything else is either awful or basic.

Pages was excellent during the 00s.

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.

Re: Apple's Reinvention as a Services Company Starts for Real Monday

#159
post #106

One interesting question is how viable this can be if they continue their strategy of differentiation through privacy. Doing "services" for people intrinsically means knowing about them. What they watch, what they read, what they listen to, what they need, who they are. The more you know, the better you can "service" them. By pursuing this path they may quickly find themselves sucked into a slipperly slope that puts…

They are taking a few Billion a year from Google for search placement after that any marketing they do about privacy is mostly bull.

Re: Apple's Reinvention as a Services Company Starts for Real Monday

#160
post #106

One interesting question is how viable this can be if they continue their strategy of differentiation through privacy. Doing "services" for people intrinsically means knowing about them. What they watch, what they read, what they listen to, what they need, who they are. The more you know, the better you can "service" them. By pursuing this path they may quickly find themselves sucked into a slipperly slope that puts…

Apple has sketched out their middle ground here: differential privacy. They're already using this for e.g. QuickType suggestions. However I still agree there is a significant risk here.
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