CloudTalkin

The battery is user-replaceable so they aren't discarded when the battery dies. The battery will also last over a year with regular use.

This is a killer feature that may get overlooked.  The product really doesn't support any use cases for me personally, but for those who will use them knowing they aren't disposable is a definite benefit.

rob53 said:

pulseimages said:

A penny is fair?

Assume Apple has 60M subscribers and each plays one song per day. That's $600K/day. If I understand the article, 52% of that goes to the label but who knows how much actually goes to the artist (probably pennies with the label getting the majority of it). That's $312K/day or $113,880,000/yr with only one song per day per subscriber.

I'm sure people using Apple Music would listen on average to more than one song per day (365 songs per year) and I doubt there are 60M artists on Apple Music so calculating what each artist on average would get isn't easy but I could see 1 penny adding up pretty fast for many artists but also not making any money for many artists.

Any math that illustrates what Apple pays also illustrates what Spotify pays as well.  155 million subscribers at 1 play per day at half a penny is $775K per day.  If, as claimed by WSJ, Spotify can sometimes pay as much as Apple sometimes pays, then we're talking about $1.55 million per day.  All this shows is at the tip of the spear, big payments are made regardless of the service.  At the tail end? Not so much.
Variety has a good article that sums up the inaccuracy of what you and I are doing: trying to make a direct comparison.  It's not really possible.  It's a short but decent read.
https://variety.com/2021/digital/news/apple-music-penny-per-stream-1234953179/
Highlighted: 

Apple says in the letter that it pays 52% of its subscription revenue to record labels; Spotify says it pays two-thirds of every dollar of revenue to rights holders, with 75% to 80% of that going to labels. That breaks down to 50 to 53 cents on the dollar, depending on agreements between the service and different labels, according to the WSJ.
Reps for Apple Music and Spotify declined Variety‘s requests for comment.
To a degree, these competing payment claims are largely a matter of dueling calculators: The comparisons aren’t really apples-to-apples, because Spotify generates significantly more revenue for the music industry than Apple Music due to its much larger user base and, thus, its much larger number of streams per month. The comparison is also complicated by the face that Spotify has a free tier that does not generate as much revenue as its paid service, although it has essentially been proven to be an effective on-ramp for the paid service. - Variety

dk49 said:

What exactly is LG providing to Apple? Batteries? 

From the article: "Because LG Group affiliates including LG Display, LG Chem, LG Energy Solution and LG Innotek are already included in Apple's parts supply chain, Apple doesn't have to worry about any supply chain issues," said one source. "
LG Display provides displays for some iPhones, iPads, iMacs, and watches.  Not sure about laptop screens, but maybe some of those as well.
LG Chem provides some batteries.

• LG ES - spinoff from LG Chem. Batteries and battery storage solutions.

LG Innotek provides camera modules.

LG is a long time partner for Apple.

lkrupp said:

But, but, but Apple TV+ doesn’t have 25,000 1950s SciFi schlock movies like Amazon Prime does. It doesn’t have a back catalog of thousands of crappy B movies like Netflix. And it certainly does not have Nicolas Cage’s complete filmography of all the Oscar worthy dung he has starred in. But, but, but...Apple TV+ is a failure at 4.99/mo.

Looks like you posted before reading the actual article.  AI's misleading headline is not really indicative of the actual content of the article.  

The article implies that Apple has the least amount of success in the area where they focus the most amount of attention:

It noted that Apple TV+ "put most of its effort into dramas," with 47 of its 70 titles falling into that category. Apple's average drama rating suffers, though, at a 3.9 IMDb average. That average is last among the platforms, translating to a "Poor" rating.

An easy take from the article is Apple's reported push for quality programming seems to a decent strategy... overall, hence the better average IMDb rating for it's titles.  They also need to be more considerate of their drama selection since it seems the ROI in ratings doesn't seem to be paying good dividends.

AI included a link to the source article from Self.  It's an interesting read.  Excerpted from the source:

Key findings from IMDb genre analysis:

• Netflix has the best game-show content out of all streaming services (6.75 IMDb rating)
• HBO Max has the best documentaries, and has almost 300 of them (299)
• Hulu has the highest-rated comedies (137) but Netflix (1,785), and HBO Max (1,252) have far more to choose from
• Disney+ has the highest-rated sci-fi content, while Hulu takes the top spot for animations
• HBO Max has half the number of horror content (171) compared to Netflix (359) but is on average better quality (6.21 v 5.19)
• Apple TV+ has put most of its effort into dramas (47) but only averages 3.9 IMDb score per show.
• HBO Max has the best sports content averaging 6.8 for each piece of content (Hulu has a high score but only 2 pieces of sports content)

Full IMDb category ratings per streaming service.  Highest rated service in bold.

Genres	Netflix	Prime Video	Disney+	Hulu	HBO Max	Apple TV+
Action	6.39	3.35	6.24	6.90	6.96	6.38*
Adventure	6.09	5.68	5.84	7.10	6.61	4.79*
Animation	5.63	6.52	5.88	7.41	7.01	5.96
Biography	6.70	4.64	6.82	7.05	7.43	5.69*
Comedy	6.13	4.95	5.95	6.85	6.59	5.40
Crime	6.37	5.83	6.22	6.70	6.76	1.67*
Documentary	6.81	1.90	6.22	6.98	7.29	5.51
Drama	6.37	5.41	5.85	6.96	6.92	3.92
Family	5.90	3.93	5.96	6.92*	6.73	5.17
Fantasy	5.55	4.53	5.78	6.36*	6.19	2.73*
Film-Noir	7.07*	7.40*	N/A	0.00*	7.74*	N/A
Game-Show	6.75	4.37*	4.93*	5.10*	5.44*	N/A
History	5.63	5.81	7.29	7.50*	7.59	2.55*
Horror	5.19	3.76	5.85	5.50*	6.21	4.11*
Music	5.95	4.53	4.47	6.51*	6.44	3.98*
Musical	4.24	4.57	6.54	8.20*	6.34	2.44*
Mystery	5.79	5.33	6.44	6.15*	7.20	6.76*
News	6.01	1.10*	4.00*	7.80*	7.22*	1.68*
Reality-TV	6.02	3.13	4.65	7.03*	6.52	5.09*
Romance	6.31	5.02	6.26	7.15*	5.04	4.25*
Sci-Fi	4.63	4.10	6.48	6.63*	6.28	2.94*
Short	4.64	2.09	4.99	6.65*	6.93	1.16*
Sport	6.33	4.19	3.15	7.31*	6.84	3.37*
Talk-Show	5.04	2.73	2.90*	7.05*	4.32*	2.48*
Thriller	4.68	4.88	7.13*	5.37*	5.70	N/A
War	7.26	5.32*	8.80*	7.33*	7.38	3.38*
Western	5.86	4.20	6.30*	6.80*	7.09	N/A

Apologies to all for length.

yensid98 said:

This has to include things like movie, tv and music purchases right? If not, I have zero idea how people are spending this much. I haven't bought or spent money on an iPhone app in about 6 years. None of my friends or family spend on the App Store either. I can't imagine what people have spent $138 on in 2020. Wow! Just crazy!

Overwhelmingly, iOS users spend money on games... especially IAP laden games like Candy Crush Saga and Gardenscapes.  The amount iOS users spend on games more than doubles the amount spent on the next 4 categories combined.  Games is over 7x the next largest category, Entertainment (movie, tv, music).  Generally speaking iOS users happily accept being nickle-and-dimed with IAP much more so than any other form of commerce on the App Store.  As with most things, our forum mentality of "IAP" sucks (it does) doesn't really carry over into the real world.    Would have been cool if AI included the graphs since they're a bit more illuminating.



I always get a little chuckle from people's personal anecdotes like "I don't spend on the apps store" or "Nobody I know spends on the app store".  The App Store generates 10's of billions of dollars per year (est 6.4 of them in 2020) so someone is obviously spending money on the App Store.