y2an

From what little has been rumored, I don’t think this is intended to be mainly an interactive device, rather a microphone to listen to every conversation around the wearer and transmit that conversation back to open AI. 100 million of these, 100 million sets of private conversations captured without the consent of the participants and used to boost OpenAI’s models. Very, very scary. An enormous intrusion into the lives of millions of people. The actual utility to the user will be through multiple interfaces including on screen information on their other devices, and presumably AI agents acting in the background on spoken requests.

It feels like they are trying to correct for some misjudged pricing decisions made in the past, but sorry Adobe, that train left the station. Usually with tech either the features improve at the same price, or the price goes down over time. An explicit price increase without additional features will be seen as without merit and create further customer loyalty. Good luck with that, Adobe.

France used an app to identify vaccination status during the pandemic. Entry to establishments depended on the establishment successfully scanning a up to date certificate code in your app.

Apple is very deliberate and disciplined in its product positioning and pricing, especially over product margin. Short term, in the US market I expect them to weather the storm (they can afford to, and International and Services will hold the fort). As product updates are introduced I expect them to increase the value proposition (such as more base features) to take consumer sting out of price increases due to tariffs. More memory or SSD is cheap to add and cheers up consumers. 

“Maybe they see something we don’t.”

It’s called downstream impact (DSI). With a little analysis you can estimate this quite well. I’m sure Apple has a good handle on the incremental impact per customer from having Apple TV+ available. It’s not a loss making venture, it’s an investment.