rare comment

The editorial's comment: "Netflix, Amazon and Disney may have exceptional brand loyalty, but none of them make a device that a large percentage of Americans carry around in their pockets" is accurate but seems irrelevant. Each is available on every device that TV+ is available on. So I don't think Apple has a special advantage over N, A or D - Apple's advantage is over newcomers who need to break through to introduce their services. ps. I include Disney even though Disney+ hasn't launched because I understand that Disney+ has already gotten enough interest to be in this group with 20% intention to subscribe - https://www.indiewire.com/2019/06/disney-plus-survey-1202148239/).

foregoneconclusion said:

Metriacanthosaurus said: It is worrisome to see Apple spending a lot of money to produce junk content that no one asked for, and then turning around and pretending that it is a huge success because they're counting every hardware purchase as a $60 year of TV. Despite the fact that no one has paid for it directly, and no one has willingly subscribed to it. After the first year when none of those people continue using it, they can hide all the dropoff by only reporting "new" subs, which will be in the tens of millions thanks to new hardware sales. This pollutes the entire industry with fraud. 

Do you consider Amazon including Prime Video for free to Amazon Prime subscribers fraudulent? It's not like this is a new idea...to tie a free service to a hardware sale or to signing up with a particular cellular provider. Apple TV+ is a value-added proposition for their current or future customers. 

Another way to think of it is: "We want to deliver something valuable to customers but that doesn't cost us more for each delivery. So we can't move everyone to OLED or add storage. But content has near zero marginal cost for each new customer and so it is a real benefit for customers without scaling up in cost as we add customers. And it makes AppleTV, iPads and Macs more valuable at the same time." I'm still not convinced but, if you assume Apple wanted to deliver SOMETHING, video is a good choice even with the astronomical figures.

Weird that Apple doesn't maintain a list of current offers (or at least none that I can easily find with a google search). I know it is a bit at odds with privacy but I think it would be nice to have a notification pop up on which is the best card available when in-store or on a site.

I understand why Apple wants the games to work with touch screens but game controllers are really very different in capability than touch screens (and vice versa) so I worry this will be a handicap for developers (and result in either weaker games or some game concepts never being introduced). But at $5/month it's a low risk that is hard to resist. I do wish the full 100 titles were available at launch and that AppleTV was supported at launch ("eventually Apple TV and Mac") as the neglect of gaming on AppleTV has been frustrating (we bought controllers years ago and have almost no games to use them on).

indieshack said:

melgross said:

But realistically, it’s going nowhere. Apple needed to have a much cheaper model as well, when they first introduced this.

Agreed, this piece should be marked as an editorial (perhaps it is, I didn’t notice that on mobile) since it’s a highly subjective (I.e. biased) perspective. From my experience of the HomePod it’s a classy piece of kit but the price point is way too high (and no, I don’t think this is part of a cunning marketing plan) - Bluetooth please.

On my screen, the headline is "Editorial: After taking..."