Gadgetory

I got to go to Apple's “show time” event this week where it unveiled a credit card, a news subscription, a TV app, a game subscription, and a TV subscription service thing. And, you know what? This event was weird. Like, weird for an Apple event, but also just weird, in general. I've had a day to think about it, and I keep coming back to the same nagging thought over and over again: almost none of the stuff that Apple announced was made available right away, which is not how Apple usually does things. So here's a question: why did Apple need to do this event this week? Okay, so you know the narrative around Apple as a business. iPhone sales are peaking, and so the company needs to come up with new ways to make money. Okay, sure, but you shouldn't care about how much money Apple makes. You just shouldn't. I don’t. I only care about one thing: are the products any good? The only new service we can actually make any judgment calls about right now is Apple News Plus. It seems good if you like magazines and so-so if you want news. It also has some launch bugs. We're going to look at it much more closely on theverge.com, so stay tuned for that. But for the rest of the stuff that Apple announced, it's not coming out until later. May for Apple TV Channels, summer for the Apple Card, and fall for Apple Arcade and Apple TV Plus. Which means, I'm not really sure what Apple was doing by announcing all of it before it was ready. Maybe they were trying to get ahead of rumors? But that doesn't make sense because the rumors we had already for almost all of the stuff they've announced had a bunch of details. And Apple actually didn't tell us anything more than what we had already guessed based on all of those rumors. The thing that should have been the splashiest, most exciting announcement was Apple TV Plus. But instead, we got a bunch of weird light-up reveals of random celebrities and then, when they got onstage, all they did was describe their shows with these weird wallpaper things. All connected through Apple! (clapping) We didn't get to see, you know, real previews of the TV shows that Apple is making. Worst of all, Apple didn't even announce pricing on TV Plus or Arcade. Pricing! Tell us what it will cost! Maybe this event was all about drumming up hype and trying to use that hype to pressure more companies into working with these new Apple services. I guess that could make sense, but it also seems like this event isn't really likely to make Netflix or The New York Times suddenly want in on this sweet Apple subscription action. Okay, so I lied a little bit earlier when I said that the only thing I care about is whether or not the products are any good. I also care a lot about how technology changes culture and how technology itself is culture. We've talked about it on this video series before. And Apple is merging the two by putting culture, like TV shows and news and games and whatever, into the technological products it’s creating, like the iPhone. So, while you shouldn't care about Apple stock price, unless you're an investor. But to be very clear, I am not an investor. Anyway, I do think you should care a lot about how Apple affects our culture. And, more specifically, I think you should care about how Apple thinks about itself. What Apple says about what Apple is and what Apple aspires to be helps us understand what its products are going to be like, and how they might affect culture. Which brings us back to an earlier question: if Apple isn't actually releasing products that we can use right away, then maybe this event was about something else? It was about putting a stake in the ground. Maybe this event was designed to redefine how Apple participates in our culture. So, that's all really heavy. Here's something else, something you might not know about me, is I used to be a TA at the University of Minnesota, and I was a writing tutor before that. So I have taught a lot of freshman composition. And one of the things that just made me groan, that made me realize I was in for a really bad essay with some really surface-level thinking, was whenever a student started a paper by writing out the dictionary definition of a word, and thinking that that counted as some kind of deep insight into the topic they were writing about. You know, like this. So what is a service? Well, if you look it up in the dictionary, you'll see that a service is defined as the action of helping or doing work for someone. Oh God, just, if you're a student, please just never do this. Luckily, the thinking in the keynote got better. Tim Cook's whole pitch is that Apple is providing services because Apple cares more about your privacy than your bank or news sites or cable networks or even game developers. Apple will give you all of these services, and then when you use them, you don't have to worry about being tracked by the companies that provide all of that content. So, for example, this slide came up over and over and over again. All of the stuff on that slide? They're good things. There may be even good reasons to subscribe to stuff through Apple instead of through whatever service you're using right now. But it was, and it still is, super weird to say that you're going to provide all of that privacy… later. When it's released… later. The privacy angle really is the main thing here. And, in truth, I believe Apple when it says it's not collecting data, and it's not sharing whatever data it does collect. But I also have to admit that I'm not looking for more things to lock me into Apple world. The most popular story that we saw on our site on Apple day was the Apple credit card. And I get it. Credit cards suck. All of the tracking that they do sucks. And some disruption there would be a very good thing. But is that how you want to think about Apple? As a bank or a credit card company? Or even a next-generation content subscription service thing? I don't know. Tim Cook ended the keynote with this line: Because at Apple, the customer is and always will be at the center of everything that we do. I want to believe that. But I couldn't help but feel like a lot of the stuff that Apple announced this week was more about Apple than it was about Apple's customers. The company presented a new vision for itself and for what it does, but it didn't actually deliver anything yet but promises. It was a very flashy, very expensive presentation of a… business plan? Apple has always been the company that delivers. This week, it was sort of just the company that promised. And that was just weird. Hey, everybody. Thank you so much for watching. Let me know what you thought of Apple's “show time” event down in the comments. We'll try and hang out and have a chat. Also, stay subscribed to The Verge. Were going to have a bunch more reviews coming. I'm pretty sure we've got those new AirPods coming.