43 Emotional Minutes 🕹️🤧
🎮Sony showed their console hand, 🍎Apple is all bundled up, 👓Facebook is detached from reality, and 🏰the TikTok saga ends with a missing princess
Forty-Three Minutes
That’s how much time it took Sony to announce the pricing and availability during their showcase last week; the entire program lasted for forty-seven minutes.
The virtual show was leaned heavily on Sony’s advantage when it comes to attractive, exclusive first-party games that gamers can find here and nowhere else. No teraflop talk, no speed tests no pixel or FPS-counting during the event, Sony is behind the competition in those and they know it. Instead, they chose to appeal to the consumers’ emotional attachment to tried and tested game franchises. A solid strategy if you ask me, stories sell products better than specs.
We’ve been lying in wait for the past week for the information that was shown on two frames: $399 for the Digital Edition, $499 for the Big Boy, released on Nov 12th.
After seeing the $299 price of the Xbox Series S, most of us were aware there’s no way Sony can bring down the price of their Digital Edition device that low considering that it, unlike the Xbox, has the exact same components inside except for the optical drive. Which is fine, even if you were to compare computing power alone, Sony’s device would surely surpass Microsoft’s.
But, when we’re pondering the purchase of a product of this kind, we’re not comparing hardware, are we? At least the majority of consumers sure aren’t. Instead, the console itself is just a delivery mechanism for the object of desire, video games themselves. The actual name and shape of the box or the form factor of the controller do little to sway consumers, we just want to play a game that we like, one that our friends play or one that receives great reviews. If a lot of these games are exclusive to one console and third-party products are available to be played across all platforms —as is becoming increasingly true with time—, it only makes sense that people will buy that product. And right now, that package is made by Sony and the many game development studios they own.
It wouldn’t be 2020 if we didn’t have at least one service launch during a hardware event and Sony was no exception last week. The PlayStation Plus Collection is a perk for the existing PlayStation Plus subscription service that allows buyers of the PS5 access to a library of landmark games including God of War, The last of Us, Fallout 4, The Last Guardian, Bloodborne, and more. This is Sony’s way of meeting Microsoft’s Game Pass offer with fewer games but of a much higher quality and keeping the $10 price compared to Xbox’s $15. It’s also a good-not-great way to give people something to play on launch day, more on this below.
Considering all of these aspects, how do we think Sony will fare come November?
Well, the first thing that sticks out based on the games sell consoles mantra I’ve been preaching, is the lack of PS5-specific content on launch day, with only Spiderman: Miles Morales having the potential to become a huge seller, assisted by Demon’s Souls targeting a smaller, much more niche audience. The PS Plus Collection is bound to have a lot of content for first-time console buyers, but veteran gamers have already played those titles to kingdom come. Sony would do well to get those studios into high gear and releasing new games early next year, but the fact of the matter is that the competition isn’t applying any pressure on this front either.
They are, however, doing a good job of establishing an attractive installment plan when it comes to the Xbox line. Those $25 and $35 plans for each version will be eye candy for a lot of people looking to buy Christmas presents on the cheap side. At the end of the day, Xboxes will run Fortnite and Call of Duty, that’s good enough for a certain category of consumers. When xCloud eventually starts working to an acceptable level of quality, it could become the straw that broke the camel’s back and turn more people to Microsoft’s solution.
Apple to Apples
Apple’s pre-recorded event last week was beautifully created and well delivered by all presenters, with information focused around two big hardware products without feeling restrictive and just enough comic relief in just the right places. A lot to learn from them, the others have…
In this day and age, most announcements leak well before the conference itself so the new iPad and Apple Watch staples were no surprise —even if the exact specs were not predicted per se— but the new services and some functionality were worthy of, dare I say, our main monitors.
Watch. The blood oxygen sensor on the new device is very relevant in our existing COVID status quo with life becoming more sedentary and while a lot of consumers were expecting a way to non-invasively measure blood sugar, that still looks a few years away for most manufacturers. Superficial additions like watch faces and new straps are a matter of fashion taste and subjective preference, I could take them or leave them, but that blue strap sure looks like the blue that’s supposed to replace the green color on existing iPhone models come next month.
Two watch-related things were questionable for me during the event. First, I have doubts about are the new non-adjustable silicone straps and their flexibility level, on one side it’s hard to know which size you’ll need without visiting a physical store, on the other this will nudge consumers to take the watch off less often, probably only when it needs charging. Secondly, the Watch SE is weirdly positioned in the lineup, it’s cheaper than the new-gen but more expensive than the currently-on-sale old gen because it’s a bit faster. Will most consumers be able or willing to make the difference between all of these? I doubt it.
I won’t even get started on the ‘SE’ nomenclature, while in the past Apple tried pushing the narrative that devices with this moniker are just a different form factor and that it shouldn’t be viewed as a ‘cheaper X —where X stands for the name of the device—, now the device is the same size…but cheaper. So yeah, SE= ‘cheap’, update your stuff Merriam-Webster. I get it that in the upcoming recession everyone will have to make their own SE-everything, but they could have gone for Regular and Pro, just like they did in iPhones.
Pad. Just that, ‘the iPad’ no SE, no-nonsense. For $299 in the US this remains the best ROI when to comes to the dollar/performance ratio, no questions asked. That appears to be the role of this model going forward, accessible performance for individuals or educational outfits who can’t afford anything higher up the food chain.
The interesting release here was the Air model, which, because it’s the first device with the 5-nanometer architecture chip, Apple says is now more powerful than the iPad Pro and every other mobile device they make. Again, this makes things very difficult to differentiate in a consumer’s mind, the Pro model is not the most powerful right now, but it will be once the new models launch next year and everything goes upside down again. With this lock-and-step move, Apple is trying to sell as many devices of both models, but is it really worth the customer confusion it’s causing? I guess we’ll find out at the same time they do..
Looking forward to the iPhone launch in a few weeks, I don’t see how this year’s device could integrate the Air’s fingerprint sensor integrated into the power button, but I really hope we’ll see this in iPhone13 in 2021
Services
Seeing Apple One being unveiled surprised pretty much no one at this point, the company is heading where it’s heading in this brave new world, but this announcement felt a bit deflated without a new iPhone to use it with. A lot of price points for a lot of people which was expected, but the important play here is Apple bundling together a lot of their services and making it harder for consumers to turn them down in favor of the competition. Are these the best bundles the company could come up with? Absolutely not. Are these the only bundles that allow consumers to buy an iDevice that runs Apple-made software and services? Yep, absolutely.
Fitness+ is a service very few companies could possibly pull off apart from Apple, it leverages their screen-enabled devices and combines them with the Apple Watch. It makes less sense that the Peloton stock dropped in reaction to the announcement considering the hardware and instructors the latter commands, but Apple has all those billions sitting in a bank somewhere and Tim could acquire a fitness equipment manufacturer with his Black Card, on a whim. Let’s wait until that happens before we start selling $PTON.
Detaching From Reality
These companies batching all of their announcements in one week makes it a lot harder to write this newsletter a lot of the time, I say #noMoreTechNewsDeserts!
Facebook was the third company to have a big announcement this week, with their previously-rumored Oculus Quest 2 becoming an official product. Compared to the first model, the new latest iteration of the device is a little lighter, more powerful, and dons a screen that’s 50% better in resolution. Oh yeah, and a full $100 cheaper, making it even more Christmas giftable than the previous one.
The Quest 2 is definitely more of a small step than a giant leap but the important thing is that they’re going in the right direction. The device still has no competition in the market and if the shortages of the previous model are any indication, this too will sell like hotcakes. Facebook is busy building a very non-virtual moat around their product by adding new content to their Oculus Store often while the others are still busy building a physical device.
The more interesting item teased in Facebook’s virtual event though was Project Aria, a research device —read ‘prototype’— of the AR glasses they’re actively developing as we speak. While the tech is at least a year away from primetime—realistically two-plus years away—, the work being done on various aspects of it, including display systems, audio, or non-invasive neural interfaces, is beyond interesting. Looking through the task-relevant competence lens, it makes a lot of sense that the current leader in VR is also looking towards expanding into AR, and hardware in general, in the future. Hopefully doing so by providing useful functions and not just putting an Apple Watch on our faces.
Until that release date, Facebook has a lot of work to do on cleaning its image when it comes to privacy concerns and other topics, let’s hope they use the time wisely.
Last but not least, in a surprising move that’s very telling of the company’s plans for the future, Facebook announced they would stop development on VR headsets that are tied to the PC like the existing Oculus Rift S. The early retirement of the Oculus GO device came naturally as the device was underpowered and considering consumers are notoriously against spending money on devices that are not-good-enough for their purpose, and in a way, so does that of the Rift lineup. Inside-out tracking is performing excellently on the Quest and the optional Link cable allows it to be connected to a PC for all of those intensive VR experiences.
I started writing this a Short Pursuit below but things moved fast over the past few days…
The TikTok saga is apparently far from its end, even if the previously-unlikely alliance between Oracle&Walmart looks to have come victorious, the US administration doesn’t look willing to give the deal a pass in its current form. Details are still being ironed out but right now, as I was assuming last week, it looks like it will be a ‘partnership’ instead of an out-right acquisition, with the American company taking control of the data storage duties of TikTok users for the territories in question while ByteDance.
On Saturday TikTok announced that the deal was accepted by the US administration, with the strategy of giving Oracle+Walmart the opportunity to become ‘trusted technology providers’ by buying up to 20% of a newly inocrporated company called TikTok Global, a company that will then file for an IPO on the US Stock Exchange soon after. So how come this deal satisfies the initial condition of ‘TikTok being owned in majority by US parties’? Well, ByteDance, the owners of the other 80% are 40% owned by US-based VC funding. If you’re thinking this is a stretch, you’d be right
Here’s the problem. These terms of sale and the deal approval were made, and then approved, by a lot of people who wanted a political battle but know very little about how technology actually fucntions. Wether Oracle will store data from US TikTok users on American soil is irrelevant, it’s not like if the Beijing government asks TikTok for user data now an employee goes down to a basement and gets the physical rack and hands it over. Can you imagine someone from the State Department looking through Chinese-written code to see if there are any backdoors into quering the data bases from anywhere in the world? I can, it would make for a great SNL sketch.
Nvidia acquired ARM for $40B and everyone loved it. On the day of the announcement, the company’s stock rose by around $18B in the context that Nvidia paid ARM’s owner, Softbank, $22B for the deal to close. The power-conscious architecture and the polar-opposite business model are strong additions to Nvidia’s current line of self-manufactured products that focus on world-class graphics and AI performance and the CUDA platform they leverage. It will be interesting to see how much power will Nvidia swing in ARM’s future designs and how this dynamic will evolve considering current ARM clients are also Nvidia competitors right now ⚔️💰
Sure enough, the next day after the unveiling of Apple One, Spotify called on regulators to jump in and stop its ‘anti-competitive behavior’. My guess is the reaction will come in the government commission’s report on this topic due toward the end of this month. I also think said reaction will be weak and/or toothless👶
IKEA and Asus will start a partnership to produce affordable ‘gaming furniture’, whatever the heck that’s supposed to mean. Their report claims that around a quarter of the world population is a ‘gamer’, but if they took those stats from one of those companies that put together these stats in search of sensationalism, they should reconsider. A hard number proxy, like looking at pro gamer gear sales, would get them an estimation that’s a lot closer to reality, even if still quite a bit off🎮🛋️
If you were wondering how people stay who survive on pushing products on TV remain relevant as time passes, this is how. They try and keep up with the times, or you keep ‘avant-garde’ as they say it in Saint Barths 🍀
I really hope there’s no zombies narrative hidden in this one…
We’re always wishing for a ‘different’ smartphone design than the existing black slab norm. We can go ahead and stop now…
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