(Preview) Apple Enters the Uncanny Valley, The SpaceX Play for Cellular, Q&A on The Ringer, Smartphones, AI Parenting

Introduction

0:00Hello, and welcome to a free preview of Sharp Tech.

0:09Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Sharp Tech. I'm Andrew Sharp, and sitting across from me in a hotel room, Ben Thompson. Ben, how you doing? Well, not just sitting across from you, sitting across from you on the floor in solidarity, because your desk chair is the creakiest chair in history. It's a great setup today. Absolutely. I sat down in the guest chair, and I was like, ah, this is actually not going to work. The desk chair, that is not the guest chair.

0:39Yes, the guest chair is fine, but I felt bad for you, so I'm also sitting on the ground. So we're both sitting Indian-style here, recording a podcast, as God intended. How are you doing? I'm doing okay. Just excited to give my life completely to Apple, I think, is where we're at.

Apple Home View Announcement

0:58Well, that's where we will begin today, the Home View. So I'll read the beginning of a press release from Apple. They released the Home View this week, designed to be central to the home and personal to everyone in it, with a stunning 7-inch liquid retina display. Home View brings entertainment, connection, and smart home management together in one place, from playing music and making FaceTime calls, to home monitoring and hands-free automations with voice control,

1:30all designed with privacy and security at the core. And there will be Siri AI baked into that product, throughout that product. The announcement was paired with a commercial showing the Home View at the center of a family kitchen, a family with three teenagers. Many people found that commercial to be very stressful and dystopian. What was your reaction to the commercial? Yeah, I guess we should start with the commercial, because I think this is one of the worst marketing videos ever.

2:03It was shocking. And you almost have to put that out of your mind to even talk about this product in a sort of positive way. Like evaluate the product objectively? No, well, so it was bad on multiple levels. So number one, I think technology should make your life easier. The impression you got from this device, it was like making everyone's life more difficult and more challenging. It was like increasing the stress level. And then... They were fighting over the Home View at one point. But also, number one, so dad puts a recipe on there to make French toast.

2:39Setting aside, do you really need a recipe to make French toast? We actually know the answer is no, you don't. Because while he's cooking, mom takes the Home View to look at her calendar. And he figures it out. He figured it out. So I guess he didn't really need the recipe a lot. Which it's funny because that is actually, I think, just a very small, little compelling use case. Like there was a... Someone showed, I think, in person, bringing your iPhone up next to the device and it just seamlessly passing over and then boom, up pops a recipe.

3:10Yeah. That's like, oh, that actually... On a bigger screen, which is useful. Right. And it's like always on. I mean, you can have your phone on a little mount, but then the phone always goes to sleep and it's kind of a big pain. Like there's little use cases here. Basically, the long and short of it is that video left me longing for an overly packaged, sterile Apple product launch video. I'm like, okay, maybe you had it right. But so there's aspects of this that I think are actually getting short shrift by people generally because the video was so bad.

3:45And almost everything in the video also was like, just do it on an iPhone. Yeah. Well, I mean, that's definitely one of my reactions to the product itself. I mean, people were saying that the commercial was giving them a panic attack and they just couldn't even finish the video, which it was a three and a half minute or three minutes and 13 seconds was the length of the commercial. So we do our research. It did take, I looked at it right before we came on and I, I, it did take some like endurance to make it through this stressful morning with all these teenagers.

4:16It's funny because as someone who's a parent, I think an outsider looking in on parenting would be like, holy crap, I don't want any part of that parenting to toddlers, for instance. And I'm sure teenagers have a whole different spectrum of stresses and whatnot. What I found depressing, though, was like seeing them use more technology is not what I would want to romanticize. Um, and that was the piece of it. There was like, everybody has these stressful mornings and actually there's some sort of tenderness to it.

4:49And like, I don't actually hate it, but the product at the center of it and more technology in that context is not really a good thing. Well, so I would just refine that slightly. So number one, the whole family's all together for breakfast. Like there's something like kind of charming about that. That's the thing. There's a charm to the chaos that you only experience if you're actually a parent. That's right. And the issue, I think, is not that there's more technology. It's that there's more screens.

5:19This is one where I think the way to understand this device and the way to understand, I think the Apple TV accentuates this given they kind of went, made it more expensive and more capable. This is about Siri AI, but it almost speaks to Apple being a device company and maybe just a lack of confidence in Siri AI. You read, you open with the press release. They don't get to Siri AI to like the fourth or fifth sentence.

5:50Yeah. And this is a device that only makes sense in the context of Siri AI. If Siri AI is really good and transformative. Like if you're with your family and you want to know something. Just talk to the device. It would be convenient to be able to just talk to the device. You're still looking at your family. There's the I do think there's this vision of a sort of ambient assistant that is there that you can just pick something up on. Like, do I? But it's and that's what was so weird about it.

6:20Like. I don't need this device to have another way to look at my eye messages from like my boyfriend. I don't want my family to know about like, yeah, that's how realistic is that? I don't like I'm just going to use the device in the middle of the counter that I don't want anyone to see. Or the whole family gathers around to watch the security cameras out front. Right. I mean, there is. It's so funny because I just recorded with Gruber. It's not posted yet, but he was more negative than me.

6:51And I like came into this saying, look, I already said a week ago I have no interest in this. So I'm like trying to not be. And I felt more. I felt I came across as more positive. You know, I'm not super positive about this product in part because I can see there's something here. There's something about like, for example, recipes next to the stove. There's something about being able to actually have doorbells or cameras and it all just works. If you get it all from Apple, that was, I think, the most encouraging thing.

7:23Their partnership with LG and Schneider Electric for these devices. No apps. No logins. You just buy them and they work. And that's exactly, I think, the angle that Apple should be going for, which is you go on in with us. You're going to get this like all these capabilities that people are talking about, but you don't have to do all the hard work to sort of stitch them together. And we just make it easy. And that did not get conveyed in this video at all. Well, and it's funny because a friend of ours reacted to the commercial on Wednesday and said, this is like the polar opposite or on Tuesday, that is.

8:00This is the polar opposite of the iconic iPhone Christmas commercial and the iPhone Christmas commercial benefited from having a product to advertise that everybody wants and solves all sorts of problems for everybody. And I just don't know that right now, this solves that many problems for anybody. But I think this is the challenge in a new category is you have to like, and this was what they were trying to do. You're trying to highlight points of pain, make people aware they actually have this need, and then show how this product solves it.

8:36The problem is this commercial has failed. That's why I said we have to start with a commercial in part to get rid of the commercial. I feel like I like this idea of having an Apple device.

Smart Home Use Cases

8:50So let's zoom out. Commercial sucks. Put it out of your mind. Well, I think the commercial sucks because the product sucks, to be clear. Which is fair. But I think the commercial sucks more than the product. At least the theory of the product. Fair enough. The theory of the product. So there's this world where you have things like doorbells or recipes next to the stove or thermostats or what's my calendar like today. I have bits and pieces of this. So I have like a display right next to the entrance of the mudroom that has my calendar on it.

9:23And it has the weather. It has a rotating thing of pictures. And it's actually quite delightful. Like everyone always enjoys it. Everyone looks at the pictures when they're up there. And it's very useful. Just glance at it. See what the weather is. I love it. I go to your house. I see your family photos. It's terrific. Well, but for example, one of the issues I had with doing it and putting it there was like I'm putting my calendar right there in the kitchen that anyone can see. Yeah. And so right there, it's like that is actually a valid use case for me to set that up this up.

9:56I have this thing called like DAC board. It's like this Linux distribution that does like the display and it's kind of shaky. I have to reset it like every week because there's like a memory leak in the app and like it sort of stops working and it's all, you know, you have to wire it together and it's connected to a folder with my with my iCloud. There's a lot of fidgetiness that went into getting this to work. Once it worked, it was great. And I love having it. I've had that DAC board concept. I first set it up in Taiwan like a decade ago. Yeah. And it's so great. Like it is genuinely useful.

10:28Everyone knows exactly where to look to get the weather. I know exactly where to look to get a handle on my calendar for the day. And the pictures are delightful, but it's a pain to set up. Yeah. Right. This is streamline that for normies and maybe there's a product. Well, yeah. So just like that's just sort of one small example of what Apple at its best is. Yeah. The nerds can set something up. Cool. You're not a nerd. You're trying to just live your life. Wouldn't it be nice to have some cool photos in the kitchen? And oh, by the way, in this specific angle, you see your calendar and not everyone sees theirs.

11:03I can kind of see the value in that. Yeah. Right.

11:07Number two. Yeah. I mentioned like the recipe thing and it sounds trivial, but it does sound trivial for the record. Number one. Do you cook? I cook a little bit. Do you ever use like chat GPT or recipe apps or like? No, but my wife does. My wife uses chat GPT for recipes pretty religiously. Yeah. Well, I use chat and I also have there's a great app called Paprika. Okay. You can like send any web page to if you have like a recipe there, it like ingests it all and puts it in an easy. It does the easy like multiple multiplication of recipes like two X, three X, whatever.

11:37It's great app. The problem is that. So we have a little stand. I have a little stand in the kitchen, like a MagSafe stand that can put my phone on so I can look at the recipe when I'm cooking. But but then it just goes to sleep. The phone goes to sleep and your hands are messy and all this sort of thing. And so, like I said, someone posted a separate video somewhere on Twitter of this idea. Like I could have my recipe on my phone. I bet you basically just put it next to it. You don't even tap it. Okay. Just like it because you can do the thing with two phones right now where two phones come together and you like do airdrop.

12:08Maybe it's using airdrop. I'm not sure. But like, boom, it's there. It's always on. It's not going to disappear. It's easy to reference in the kitchen. I should be able to talk to it, ask it, oh, what's the next ingredient sort of thing? Actually, the fact that it sounds trivial in some respects is actually the point. It's little edges in life that actually this can make it much nicer and much better. Like that use case in and of itself actually to me would be worth, what is it, $300, $350?

12:41Mm-hmm. Like I might get it just for a recipe display. Interesting. Like it's honestly super annoying. Your phone just goes to sleep all the time. Your hands are dirty. Yeah. And so there's like little pieces here. Or another thing, smart like thermostats. I have a home automation system and I have thermostats that's made by another company and the integration breaks constantly. It's such a pain and the apps are all terrible. And so the idea that, oh, if I just buy this one from Apple and it just works, right?

13:16There's a real opportunity or doorbells. Someone shows up. You can see who's at the door. I have my doorbells are from another company than my home automation system and the link breaks all the time. It's super annoying. I actually got the doorbells from the company that makes my kit, which is Ubiquity, just as a backup because I don't trust it's going to go through my home automation system. Like all this stuff is genuinely useful and no one should be doing any of this stuff because it all sucks. So somebody should be – you should be able to just do it in one place.

13:49There is – so there's an – and I've actually been on Apple to do home stuff for ages for this reason. It actually is useful if it works. And Apple at its best delivers stuff that just works. Yeah. You're selling me. I'm not going to lie. As I'm sitting here Indian style across from you, I'm now envisioning a future. Having like an iPad that could control my entire house would be appealing to me. People are saying, why don't you get an iPad?

14:20Because an iPad is a battery-powered device that makes different compromises than these sorts of things. Now, the – now, here's the flip side. Okay. So I just came across a tweet just now. It was very good timing. Someone vibe-coded an entire menu bar app for their Mac where basically the AI went in. They had a menagerie of different smart devices. Uh-huh. It figured out the interfaces to all of them, how to control all of them, put them all in one place, and then he did like a scan of his house.

14:54It constructed like a visual. He clicks on it. He sees his whole house, can click on different items and have controls on them. It's insane. It's like the – and the reason to bring this up is not that that is – this product, this vision of what Apple is bringing, one year ago, two years ago, three years ago, incredibly compelling. I would be sitting here saying, yes, I've been saying Apple should do more in the home for ages. Now I sit here and say, do you know I'm going to fix my thermostat problem?

15:26I'm going to fix my thermostat problem. I'm going to – and it's going to be amazing. It's going to be spectacular. And there's – it's funny. There is the – you're doing the home stuff. You're doing it for years. And do I want to lock in on all progress on my home stuff is limited to what Apple deigns to do or design, or do I want to actually be able to do lots of new stuff, which means I don't want to be in the Apple ecosystem?

16:00So I – again, it's just – this product a year or two ago, I think I could be remarkably full-throated. Again, it's amusing to me that it appears I'm more half-throated. Seriously. Well, and I mean, from my perspective, watching the commercial, reading the press release, it just strikes me that Apple is creatively exhausted right now and trying to find reasons for a product like this to exist.

16:32And not just because the creative itself was a complete disaster, but like the recipe thing, it reminds me of the Vision Pro with – Vision Pro is so useful for surgeons and there are going to be all these different use cases. And it turns out there's not really any utility to a Vision Pro beyond an entertainment device that's enjoyed by like me and maybe 50 other people in the United States. And I'm curious to see whether they could execute on this and find other use cases that people find compelling.

17:04That will be the question, and I'm just not sure – I'm certainly not a believer that there will be. Well, the issue is this is a ultimately – again, it's weird Apple didn't sell this, but this only makes sense as like a Siri AI device. That is the core interface. And do you trust Siri AI?

Apple TV and AI Capabilities

17:25Well, that's the issue for sure. You know, the Apple TV I thought was interesting. This is actually a good example of the – it's almost as if this product is in an uncanny valley. So on one end, you have the like Fire Sticks and Google TVs or Roku's or whatever of the world, which it's always been bizarre to me. Apple never went more down market with the Apple TV device. It's actually – you know, they've – even before the price raises, I think it was $150 get in, then it jumped up to $200 or more than that.

17:58And also the form factor was kind of annoying because you had this box that you need an HDMI cord as well as something you just plug into the back of your TV. So especially if you wanted to travel with it, which again, weird edge case, but still. So the – and so they were kind of like more expensive, but it was still great. People like the user interface. You like the user interface. It's very powerful. So you can do like – there's just more capabilities of stuff you can do if you want to have like say four different streaming things through channels as we've sort of discussed.

18:32And this new product, instead of going down market, they actually raised the price even more. So now it's $300 and – How will it be better? Well, the reason it's more expensive is now it has a far-field microphone. Okay. So basically you can talk to it. It's another Siri AI device, and I assume you talk to it to not just control your TV but to be like what's on my calendar or who's at the door or turn up the temperature. It's part of this – they're trying to deliver a home ecosystem, and they didn't talk about that.

19:11They talked about devices. We have a new Apple TV. We have a new home view instead of we have a new home ecosystem of which these are sort of component parts. It was a weird framing. Yeah. The uncanny value though is I'm on the extreme side. Again, not the representative customer, but I have a bunch of Apple TVs, all of which are like down in my rack in my basement and are like piped to my TVs around the house. So for me, a more expensive with a microphone is totally useless, like not even a part of like my use case, which again, I'm not the representative customer.

19:46I'm not saying that's the case. But when you're going up market and making your stuff more and more expensive, the likelihood you're getting to a consumer who actually wants way more, wants way more control, wants way more possibilities for integration, doesn't want to be constrained to just your devices, is sort of increasing. And the customer that just wants Apple to do it for them is – are they going to pay $300 for an Apple TV device? It's like in this weird middle ground. And what are the far field microphones actually going to deliver? Like what's the utility of Siri AI?

20:19I mean, in the press release, they talk about profoundly more capable and conversational with broad world knowledge that powers rich music discovery, richer music discovery and on-screen awareness. I think the issue is that for Siri AI, it's such an inferior product to what you can find elsewhere and what you can use elsewhere. All of those use cases, I'd rather use different AI than Siri AI. And a lot of the other use cases, an iPhone is just as capable or an iPad is just as capable.

20:56And that's where Apple is, sort of in an uncanny valley where their other products are so great and their AI products are just like a non-event and often frustrating. Right. That's exactly what I'm talking about. If you're aware enough of the possibilities of, say, a smart home such that you're going to go in and buy a home view and buy an Apple TV with a far-flung microphone, you're going to get all these capabilities. You're going to go buy a thermostat and buy a lock. That person is currently using far better AI right now. Exactly. That's exactly it.

21:27And so it's the challenge that I think they're facing where I do think, again, this vision, which, again, it's frustrating this vision. I feel like I'm articulating the vision better than they were in this event. And the vision that you're articulating is clearly a product category that should exist. I just, amazingly enough, don't really trust Apple to do it at this point. Well, so I already was thinking about my article next week, and it was going to be some variation of, like, do you trust Apple? Yeah.

21:57And it's like a play on, obviously, their whole thing is trust. Sure. Right? And trust us with your data and all the stuff they did with this. Like, you only see your stuff when you look at it, which, again, I can see the use case. It does feel like, is that actually the most important thing for this product? Actually, a general display for everyone is more useful. But the real issue is, do you trust Apple to deliver a good product if the root of the product is good AI? Yeah.

22:27And I don't. I don't. I don't. And I also don't want a giant screen that my whole family is going to be fighting over in the mornings as we're getting out of the house. It's not that big, I think. What I understand is it's pretty small. Bigger than an iPhone. And still, we don't need more screens in our family lives, which you would think Apple would be clued into. But again, it's kind of hard if you're advertising a product that is an additional screen for the entire family. So I'm telling cooking screen, underrated. They should just give me the cooking use case.

22:59Look, I have to keep my recipes very, very simple. But I'll run it by my wife.

SpaceX Spectrum Acquisition

23:04See what she thinks. Shifting gears here. Other news this week. The Wall Street Journal. SpaceX reached a deal to buy cellular spectrum licenses from investment firm Grain Management. Its biggest move yet into a wireless market dominated by traditional telecom companies. All right. And that is the end of the free preview. If you'd like to hear more from Ben and I, there are links to subscribe in the show notes. Or you can also go to sharptech.fm. Either option will get you access to a personalized feed that has all the shows we do every week.

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