Anybody got $2,000 for a phone?

SPEAKER_1 (0:07)

This is Marketing Over Coffee with Christopher Penn and John Wall.

John Wall (0:15)

Good morning. Welcome to Marketing Over Coffee. I'm John Wall.

Christopher Penn (0:18)

I'm Christopher Penn.

John Wall (0:20)

And man, so much news. There's a bunch of things.

The one that hits me, though, that I really just want to talk about, because this is nerding out, is the iPhone Duo, this foldable iPhone. iPhone, huge market share. It's driving the majority of their profits as the biggest tax-paying company in America. But yeah, $2,000 for this thing. I'm just like, for a phone. Because as much as I'm a gear head and a techie, I still treat phones like cars. I just need one that does all the things I need, and this is a depreciable asset. So you're talking about me burning $2,000 in like three or five years on a phone. Like that's as much as I think it's cool, I'm not going to pay that. So that's my initial hit.

What's your feeling?

Christopher Penn (1:04)

I'm right there with you. I mean, I don't need a tiny laptop. I mean, because they're showing, hey, in flip mode, you have a little keyboard. Like I don't need a tiny laptop. I have an iPad already. Marcus Brownlee was calling Apple's phablet because it really does fold into basically an iPad Nano or whatever, if you think about it, when it's on fold mode. It's cool. It looks well engineered. But no, I mean, I'm probably going to end up spending close to 1500 bucks on the Pro Max regular phone because I want the enhanced scores. And supposedly, supposedly, there's going to be a way to get access to the Apple neural engines on the iPhone itself. So if you are someone who is going to be or has a home AI lab setup, we know on the A20 chipset on these things, there's a lot of GPU capacity on these on these very expensive devices that mostly sits idle most of the time. So if you could plug your phone in and create your own little cluster and like double your home compute capacity, that might be the way to go.

But I was looking at the Pro Max stuff.

Cameras look great. First, cameras with an actual physical aperture, which I thought was really, really sexy. And they built enhanced AI to do post photo and post video changes, like changing the angle of the photo, et cetera. So I thought that's some really cool stuff. But no, $2,000 for a folding phone that doesn't even have all three cameras. No.

John Wall (2:28)

Well, that wide open big screen, you talk about watching video and gaming, like that could be just completely nuts. And then it is, there's an interesting thing of talking about iPad mini. Like I have an iPad and I have this world where I use an iPad and a Kindle, and I buy these things and then they sit on my desk and collect dust. And when I go to finally use them three months later, the batteries are dead. So yeah, and then another one too, the engineering behind this hinge, you know, there's over 100 parts inside that hinge. And so now you're saying, well, wait, so because the other thing I could get away with is I can buy a top-end iPhone and I can have the battery swapped out after two or three years. And it's, you know, I can squeeze another two or three years out of it in good shape. But, you know, opening that thing up, that's definitely not a DIY thing. Nobody's going to do that. So, you know, unless they now maybe it's modular and the whole hinge can just be easily replaced. I don't see any reason for them to do that. Like that doesn't make business sense. So all right, well, I'll throw this out. This is a great polarizing issue. We'll throw it out to the crowd. Tell us what you think. Are you going to buy one? Whoever's got one first will feature you on the show. And you can parade yourself around as the Alpha Gadget.

You can mog. And we would love to see what you're doing with that. Also, I should, and this is a good place to talk about this too, as far as ranting, we had Christopher Lockhead on his interview. He completely goes off. And if you look at his website, his website is filled with stuff like off-putting to some, this guy's a moron. He's not afraid to say things that make people angry.

If you're going to make comments to Marketing Over Coffee though, tell us what you disagree with. If you have a problem, say like he said X and the data is Y or whatever, it posts like, you guys are jerks or I'm leaving. Nobody wants to hear that. I'm not interested in that.