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

Andrew Sharp (0:00)

Hello, and welcome to a free preview of Sharp Tech. Hello, 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 are you doing?

Ben Thompson (0:20)

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.

Andrew Sharp (0:30)

It's a great setup today. Absolutely. I sat down in the guest chair, and I was like, this is actually not going to work. The desk chair, that is not the guest chair.

Ben Thompson (0:39)

Yes. The guest chair is fine, but I felt bad for you, so I'm also sitting on the ground.

Andrew Sharp (0:44)

So we're both sitting Indian style here, recording a podcast as God intended. How are you doing?

Ben Thompson (0:51)

I'm doing okay. Just excited to give my life completely to Apple, I think, is where we're at.

Andrew Sharp (0:58)

Well, that's where we will begin today. The HomeView. So I'll read the beginning of a press release from Apple. They released the HomeView this week, designed to be central to the home and personal to everyone in it. With a stunning seven inch liquid retina display, HomeView 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, all 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 HomeView 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?

Ben Thompson (1:57)

Yeah, I guess we should start with the commercial because I think this is one of the worst marketing videos ever.

Andrew Sharp (2:03)

It was shocking.

Ben Thompson (2:05)

And you almost have to get put that out of your mind to even talk about this product.

Andrew Sharp (2:11)

To evaluate the product objectively.

Ben Thompson (2:13)

No, 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 was it was like making everyone's life more difficult and more challenging. It was like increasing the stress level.

Andrew Sharp (2:30)

And then they were fighting over the HomeView at one point.

Ben Thompson (2:33)

Also, number one, so dad puts a recipe on there to make French toast. Mom, setting 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 HomeView to look at her calendar.

Andrew Sharp (2:50)

And he figures it out.

Ben Thompson (2:51)

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, without compelling use case. Like there was 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.

Andrew Sharp (3:10)

Yeah.

Ben Thompson (3:11)

That's like, oh, that actually-

Andrew Sharp (3:12)

On a bigger screen, which is useful.

Ben Thompson (3:14)

Right. And it's like always on. Like 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.

So there's aspects of this that I think are actually getting short shrift by people generally because the video was so bad. And almost everything in the video also was like, just do it on an iPhone.

Andrew Sharp (3:49)

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 it did take some endurance to make it through this stressful morning with all these teenagers. It'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 seeing them use more technology is not what I would want to romanticize.