We’ve managed to make it through another week, and TechRadar’s UK team is planning for a three-day weekend, as there’s a public holiday on Monday – which is a double-edged sword for me.
On the one hand, it’s great to have some time off with the lovely family. On the other hand, we need to make sure we’re stocking up on top content for you all to keep reading while we pretend the weather is warm and that having a barbeque is a very good idea – and we’ve got some wonderful features going up.
Anyway, back to the week that was. Apple managed to – once again – rack up some incredible profits, Netflix seems to be flummoxed, and we go back in time to look at the history of wireless headphones. It’s a good one this week, I promise.
Gareth Beavis, Global Editor-in-Chief
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You might look at Apple’s latest monster financial quarter, during which it earned $97.3 billion – mostly on the back of an apparently very well-received iPhone 13 line – and only see the headline number of dollars the company is making.
Maybe you’ll equate it to how many of the latest thing you bought you could get with that money – I could get about 20 billion smoothies, for instance.
But whenever these financials come out, there’s always one thing I’m looking out for, and that’s services. That’s Apple Pay, Apple Music, Apple Fitness+ – the stuff that isn’t hardware but which brings decent amounts of money into the Apple coffers. And this quarter, the services numbers have been pretty robust, with 825 million paying subscribers plumping things up to the tune of $19.8 billion.
That number in itself doesn’t mean much – but what it does do is show that there are close to a billion people who are more ‘locked in’ to the Apple ecosystem than ever before. We’re not just talking iTunes being the place where you have all your MP3s, so moving to another platform would be annoying; this is people using their iPhone to pay for things, or to get fit, or to watch TV shows, and being less likely to get off that carousel when it’s time to upgrade.
Of course, it doesn’t mean there aren’t good alternatives: Google Pay is great, Spotify rocks, and there are a million on-demand videos to help you get into shape. But if the system is working for someone, they’re less likely to want to leave – and that’s something we can expect Apple to stay more focused on in the coming years.
People are looking to the world’s biggest streaming service to see how it plans to turn things around, and it seems that one of the main things it wants to do is strip things back a little – and man alive, did you all love this story.
Tom Power’s in-depth take on all the rumored and confirmed things Netflix is looking to get rid of – and the effect that’s going to have on TV and movie production – was one of the biggest stories we’ve ever published.
Will Netflix survive? Of course it will – while two million subscriber losses is bad, we’re talking about hundreds of millions of people still being subscribed, and more signing up daily. But we’re now in a world where Disney+, HBO Max and a host of other services are stealing Netflix’s lunch.
While it’s easy to think that more choice is a good thing, as the cost of living skyrockets you'll want to make sure that you’re regularly weighing up your various TV, music and other subscriptions to ensure that you're still getting good value for money.
'Meta Quest' just doesn't have the same ring to it (Boumen Japet / Shutterstock)
I really enjoyed this piece from Hamish Hector, because it contains some excellent thoughts on why Meta, parent company of Facebook, is letting users down by rebranding the Oculus Quest as the Meta Quest.
The writing looks to be on the wall for the Oculus Quest name – the Oculus Store has just been renamed the Meta Store – but as Hamish points out, millions of VR fans are still clinging to the Oculus name, and it’s not too late for Meta to reverse its decision.
I totally agree. Oculus is a great name, and it isn’t synonymous with Facebook – which for me is the likely reason why Meta exists in the first place, so the brand can distance itself from the social network. If it ain’t broke, why fix it?
This is less a hot take on the tech industry, and more of a public service announcement. Following a thrilling Slack conversation in the TechRadar workplace, Matt Hanson found out that very few people knew about using Win+V rather than Ctrl+V to paste text and images.
What’s the difference? Well, using the Windows key allows you to see your history of copied text, which means a single click will always get you the snippet you want. I’ve started using it since I read this article – and yes, I can confirm I’ve been doing it wrong all these years.
E Ink is one of those technologies that is so cool but never gets the love it deserves. It’s low-power, can rejig itself into any form you like and, essentially, can make books come to life on a screen.
However, it’s been mostly used in its monochrome form for years – color versions of it have always looked too washed-out, and the need to see book pages in color is a little redundant.
But recent advances in the tech means color E Ink displays are now faster (and I mean much faster, with speeds of around a second to refresh rather than 10 seconds when the tech debuted) and look far more vivid.
They’re also flexible, rollable and perfect for things like digital comic books. Wait, doesn’t Amazon own Comixology, the platform that offers exactly those titles? Hmmm…
I do love a good retrospective about a piece of technology, and this one from our regular writer Carrie Marshall is right up my street.
If you’ve ever plugged in earbuds or slipped a pair of cans over your head, then trust me: there will be something in this history of headphones that you’ll really love. I didn’t know, for example, that the first headphones was designed to be for workers using the telephone, or that one of the first pairs of earbuds was launched before 1900.
Or that you could dial into concerts through the telephone and listen to them over 100 years ago – a proto-Spotify that shows how there have always been new and innovative ways of catching your favorite tunes.
It’s a fascinating read and one that I think readers of this newsletter will gobble up.
However, it turns out that all the video shows is a helicopter flying smoothly through the air, then hovering over a slowly-falling parachute with a rocket booster suspended from it, and using a rope to hook it out of the sky. It looks pretty easy.
I know that’s hugely unfair, and that if the pilot came to me and said ‘Right Gareth, you give it a try’ I wouldn’t have much of a comeback. But I was hoping to see a rocket falling from the sky at speed… a helicopter racing through the air to intercept it… a split-second moment where you knew that a miss would lead to catastrophe.
Maybe I have watched too many action movies, but it would have been cool.
This is from the editor
I just wanted to say thank you again to all of you who write in each week. I’ve had some lovely ‘welcome back!’ messages, and one of the best ones was from Billy, who had a simply stupendous signature.
If you’ve spent time crafting an immense signature, or you just want to tell me how wrong I am to be complaining about that video of the helicopter catching a rocket, then feel free to email me, remembering to include NEWSLETTER in the subject line.
And if you’ve haven’t yet signed up for this newsletter, or think someone you know would enjoy getting it in their inbox, then here’s the link you want. It’ll make your life 97.3 billion times better, and I'm not exaggerating.
Have a lovely weekend!
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