In 2010, days after Apple announced the first iPad, the company’s senior-most executives descended on a handful of newsrooms across the country to show off the new device. At the time, I was a cub reporter at The New York Times, but given that I covered Apple, I was invited to attend the event, which included a hands-on demo and a private Q&A session with Steve Jobs. About halfway through the demo, I asked Jobs a somewhat impertinent question—one that was wholly unrelated to the iPad, but which is entirely relevant today. “In 2007, you unveiled the Apple TV, and while you were sitting on stage, you described Apple’s core businesses as a three-legged stool,” I said to Jobs. “You said you hoped Apple TV would be the fourth leg of that stool. Yet, three years later, Apple TV sales are paltry. Did you get it wrong?” Jobs dismissively denied—in front of the top editors at the paper—that he had ever said that. I began to push back, but Jobs interrupted me. “Nick, I did not say that.” He was emphatic. As I opened my mouth again to argue, Jobs stopped me, stared me dead in the eye, and said: “For us, Apple TV is just a hobby.”
I was unsure how to react, so I shut my mouth. I had watched that very keynote in 2007, with Jobs sitting on a stage in his black turtleneck, blue jeans, and gray New Balance sneakers. And I was sure he had said that, but who was I to argue with Steve Jobs? After the meeting, when I told veteran reporter John Markoff about the incident and showed him a video of Jobs saying exactly what I had believed he said about the Apple TV, Markoff laughed. “Welcome to the Steve Jobs reality distortion field.”
What I took away from that exchange was that, while Apple wanted to be in the television business, it wasn’t exactly sure how to get started. (No one was at the time.) One year later, I reported that Apple was working on an actual television set. But soon after, the company changed its mind. Televisions, after all, are not a particularly high-margin product. Worse, they have a long life cycle. Unlike other iPhones or electronic watches, which people upgrade as often as once a year, a good television can last a decade. Apple continued to upgrade its stand-alone video-streaming device, Apple TV, but until somewhat recently, it never felt particularly Apple-y. The user experience was good, but not great. The devices were nice, but not iPhone X nice.
Now, almost a decade after my argument with Jobs, Apple has finally presented a comprehensive vision for conquering the living room: a new streaming service, called Apple TV+, which will include original television and film offerings. At Apple’s gleaming Cupertino headquarters on Monday, C.E.O. Tim Cook rolled out a slew of celebrities—Oprah Winfrey! Steven Spielberg! J.J. Abrams!—to unveil its new slate of products and services, which will include offerings from HBO, Starz, and Showtime, alongside dozens of original programs like The Morning Show, starring Reese Witherspoon and Jennifer Aniston.
And yet, the keynote announcement was noticeably lacking in details and specifics. While the company sent out a press release Tuesday showcasing all of its new talent, pulling out all the stops to appear exciting and glamorous, Apple still doesn’t appear to have a clear business strategy. While Apple is taking bigger bets and throwing more money at the problem—about $1 billion a year on original content, according to reports—that’s still about an eighth of what Netflix will spend this year, and about a fifth what Amazon plans to spend. If you’re Apple, with $250 billion in the bank, and you’re really truly trying to go after this space, why not spend ten times that on content? Why not buy Netflix? Why stick your toe in the water when you could jump in and make the biggest fucking splash imaginable?
I’m not the only person wondering aloud why Apple isn’t doing more. As Peter Kafka wrote in Recode after Monday’s announcements, Cook’s keynote offered more questions than answers. “What, exactly, is Apple going to have in its new video service?” he asked. “What, if anything, will Apple’s new video service cost? Why would someone pay anything for Apple’s new video service?” It’s almost as if Apple is still treating the TV business like a hobby.
From the outside, it appears these new services are all part of Apple’s strategy to distance itself from the competition. Cook talked about privacy at the event, and how important it is for Apple’s customers not to be tracked for the purpose of delivering more ads, a direct swipe at Google and Facebook. He unveiled an Apple credit card, a direct swipe at payment-processing companies like PayPal and Square. But it was also Cook’s way of creating a future in which the Apple ecosystem begins to encompass your whole life. As Apple’s revenue growth from its hardware business declines, an investment in entertainment and games and news media guarantees that consumers keep coming back for the latest iPhone or iPad, too. It’s a way of welding the locks on Apple’s gated community so that nobody ever leaves.
A decade or so ago, companies competed in discrete market sectors to earn a buck. The Wall Street Journal went head-to-head with other print newspapers like The Washington Post and The New York Times. CNN competed with Fox News. It was Nintendo versus SEGA. And so on. Now, everyone is competing for something more precious: time. As C.E.O. Reed Hastings said recently, Netflix’s biggest competition isn’t necessarily YouTube or Disney or Amazon. It’s the video game Fornite, which some 250 million people play. Tim Cook, too, is now fighting for our attention. In the digital age, that’s the only economic unit that matters.
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