Apple’s Sci-Fi addiction
Good morning: In today's edition of The Industry, we look at:
Apple's Severance from reality, the building blocks of Netflix's new chief, a proper Curb Your Enthusiasm send-off, A24's TV, and a grandfather clock.
(A quick leap-year warning, the cover story is grim)
Let’s go!
APPLE’S SCI-FI ADDICTION
Apple produces an outsized number of sci-fi TV shows.
1 out of every 5, in fact. From their first slate of content in 2019 (See, For All Mankind) to their recent masterpiece (Severance). And nearly a dozen in between.
They’re courting audience members who are predisposed to purchasing Apple’s futuristic products while ironically reinforcing audiences' fears of technological dystopias.
Previous shows have harped on malevolent products like a chip that divides our work and home memories and fake moon timeshares.
Apple's tech and TV+ divisions are so severed there's an unrealized irony in their major announcements made less than 24 hours apart:
Greenlit Apple TV+ series about an unthinkably powerful AI
Apple is diverting employees to AI teams after canceling its electric car (Project Titan)
When Steve Jobs founded Apple in 1976, he initiated a dogfight with Microsoft. This reached its zenith with Ridley Scott’s 1984 commercial, which showed Microsoft as George Orwell’s all-seeing Big Brother.
This may be Apple’s most terrifying technological prediction to date.
Microsoft is a partial owner of ChatGPT’s OpenAI, which is so lucrative and powerful that Microsoft has officially, as of last month, overtaken Apple as the most valuable company on the stock exchange (Apple held this position at one point for nearly a decade).
Apple’s blind pivot to content to keep users in its ecosystem may end up being one of the greatest technological blunders in history, as Microsoft’s runaway lead makes their AI systems asymmetrically powerful.