In today’s Monday Note, Jean-Louis Gassée offers his takeaways from last week’s WWDC keynote.
On Apple Music:
Apple Music doesn’t need to make money. It isn’t a business unit, it doesn’t have a Profit & Loss statement. Its sole raison d’être is to make iPhones more valuable, more pleasurable. The incumbent music services don’t have the luxury of Apple’s deep pockets and enormous user base, 800 million or more credit cards on file. Individual users might balk at the $9.99 per month price, but I have a feeling that many will find the $14.99 family deal quite attractive. We’ll know soon; the service goes live on June 30th, free for three months.
I think this logic is spot on. That $14.99 monthly fee allows up to 6 people unlimited access to Apple Music with custom settings for each user. For a family of music lovers, that is an excellent deal.
From the official Apple Music site:
As an Apple Music member you can add anything from the Apple Music library — a song, an album, or a video — to your collection. And that’s just the warm-up act. From there you can create the perfect playlist from anything you’ve added. You can save it for offline listening and take it on the road. You can even post your favorite playlists, albums, and videos to Facebook, Twitter, or Messages. It’s never been easier to share music with each other.
The math on this is compelling. I certainly spend more than $15 a month buying music. Key for me is the ability to save a playlist for offline listening so I am not sucking on my data plan during long runs/bike rides/drives.
Regardless of what you thought of the keynote performances, Apple Music offers something of real substance. The competition is right to be concerned.
Jean-Louis also weighed in on the iPad announcements:
It appears that Apple might be reconsidering the iPad’s purpose. In addition to the split screen, Apple’s hermetic iCloud Drive has been “opened”, making it look more like a conventional file system. We also have shortcuts for Bluetooth keyboards and two-finger gestures that convert the iPad’s on-screen keyboard into a trackpad of sorts. All we need now is an accessory keyboard/trackpad and, who knows, a stylus.
There is a major gap between my ability to create content on my iPad and on my MacBook Pro. The biggest issue for me is typing speed. My fingers fly on the MacBook Pro keyboard, but slow to a crawl on the iPad’s virtual keyboard. I’ve got a Bluetooth keyboard, but that defeats the purpose. If I’ve got to carry my iPad and a keyboard, I’ll just bring my laptop.
Adding gestures and Bluetooth keyboard shortcuts is definitely a step in the right direction, but that gap still remains. iOS 8 brought us QuickType and predictive text, and iOS 9 raised the bar with gestures that make QuickType that much better.
With the changes brought by iOS 9, the gap between typing on a Mac and on an iPad is now interestingly close. If I am typing on my Mac and want to move to another paragraph in my document, I either have to press and hold the arrow key and navigate my way to my new insertion point, or reach for my trackpad or mouse. On the iPad, I can gesture to the new insertion point without taking my hands from the home row. This one change narrows the gap considerably.
One last thought about the keynote concerns the performance itself. There have been a tremendous number of comments about the various presenters and the overall polish of the keynote. Most notably, Jimmy Iovine has been lambasted for his apparent nervousness and unpolished delivery.
I think those criticisms might be true, but are pointed in the wrong direction. The keynote delivered well when it focused on benefits and not features, and when those benefits were presented clearly and quickly.
As an example, the Apple Music rollout was all about features and short on benefits. We’ve got curated music, we’ve got celebrity DJs, we’ve got radio stations emanating from three different cities. Those things are incidental, they are features. How do those things help me?
Consider this benefits-first approach: “For only $9.99 a month, you can have access to pretty much every song ever recorded. Add in $5 more a month, and it’ll be you and up to 5 more people. That’s a real cost savings. You can listen to all that music offline, just like the music you own. We do curated playlists to help you discover more music and those playlists are tunable, so we can make them more enjoyable for you as we learn your tastes.”
That short paragraph would have hooked me. As is, the lede was about as buried as a lede can be. Those messages were stretched out and buried in a sea of features and marketing speak.
Jimmy Iovine didn’t help matters, but he’s a smart guy. I’ve seen him captivate an audience with his deep musical knowledge and charisma. With the right material and enough practice, Jimmy Iovine will be an invaluable resource in bringing across the keynote message.
I’m wondering if that last section of the keynote was originally built around an AppleTV rollout and the “one more thing” was changed to focus on Apple Music late in the game. That would explain a lot.