Apple vs The Paradox of Choice!

[Music] hey what's up mkbhd here so you know those fish that suction themselves to sharks and you always see them along the side of sharks like they follow the shark everywhere they go swimming alongside it usually attached to it it's called the remora fish and they are fascinating creatures they have this relationship that's kind of amazing for the remora it gets to snack on the scraps of whatever the shark is eating and it has a 24 7 bodyguard basically and the shark allows it to do that because it'll also eat parasites off the shark's back keeps it clean it's a win-win they have a symbiotic relationship meaning they both benefit but really really the remora fish definitely needs the shark way more than the other way around so you never really see them out in the wild without some sort of host or something to attach to now in the tech world apple is that shark and there are a whole bunch of companies you've probably heard of them whose primary business function happens to be an accessory that attaches to something apple does and that is a dangerous place to live so this whole dynamic is it's so fascinating to watch because there's so many examples of it now of course air tags is you know the one recent announcement that's got me thinking a lot about this lately but really any time apple enters a new product category it gets a lot of attention because it's interesting like how will apple do it the apple way will they separate themselves from the competition or do anything technically different and air tags they have some legitimately unique features the little precision find feature makes for a cool demo but bluetooth trackers are not new not even close uh tile has been making these things since 2013 and they do fundamentally the same thing they help you find whatever they're attached to by pinging other phones around that have the tile app which creates a community mesh network and help you find your thing plus there's a couple other features and a variety of shapes and sizes and tile is also built in to some other items but for the core function of finding your thing air tags have a massive advantage which is their network isn't just people using the tile app it's all the stuff on apple's find my network so it's iphones it's ipads it's macs and they'll all passively update the position of something near it anytime it's around a device on that network it's frictionless it happens silently and effortlessly in the background you don't even know what's happening and the network is massive it's approaching a billion devices so there are some best case estimates that put tile's presence in some of the most densely populated cities in the world like manhattan and san francisco at one tile user per block meaning you can't go more than a block without encountering a tile that will update the location on the network which is pretty impressive but when you think about those same blocks in those same cities you're gonna get what a dozen plus iphones and macs and ipads and that's not even considering all the other less populated areas so immediately apple's ability to plug a feature into the iphone gave them a huge advantage over the competition that is the theme so i already made a video called the apple ecosystem explained i'll link it below the like button if you haven't seen it already but i talk about why people keep choosing the iphone because of the walls around the ecosystem but here's another thought because of apple's ability to plug things into the ecosystem especially with the iphone apple can kill entire companies but they don't do it menacingly they do it so nicely by presenting it as a choice on a silver platter less than a month ago apple actually opened up the find my network to allow third-party accessories to take advantage of this incredible network right so out of the gate there were e-bikes and earbuds and conveniently another cheap plastic bluetooth tracker that you can find based on nearby devices in this network amazing so now for tile there's technically a choice you can make a tile that's compatible with apple's find my network or not it's a choice pretty simple but it's actually a bit of a paradox of choice because either way you choose apple still wins so let's say they choose to make a compatible tile that works in the find my ios ecosystem that seems great right it works great for the users they take advantage of that better network but now that means a portion of new tile customers who were going to buy a regular tile that plugs into and improves the tile network will actually be plugging into and improving apple's network instead they'll plug into find my and they won't use the tile app for locating their device which means now tile is selling a product that actively hurts their own business and makes their own network less desirable over time so the other choice is to not participate in the find my network and not offer a tile that works with it which just means you're missing out on those sales and their less appealing network slowly dies over time as people just buy the ones with the more deeply compatible iphone but hey technically it's a choice right look look how friendly this guy is he would he would never force you to do anything he didn't want to you can just you can choose to work with the iphone or not it's up to you you could also choose to swim off into the rest of the ocean or you could stay swimming with me the shark makes sense right i'd actually argue this paradox of choice happens twice with air tags so once with tile as we just saw but also again for the customer so if you're an iphone user now technically you have a choice between the two different options which one is going to require a separate app and has a much smaller network and the other just kind of plugs right in and seamlessly works in the background and not much thought to it and they're around the same price see what i'm getting at now apple apple will always repeat day in and day out there is competition we have competition and you can always choose our competition over the product we make but apple's smart so obviously they know they have deep market penetration with the iphone and so when they want to leverage that to jump into a new product category they'll do it every time they've done it before apple watch is maybe the most popular watch on earth i think they've said this before and airpods are honestly some of the most popular wireless earbuds ever made that's because of the iphone but it's even more fascinating when they literally kill whole companies like when the shark decides to close its mouth and eat the fish that was cleaning its teeth apple's done this so many times i've got four more examples for you each one of them a little bit more brutal than the last so i'm gonna rank them on a scale of one to ten one being a light scratch ten being absolutely finished on how bad apple left them after they jumped into the new product category and if you'll notice they're all on the back of this paradox of choice so flux or f.lux you might have heard of them they are an app that lets you change the color temperature of your screen right so it'll adjust to have more or less blue light output and it can automatically make your screen warmer and dimmer the later it gets in the day flux used to be in apple's app stores but then in 2015 they were kicked out and apple's reasoning was developers can't take advantage of the use of certain private apis so it seems reasonable we all know apple's been very specific about the way you know macs and iphones and ipads should look and feel but what feels weird about that one specifically is later that year apple came out with an update where they built in that exact functionality into the os themselves it's on the mac behind me it's called night shift so with night shift your iphone or ipad or mac can get warmer or cooler based on the time of day or where you're at and it can set a schedule for when you want that to happen super useful of course and convenient now that it's baked in so now you're a mac user you've got a choice you can you can go to the flux website and download it since it's not in the app store anymore and approve it through security and then set it up and get the schedule going or you can just use the one built into system preferences but you have the choice i'm giving this one a five out of ten only because apple could only kill half the company when it's also available on windows and on android if you root but also android's added some of this functionality windows 10 has added some of this functionality so all of them combined would make it about a 10 out of 10 but apple could only kill half all right so then there are ipad styluses and uh this isn't one company so much as it's like a whole product category that sort of got pummeled when apple decided to enter so there's a big variety in this space there's the markers and pens and pencils and styluses that can all write on the ipad's surface and so you can get anything from ultra cheap to ultra premium depending on what you want it to do and then apple just drops in at the high end with the apple pencil now the apple pencil as we all know works with and plugs into the ipad pro better than any other stylus i would say literally because of the first gen apple pencil but no other ipad pro stylus slaps onto the side of the ipad magnetically and pairs instantly and charges while sitting there it works with all of ipad os's built-in tools and minimizes latency with that high refresh rate display it is the best possible implementation of an ipad pro input device plus i can imagine future versions of the apple pencil having a u1 chip right it would make a lot of sense you can add it to the find my network you can direct your iphone to find it when you lose it we all know we've lost that pencil before there's just no way to justify buying a different stylus for 100 bucks for the ipad i mean you can you have that choice so i'm gonna give this one like a six six or seven just because you can still buy the cheaper ones if you just want a very simple input device normal stylus but the second you go hundred bucks plus that whole category it's really hard to compete with the apple pencil so okay then there's duet display so you might not heard of this one but you probably have heard of sidecar the feature right that lets you use your ipad as a second display for your mac what you might not know is duet display is an app and a company that's been built to do exactly this for a long time much before sidecar existed and just like flux you know it still exists still got windows and android and even chrome os versions and actually does still work for ipad but you can imagine most people who are just searching for something on google like how to use an ipad as a second display sidecar is going to come up the majority of the time and it's going to be the easiest way to do it plugging straight into ipad os the majority of the time so duet display does have a couple extra features on top of sidecar like you you can use the touch screen while you're mirroring but still like flux and like tile most people are just going to be satisfied with the first party built-in version so i'm going to give this a 7 because there's still the windows users with ipads who are still gonna make that happen so last but not least there is watson and this one probably hurts the most so this was a search tool in the mac that let you search the web and and search all kinds of other things without actually having to open up your browser and their tagline was actually an innovative utility that bypasses the web browser but as you probably already know apple came out with sherlock 3 which was then called a spotlight which is in everything they make now i use it all the time and it does exactly the same thing search the web search your mac search whatever also the mac does it the iphone does it the ipad does it android phones do it like you can still technically choose to download this original but look at their website like you can imagine there hasn't been a good reason for people to download watson in a long time if this is what their website still looks like that that i'm going to say is a 10 out of 10 rip completely gone right alongside like the flashlight app you remember those when you used to be able to download a flashlight app on the iphone then apple literally built it into the lock screen on ios and now there's no reason to download a flashlight app i mean you can choose to technically but you're not going to so all this is a dynamic i encourage you to pay attention to the shark and the remora of the tech world right and there's a lot of this talk going on in in the public sphere already with the the whole anti-trust and the walled garden talks funny enough the day after air tags were announced tile testified in front of congress to explain how apple was leveraging an unfair advantage to enter that market but of course apple would argue no we didn't we let people choose we gave people a choice everyone had a choice you could plug into the find my network if you wanted to or not that's up to you you can do it the apple way or not whichever product people decide to buy so be it so i don't think there's any correct answer there's no easy right answer but what do you think should apple not be allowed to plug into their own ecosystem and leverage that to make new great products or does apple have too much power in that way but i encourage you to pay attention to when apple inevitably enters even more new product categories like when they make an ar headset or a camera or whatever other new product they do end up making watch how much they plug in to that ecosystem in ways that their competition literally can't and watch how those fish respond to the shark but either way it's crazy to think about how far apple has come from being a small company out of a garage to literally one of the biggest companies ever to exist mostly on the backs of the iphone oh speaking of which my friend renee ritchie also he's made a nebula original on the introduction of that original iphone with a bunch of industry folks including myself talking about you know the fact that that made such huge ripples in the first keynote and what that original iphone meant so you can watch that whole thing on nebula a video streaming service built by independent creators including myself and that is bundled with this video's sponsor curiosity stream so nebula is already pretty dope there's a lot of the smartest creators i know on there minute physics tech alter renee ritchie as i mentioned all using nebula to share their best stuff and sometimes even trying new stuff that doesn't quite work on youtube so i've been putting my videos on nebula ad-free so you're welcome for the info on how to watch the videos without sponsors as a sponsor it's getting pretty meta but besides that curiosity stream is a subscription service sort of built to like my exact tastes it's a home to all kinds of thousands of documentaries and shows about technology and futurism and culture and inventions and the social web all that kind of stuff just look at this category drop down on the site i mean that's pretty amazing i feel like i'm perfectly in the target demographic and if you watch my videos or enjoy them you probably would like these too there's one called shark family tree which looks at how incredible great white sharks are they're all in 4k and there's also plenty more where i can learn way too much about sharks so i encourage you to check them out so since the two together are kind of a no-brainer you can use my code or the link below to get both nebula and curiosity stream bundled together i have a feeling i'm gonna be recommending a lot more of this stuff in the future either way that's been it again let me know what you think of the apple paradox of choice and i'll talk to you guys in the next one peace

Channel: Marques Brownlee

Views: 1,763,813

Rating: 4.9369636 out of 5

Keywords: AirTags, AirTags vs, Tile, AirTags vs Tile, Apple vs, Apple vs congresss, congress, MKBHD, Apple antitrust

Id: qNAo0UdYF6g

Length: 15min 45sec (945 seconds)

Published: Thu Apr 29 2021

Reddit Comments

[u/RedditingHopper]

I think Tile should double down in other form factors such as their Tile Slim, which offers something different to what the Airtags are doing with it being able to do be put into a wallet. Find specific niches.

[u/Deep-Ad3797]

Partner with Google and place the tile info on google maps. Thus turning every Android phone into a tile network. Like tile can literally play uno reverse on Apple.

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Also they could via the app then show both networks overlayed. Thus they could beat Apple by having every Apple and every Android product as their network.

Tile if your seeing this comment. Hire me I'm an engineer lol.

[u/thisisausername190]

Interesting ideas - In my opinion, this is something that a lot of companies end up doing over time. People have been saying that Apple copied this or that feature from jailbreak tweaks for years, and it's true - they find something that people like, that increases the user experience, and they add it. They do the same with AirTags, with flashlight apps, with f.lux.

This is far from unique to Apple though, and I want to make sure people know that. The idea of a "paradox of choice" in the sense that it's presented to Tile here, yes, is more unique - but the idea of "copying" an existing feature and making it easier to use? Not nearly.

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Anyone remember a few years ago when everyone had a GPS mounted to their car dash? It was this novel invention, that no one needed maps, you could just mount this thing to your dash and it would tell you where to go. Revolutionary.

What did automakers do? They integrated it into vehicles! Now, without having to suction cup anything to your windshield or dash, there it was, telling you how to move around! Did this hurt the mobile GPS industry? Sure... but it was absolutely an innovation for customers, and when they could make the choice to use something built into their car or use something of equal monetary value they had to buy separately, the choice was obvious.

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I don't blame Apple for doing what they do best - using their position as a shark to build themselves up in as many markets as they can. If we look to tech companies, they're notorious for this - Amazon started as a bookstore, then became a giant in hosting with AWS, then became the "band-aid" and "kleenex" of online shopping. "Just get it on Amazon" is nearly as synonymous to "buy it online" as "Just Google it" is to web search - these are things we hear not because Google or Amazon were the first to attempt what they do, nor will they be the last, but because they are popular and they give people what they want.

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This is what Apple does - they make a product, it sells, and it works well. It gives people what they want. Are they anticompetitive? Maybe sometimes. Are they competitive? Definitely.

[u/aamurusko79]

the problem with tile was always the fact that it needed to build the network from scratch and to conquer a new geographic area would mean they'd have to push hard in advertising to start building the network there.

I live in finland and while people in the tech business know of tile, very few have bothered with it as they know your average person doesn't know about the product and certainly doesn't have the app installed. with apple again the network was already in place and buying the product is a no-brainer if you need something like that.

[u/ktappe]

It is surprising he goes over all these examples without mentioning that there is a term for Apple doing this to third-party companies: it has been dubbed “Sherlocking“ by those in the Apple press.

[u/NicInTime]

I think the case of Tile is more interesting than the others. Personally I think Tile built on the find my network could still encourage users to download the Tile app through the advantages it might offer, such as being able to use it if you switch from iPhone or having access to the network of android devices as well. Maybe introduce other features? Lean into customization/fashion accessory? As is, I’d agree that Tile cannot properly compete, but how much of that is Apple’s fault.

[u/nadroj37]

I feel like I understand why Tile and other developers are upset, but I don’t think this is something that could be solved. What kind of laws or regulations could they try to put on Apple? Are they going to tell Apple that they can’t innovate new technology to make better products than other companies?

I think things like f.lux and Watson were just destined to be natively implemented. It’s unrealistic for Apple to not implement those services into their own products. I personally feel like entire companies shouldn’t be completely based on ONE piece of software that (in my very uneducated developer knowledge) seems like it would take a week or a month to code.

I guess I’ll leave with the fact that I don’t understand how the government can regulate Apple’s own technological developments when it’s their products. I also have very limited knowledge on monopoly and duopoly rules and regulations, and I was 1 year old when the Microsoft antitrust was filed. So I am extremely open to learning both sides of the story here.

[u/banksy_h8r]

"Paradox of Choice" doesn't mean how MKB is using it here. It refers to people's inability to make a decision when presented with a huge variety options, versus only a few. The book of the same name that coined the phrase and described the phenomenon came out in 2004.

"Catch-22" would be a more appropriate literary reference.

[u/Crazy_Drago]

If your entire business model is based on the use (and success) of someone else's product, I don't think you can complain when something changes that interfere's with that. It's a gamble to begin with.