By John Moltz
July 7, 2023 2:00 PM PT
This Week in Apple: Too many socials
Pity poor Goldman Sachs, as it fails to turn a profit in the credit card racket. Also, pity yourself next year when you can’t get an Apple Vision Pro. And which social media platform will you turn to when you want to complain about it?!
Go rack up some debt, already!
All you horrible Apple people have disappointed a giant financial services company.
“Goldman Is Looking for a Way Out of Its Partnership With Apple”
What’s the problem, you wonder? What bee do they have in their bonnet? Well, it could have something to do with this:
“Apple Card Has Cost Goldman Sachs Over $1 Billion in Losses”
That’s a lot of bees.
By all accounts, the Apple Card is working for Apple, so you have to wonder why it isn’t working for Goldman. Not enough people holding huge balances? Maybe. Whatever the case, Goldman is looking to divest its entire credit card business and is in talks with American Express to take the division off its hands. The company is apparently trying to move away from dealing with consumers. Makes sense. Humans are so messy and it’s so much easier to just make billions off of money as a concept. And when that fails, you can always just get another bailout!
Because when you’re Goldman Sachs, you might be too big to fail, but you’re still young enough at heart to keep tryin’.
Vision Pro no
You can’t get the Vision Pro yet and, if these reports are true, you might also have a hard time getting one next year.
“Apple Reportedly Cuts Production Targets for Vision Pro Due to Manufacturing Complexity”
Hey, I get it. I usually give up when something gets hard, too.
Supply chain rumors also allege that two of Apple’s China-based component suppliers only have enough parts to produce around 130,000 to 150,000 Vision Pro units in the first year.
That’s a problem, as Apple was reportedly hoping to sell about a million units in the first year. It’s not exactly a new problem, though. Long-time iPhone buyers will recall having to wait for supply to catch up to demand. Personally, I will never get over the month I had to wait for an iPhone 4 back in 2010.
Sometimes I wake up at night and walk to the window in the dark. I watch the lights of ships coming and going in the bay below and think of the loss I suffered. For those four weeks I didn’t have an iPhone 4.
A single tear falls.
…
Anyway, c’mon. You probably weren’t seriously buying a Vision Pro anyway, were you?
Big Deal Social Media
I regret to inform you that it was another big week in social media.
Remember Twitter? Yeah. Anyway, over the weekend, Twitter said that it would be limiting the number of tweets people could see, ostensibly to stop data scraping, but perhaps more likely to avoid paying infrastructure costs. The company has since backpedaled a bit, but not before more fed-up users fled the platform.
Where to go, though? Fear not! Everyone’s favorite privacy grinder, Meta, has come to the rescue!
[collective groan]
Yes, Meta introduced Threads, a Twitter-like platform spun out from Instagram. The platform gets a leg up by leveraging an existing huge user base, but already has its own problems. For instance, it won’t be launched in the EU because of regulatory concerns. Also, it features the same vapid content you know and love from Instagram.
Twitter has reacted calmly to the unveiling, welcoming the ha-ha, no, it’s accused Meta of “unlawful misappropriation of Twitter’s trade secrets”.
“Twitter is threatening to sue Meta over Threads”
This is, of course, a “trying to eat a Hot Pocket right out of the microwave” level of hot nonsense.
What does this have to do with Apple, you ask? After all, this column is titled “This Week in Apple” not “This Week in Clown Car to Online Engagement Town”. Well, Apple is one of the last few reputable advertisers on Twitter. For some reason. That’s a situation that’s unlikely to improve, as Elon Musk—the boy who sprung out of a cautionary Aesop’s fable about the dangers of becoming too rich—continues to autodrive the company into a ditch. Repeatedly. In addition to the rate-limiting, sometimes the ads users see don’t even work. One can only imagine what Faustian bargain Tim Cook struck with Musk when they met at Apple Park back in November.
Although, Faustian is probably the wrong analogy, as Faust struck a bargain with Mephistopheles who was, by all counts, a competent demon. This was probably more of a Beetlejuiceian bargain.
[John Moltz is a Six Colors contributor. You can find him on Mastodon at Mastodon.social/@moltz and he sells items with references you might get on Cotton Bureau.]