Apple still has a lot to prove with its new subscription services

I knew that Apple had lost it when the light was falling out of total darkness for what seemed like the tenth time to reveal Jason Momoa and Alfre Woodard.

I knew the exercise the moment they introduced themselves: instead of actually showing something at an event called "It's Show Time", the actors to describe their television show. But because the TV show spoke of a post-apocalyptic world where everyone had become blind, Momoa said, "Close your eyes, please." Just for a moment. Just close them. I want you to experience something. Try to think of the world this way. "

Although no one wanted to, closing their eyes and imagining a future world was an appropriate metaphor for almost all of Apple's ads. None of these new services, with the exception of Apple News Plus, is still available. That's not how Apple usually does things. He is famous for having announced a new product and have it shipped immediately – or at least in the week.

Why did not Apple wait longer to get out, or at least longer to show? This created a strange mood at the end of the speech. What seems to me the closest to a consensus on the Apple event is this he was "weird"

I therefore have an honest question: why hold the event this week, before everything is ready? I have some ideas.

One is simply to create hype for the products it will launch later this year. But if that is the goal, I do not yet know how to judge success. (Although I would say that not publishing any previews or trailers of these shows is not a good start.) The best part of the talk was absolutely the section on Apple Arcade, where we saw a lot more about the games we could expect and figured out how would work and why we might want it – but again, no price.

Another is to give us details about these long-rumored projects. But that does not tell us the most important detail: pricing. Apple was troubled by the silence about the cost of Apple TV Plus. The question of whether it would offer bundled discounts for half a dozen Apple services that you can subscribe to at the end of the year was even quieter. And these discounts will be important: by placing each Apple service at $ 10 a month, you will potentially earn $ 600 a year for the privilege of living in Apple World without the benefit of bundles.

A final reason for announcing this announcement now is that in order to launch services like Apple TV Plus and the Apple Card, the company has to start doing a lot of public marketing and just wanted to make it all public. That's probably true – even though all TV shows have already been announced with a press release and others were so common that they were secret secrets – but that's not a good reason to hold an event for consumers.

That's the point: everyone has talked about the importance of subscription services for Apple's business, but I do not care about the money Apple earns (aside from that, it's enough to keep going to create good products). You should not either, unless you are a major shareholder.

Instead, you need to worry about the products made by Apple and what it adds to our culture through these products. To judge these products and their effects on our culture, we must wait until they are shipped.

It's easy to say that it's sad to have to wait for new products (that's a bit of that), but back to the original question. Why did Apple host an event this week? Did the company tell you, as a consumer, why you should worry about what it has announced?

The best answer I can find is: Apple has a huge impact on technology and culture, and Apple is trying to tell a new story about who it is and what it makes. You should worry about it because the story of Apple tells us and tells itself that it has real effects on the products that it manufactures and on culture.

So yes, Apple offers subscription services now. But if the whole story is just "Apple can make more money now that iPhone sales have reached a plateau", then none of this really matters or does not change anything.

The idealistic reading is that this event was to inject another idea behind all these subscriptions: confidentiality. It's not an easy thing to exaggerate, but it's important. Is it important enough to grant even more of your digital life to Apple? I am less sure. I do not know if the slide above is a coherent story about the type of business Apple wants to be.

Tim Cook concluded the keynote speech, as he often does, stating, "At Apple, the customer is and will always be at the center of everything we do." I did not really feel as if this philosophy applied to the event itself.

In a previous life, I was attending university and taught a lot of composition for freshmen. Whenever a student made an essay that gave a definition of the word in the dictionary, I moaned audibly because I knew I was going to lose some money. This is the classic sign of a paper that claims to be deeper and more insightful than it really is. And that always led to a long editing where I had to make a lot of effort to help the student clarify his ideas and to say something really original, something really different from what was said or do a thousand times before.

Here is one of the first slides featured in the keynote speech of Apple: