Welcome back to This Week in Stratechery!
This week marks a new era for Stratechery, which is now presented by Stripe. I’m excited about what this partnership can unlock, starting with in-person on-video episodes of Sharp Tech. Check out the YouTube video above (or watch it on Stratechery); and, for subscribers, look forward to a bonus episode showing up in your subscriber feed every Sunday morning (add your feed on sharptech.fm).
Here were a few of our favorite topics this week:
- The Best iPad; The Worst Phone. John Gruber wrote a great review of the iPhone Duo, which we broke down on Dithering. In short, it’s an iPad that fits in your pocket, and it’s awesome at that; just don’t expect a good phone. Plus, on Monday we discussed Apple’s surprising partnership with Meta for edge AI, a topic I also covered in Tuesday’s Update. — Ben Thompson
- The SS Sarandos in a Storm. The past week has seen a flood of bad news for Netflix: layoffs, executive departures, another disappointing round of earnings, and another hit to a share price that has taken a 40% hit over the past 12 months. Wednesday’s Update provides a comprehensive state of the union, and we doubled back on the topic for a fun conversation on this week’s Sharp Tech, where we divided the company’s problems into areas that can be fixed (the content) and what may be much trickier (growing the business in a world where Meta and YouTube are primary engagement competition).— Andrew Sharp
- You Can See Everything, But Can’t Trust Anyone. Allow me to be the 1,000th person on the internet to recommend Nathan Fielder’s new Elizabeth Holmes documentary, You Can See Everything. After declaring on Sharp Tech last week that I wasn’t interested in seeing it, I did in fact check it out, and wound up loving it. I wrote about my experience on Sharp Text, with 5 spoiler-free notes for anyone still on the fence, and 5 more reactions for anyone who’s seen it. Compulsively watchable (and worth seeing in a theater), I think it may have also been the most effective document of our modern media environment I’ve ever seen. — AS
Presented by
It’s kind of weird to be the Internet’s number one fan of ads. What makes it even weirder is that I have been the Internet’s number one fan of ads without actually having ads on Stratechery.
That second part is changing: I’m super excited to announce that Stripe is going to be the presenting sponsor of Stratechery. And, at the end of the day, for me it couldn’t be any other company.
One of my hangups in terms of advertising is that I take my ethics super seriously, and ultimately, if a company is helping pay the bills, it’s hard to be truly objective about them. What I realized, however, is that it’s hard for me to be objective about Stripe anyway.
I wanted to be a professional blogger long before I started Stratechery; however, I thought I had missed my chance, particularly as it became clear that advertising was not a long term business model for a one-person site. However, when Stripe launched with support for recurring billing, I realized there was a better model: subscriptions. 13 years later, and I’m still a happy customer. Or, to put it another way, I’m already conflicted because I love Stripe.
I’m not the only one: more than 5 million businesses use Stripe, accounting for 1.7% of global GDP. Moreover, a lot of those businesses are Internet native and accretive to the world’s economy, which is to say that Stripe is literally making the world a better place. That’s an easy company to get behind, especially since they have been behind Stratechery from the very beginning. — Ben Thompson
Stratechery Articles and Updates
- Do You Trust Apple? — Apple has a lot of trust in terms of delivering integrated products and preserving privacy; the real trust question is if you think Siri AI will justify investing more in their ecosystem.
- Muse Spark Open, Meta + Apple, Thin and Thick — Meta has a new open source model, and to everyone’s surprise, they are are partnering with Apple to make sure you can run it locally.
- Netflix Earnings, Business or Franchise, Disney’s Deal — Netflix has a solid business, which is exactly the problem: the company increasingly seems like a business and not a franchise, at least in terms of growth.
- An Interview with Craig Moffett About SpaceX and Bubbles — An interview with Craig Moffett about SpaceX, from launch to broadband to mobile, plus how he is applying the lessons of the dot-com bubble to today.
Sharp Text by Andrew Sharp
- You Can See Everything (And It’s a Great Time) — Nathan Fielder’s movie lives up to the hype and captures the modern world better than any art in recent memory.