This week on The CultCast: The journey to a trillion! How did Apple become the most valuable company on earth? We discuss, and remember the company’s troubled history. Plus: Is the i9 MacBook Pro a total ripoff? One YouTube reviewer says yes, and his tests are convincing. We’ll fill you in. And stay tuned for the sad decline of MoviePass. Is the troubled movie service still worth it?
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Episode
CultCast CultCast #347 – i9 MacBook Pro – a total ripoff?
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@erfon / @lewiswallace / @lkahney
i9 Macbook Pro – Apple’s biggest RIPOFF!
- YouTuber Max Yuryev pitted the 2.2Ghz and 2.6Ghz i7 MacBook Pros against the the 2.9GHz i9, and the results aren’t great. These are the tests I’ve been waiting for.
- in his Cinebench test, he found the i9 beat the i7 by only 2 percent, averaging only 3.15Ghz, while both the 2.2Ghz and 2.6Ghz i7’s both averaged 3.05 Ghz.
- And in test after test, he showed that the i9 rarely performs better than the 2.6Ghz i7.
- Why? It seems like it comes down to heat. Even with the patch, the MBP struggles to keep the i9 cool enough to keep it in turbo mode, and sometimes it’s even not cool enough to run at base clock.
The biggest takeaways from Apple’s dominant Q3 earnings results
- Apple beat Wall Street’s expectations today with its Q3 2018 earnings report, shooting its stock price just below the $204 price needed to mint it as the world’s first TRILLION dollar company.
- iPhone sales were up slightly year-over-year. Revenue was up big time. The ASP (average selling price) was also up big time. Even Apple’s EPS (earnings per share) was higher than some of the biggest Apple believers expected.
- When the iPhone X launched last year it was panned as too expensive by far too many critics, but Phone revenue was up 20% YOY.
- Wearable sales are up 60% year-over-year
- AirPods and Beats are also selling well. Combined with Apple Watch they’ve generated more than $10 billion in revenue in just the last year.
- TimCook also commented on Apple’s TV deal with Oprah, saying he “couldn’t be happier” that she’s on board.
- He also said there’d be “dramatic changes speeding up in the content industry,” and went on to say “We’re really happy to be working on something. We’re just not ready to talk about it in-depth today.”
- Apple sold only 3.72 Macs in its third quarter, less than any single quart since it’s Q3 of 2010. This may be because it’s entire Mac line was ancient until just weeks ago, in Q4, when MBP was updated.
- iPhone and iPad now make up 65% of Apple’s yearly revenue.
The sad decline of MoviePass. Is it still worth it?
- It was a year ago, in august of 2017, that MoviePass dropped their price to $9.95 a month. In the following two days, more than 150,000 new users signed up, crashing their website and app.
- By December of 2017, a million new subscribers had joined.
- By April 2018, there were three million people using the service.
- But that’s when the cracks started showing. MoviePass ended the ability to see the same movie more than once, and then soon after that introduced “surge pricing”, which was an additional fee they’d charge you to see popular movies. Problem was, this extra fee seemed to apply to pretty much all movies at most times.
- Then in July, the shite really hit the wall. You may have heard that many couldn’t purchase tickets in the last weeks. It’s because MoviePass ran out of money and had to borrow 5 million bucks just to counting paying for tickets.
- Then this week, the MoviePass app started reporting that theaters had no movies movies available. This looked like the end.
- But MoviePass refuses to die! They’ve now raised their price to $15 a month, but will now not include access to new movies (for the first two weeks of release).
- Though AMC said MoviePass’s model could never work, they essentially created their own version of the service to compete. It’s $20 a month and their service includes digital reservations, iMax and 3D, and let’s you see the same movie more than once.
- Sinemia is another competitor that’s popped up. They offer a 2 movie a month plan for $10 a month that works with any theater, offers advanced ticket options, and works on 3D movies, IMAX, 4DX, and more.
