(Preview) Apple Gets a Temporary Reprieve, The End of Internet 2.0, An Incomplete Tech Blog Post Canon
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Hello and welcome to a free preview of sharp tech Hello and welcome back to another episode of sharp tech. I'm Andrew sharp and on the other line Ben Thompson Ben, how you doing?

I'm doing well, Andrew. And after we finished recording on Thursday, I told you and you sort of scolded me for not including it in the podcast that, you know, you only a few times in your life get to experience that rush of the collective crowd rush.

reacting like happened in Japan when Max, you know, set that lap. A nice thing to call back to because Red Bull may never finish first in a race for the rest of Max's career. Short-lived reign for you and Max this year. Yep. But, but,

I was thinking about that today while watching the Masters. And, of course, I got to watch sort of towards the end. So I missed a lot of the roller coaster and one of the time zone problems. Sunday afternoon sports are always a challenge in Asia. But the Masters, everyone talks and raves about the experience of going there. And it seems obvious the experience is dramatically enhanced by virtue of the fact that there are no phones allowed.

And what's interesting about the no phones allowed bit is we could talk about this and why this is great and why it particularly works at the masters. There's such high demand for tickets that they control the market. So if you don't like it and you get kicked out, it doesn't matter. There's plenty of people willing to take your ticket. Right. So they have others. Right. Like, could like the NBA enforce this, the regular season. No, because people just stay home. Like, screw you. Right. Um, it,

the uniqueness and the exclusiveness of the experience is what makes this possible. And it's funny because you get this positive cycle where no phones makes the experience better, which makes the tickets even more desirable, which gives them more leeway to enforce the no phones policy. But it's all part of the mystique. That's what you're paying for at the end of the day, which I think, and I think that's dramatically becoming more and more valuable over time. My favorite moments from the broadcast are,

were the shots of the 18th hole when they have the scoreboard that shows like what everyone's, you know, where they hole by hole, where their overall score is minus 11, minus 12. It's a roller coaster. It's going up and down, but they pull the numbers down because they're going to update them for the players that are, you know, later, like particularly Rory McIlroy. And so everyone knows we're about to find out what's happening.

Yeah. And it's, you get the collective crowd experience of discovering something at the same time again and again. It's actually like the equation. It's like, it's perfect for golf in this, where if you can imagine in a normal, if you have a phone or you smuggle something in, you're finding out individually. And there's the, the,

The way people act is they continually choose individual experiences. We see this with social networks, all right? What is a social network at the end of the day? The crazy thing about social networks is even though they're framed as, quote, unquote, connecting people, they're actually deeply individualistic, atomized experiences that separate people. Your Instagram is different than my Instagram. Your Facebook is different than my Facebook. Your Twitter is different than my Twitter. I'll get every freaking Elon Musk post.

But there's – Somehow I don't get every Elon post just for the record. I don't know what code I cracked. I never see anything that Elon Musk tweets. You probably blocked him and didn't realize it. It could be. Who can say? It's out of control. But the – like there is a certain bit of gaslighting about this quote-unquote connecting us because it's connecting us on terms that are completely individualistic, and everything about tech drives towards this idea

Even though the scale is the whole world, the actual experience of the individual is completely unique. And people like that in their choices, especially

But there's a bit where what you like and what you choose isn't always what's best for you and what you love. Right? There's some sort of relationship analogy here or something along those lines. Right? And I just thought it was really striking. That was my favorite thing about the broadcast was – and they kept showing it. Maybe they've always done this or they just did this camera angle this year. But the number goes blank. Crowd tenses up in anticipation. Mm-hmm.

Numbers flash up and this collective groan or collective sort of release at seeing what happened just a few hundred yards away. I thought was, was really, was really interesting. And yeah, congratulations, Rory McIlroy career. That sounds amazing, but I'm relieved on behalf of Rory McIlroy as a millennial, you know, like where, I mean, where, you know,

you know, congratulations on your generation. Finally, he was supposed to be our guy. He was supposed to be the next tiger. And he's had a nice run. No question about that. But I was rooting for him at the beginning of the day. Well, the part where he won at the end and he had so much gray hair, it's like,

Wait, this was the guy that was promised, right? Like the next tiger. I'm glad he scraped through to get his career grand slam. Listen, Ben, I've got a few gray hairs myself. Nothing wrong with that. But Rory, he continued to like self-sabotage throughout the 18 holes today.

So it was really, really stressful as someone who was rooting for him. And I feel a kinship with Rory. I've got some Irish blood in me. So great to see him get it done at the end and great take on the Masters generally. I feel like whoever's running the Masters, they have to be on touch grass Rushmore because of the policy and how...

I think it's more because it's a golf tournament, which is literally about grass. But yes, beyond that. Exactly.

Literally and figuratively. They're literally saying, put your effing phone in this bag and go touch grass for the next 12 hours and get your money's worth. If we see you with a phone, we're not just going to tell you to take it away. We are kicking you out of the course. You lose your tickets for the weekend. Yeah, absolutely. That's the kind of enforcement we need in the future. Well, I will say...

Watching the Masters on Sunday was not as enjoyable as it could have been because I had to rework the outline for this episode. Most of the Monday mailbags, I set the outline on Friday and just set it and forget it. We record Sunday night. We did have some news over the weekend though, Ben. So we'll start there. We'll start with a note from SB that came in last Wednesday.

He said, should I upgrade to the current generation of iPhone? I was planning to wait for the iPhone 17 in September, but should I just buy right now before the prices rise due to the tariffs?

So thank you for the question, SB. That was a pretty simple question. We had it on the rundown last week. We weren't able to get to it. The dynamics surrounding the answer have changed multiple times over the past couple of days. Does the White House need to touch grass? I mean...

I wish we could all touch grass. I really identify with the friend that you cited on the last episode who said, look, I agree with certain things Trump does. I disagree with certain things Trump does. More than anything else, though, I am just exhausted under Trump and I don't want to live like this. And so that's sort of where I think a lot of us have been over the last two weeks. I'll read two bits of news to anchor this.

Bloomberg says President Donald Trump's administration exempted smartphones, computers and other electronics from its so-called reciprocal tariffs, representing a major reprieve for global technology manufacturers, including Apple and Apple.

and Nvidia. The exclusions, published late Friday by US Customs and Border Protection, narrow the scope of the levies by excluding the products from Trump's 125% China tariff and his baseline 10% global tariff on nearly all other countries. The exclusions apply to smartphones, laptop computers, hard drives, and computer processors and memory chips, as well as flat screen displays.

And then Trump on Sunday, that Bloomberg report was Saturday. Trump on Sunday came back and said, nobody in all caps is getting off the hook for the unfair trade balances and non-monetary tariff barriers that other countries have used against us, especially not China, which by far treats us the worst.

There was no tariff exception announced on Friday. These products are subject to the existing 20% fentanyl tariffs, and they are just moving to a different tariff bucket, he puts in quotes. The fake news knows this but refuses to report it. We are taking a look at semiconductors and the whole electronic supply chain, in all caps.

In the upcoming national security tariff investigations, what has been exposed is that we need to make products in the United States and that we will not be held hostage by other countries, especially hostile trading nations like China.

So that's where we are as of Sunday night at 9.18 p.m. Thank you for the time specification because I think it's necessary. I'll keep checking back throughout the podcast. Do you have takes on where things stand for, let's say, Apple? We can start with Apple. Well, I think the biggest take is you step back and this is...

what I expected. I don't think that the U S has the stomach for an actual trade war. And so what, what, what were, you know, and again, I, to go back to our friends thing, like this is tiring. I don't really want to talk about this because what's the point if it's all just going to change in the next week or two. And that of course is the real damage here. We could, we

for Apple or anyone else, we could step back in a month and everything that I wrote last week and getting worked up and writing two articles and these podcasts, we can step back and actually nothing has changed except for the fact that we've now inserted just this massive dose of uncertainty and reduced the possibilities of investments and all of which theoretically would solve this problem. Like, like even if you wanted, even if you disagreed,

or even if you wanted to go in this direction, you need to actually be credible and...

have faith that it's going to stay the way it is so that people do the necessary investments to come up with it. The whole point of tariffs is theoretically it should give an advantage to domestic production, which needs to be built and invested in. Implied in that is the domestic production, at least at the beginning, can't succeed on its own without the tariffs. So if you think the tariffs are going to go away, then all you're doing is just introducing deadweight loss into the system.

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