![]() ![]() Overhear someone talking about a podcast episode about Welcome Back, Kotter lunchbox? This search should mean you can type in those words and get directed to the Mystery Show episode you’re looking for. Apple will now use machine learning (of course) to index the spoken content of all the podcasts in its database and make it searchable. The biggest news for podcasts - which was presented as part of the new Mac app but which I have to imagine will also be available on mobile - is full-text podcast search. And on a more practical level, a Mac app might remove a step when someone hears about an interesting show on desktop but doesn’t want to jump to the iPhone to subscribe. That’s exposure that’s hard to get, even if the Mac userbase is a small fraction of the iPhone’s. Every Mac user upgrading to macOS Catalina will now have a Podcasts app icon right there in the Dock. That said…there’s a reason that many people tie the podcast boom of recent years to Apple deciding to include a separate Podcasts app on in iOS 8 in 2014. ![]() I don’t think that a native podcasts app on the Mac will do much to move the needle of listening the rise of smartphones has meant that laptop time is now more focused on work than it used to be, and I don’t see much reason most podcast listening would move to the desk. One app is being split into three: Apple Music, Apple TV, and of most interest to publishers, Apple Podcasts, which will bring “a dedicated podcast-listening experience to the Mac.” The divvying-up of iTunes’ jobs happened some years ago in iOS, but now it’s coming to Macs. (Apple’s Craig Federighi said at one point that “customers love iTunes,” earning repressed guffaws from the audience before he made it clear he was in on the joke.) Okay, it’s an imperfect metaphor, but both iTunes and newspapers made perfect sense in their original contexts, and neither has been able to fully adapt to the more agile group of mammals scurrying around the App Store. In the end, it was the marketplace that determined its future more than the company that made it - to survive and compete, it had to be broken into pieces. The new guys usually tackled only one of the many problems the bloated old mess had evolved to deal with. ![]() Trying to be everything to everybody wasn’t a sustainable strategy the company just kept stuffing in more and more features until it became heavy, slow, and at times borderline unusable.Ī new generation of products came along, born of ubiquitous wireless data instead of physical distribution. In a diffuse market, this was the sort of thing it took a strong company known for its centralized command-and-control to wrangle together.īut over time, it became a little too bloated - and a lot too clunky. There were ways to get those pieces of content before, of course, but putting them into this single bundle enabled an entirely new business that threw off a lot of revenue for a long time. It could gather pieces of professional content from out in the world and compress them down into a portable device walking around with one of those made you seem au courant. That final step of delivery, which had been a real hassle before? This took care of it for you. It was a product built for an earlier era, one where getting access to new content was complicated and built around actual physical distribution, if you can believe it.Īt the time, it was revolutionary - combining lots of different kinds of content and information into one easy-to-access hub. ![]()
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