We all want a slice of the Apple Vision Pie

Football games and virtual reality make for a fun start to the year of the Dragon. Let’s see how Apple and the NFL have found a way to make the worlds of the tech nerds and the jocks collide. All for the love of commerce. 

Six Degrees

^{Six Snippets of Global Industry News for the Industry Tycoons}

• Finance: On my morning news read I was fascinated to learn that Berkshire Hathaway offloaded 10 million shares of their hefty Apple portfolio in the last few months of 2023. I’m wondering if this is indicative of any trends regarding Apple’s stock price for 2024. Their sales have grown YoY during Q4 2023 which was an improvement after four consecutive quarters of declines in revenue over the last year. With an uncertain economy that is continually unpredictable Apple stock has remained flat thus far for 2024. With the release of this new product and big moves like the trimming by Berkshire Hathaway, we will see more drastic changes as the year progresses for Apple’s business and earnings.

• Entertainment: The world of VR has had abundant developments over the last decade and they have increased exponentially with the introduction of AI and AR. The Apple Vision Pro being the newest advancement on the market has been the talk of tech for the past few months and has now made its way into mass media and entertainment with the product’s release earlier this year. Kai Cenat, arguably one of the most successful streamers on Twitch at the moment put out a series of content using the new product. I’m interested in knowing if someone at Apple curated this campaign or if he did this on his own merit. Nonetheless, I can attest that they’ll see a spike in sales from Gen Z Hip-Hop fans as a result of this content. I’m not completely in his audience demographic, but I know if I were an 18 year old I would do whatever my parents asked for them to buy me one of these based on his campaign. It always makes for fun content when the tech world collides with the Hip-Hop community.

• Tech: AI capabilities are breeding a new level of acceleration in what we can do with some of our favorite products. The Apple Vision pro has the ChatGPT app by OpenAI available in the app store. This addition to the user experience allows users to enter prompts in a text box and receive a generative response. 

• Health: The most interesting capability I’ve seen regarding the Apple Vision Pro is the eye-tracking functionality and its uses in the medical field. This system can be used to diagnose medical conditions such as vertigo and help with precision for medical procedures. It can also aid in surgeries using virtual navigation. This product is changing the way we are able to conduct medical procedures and serves a much larger purpose than entertainment or video games (although that stuff is fun.) 

• Media: In true big Media fashion, conglomerates ESPN, Fox, and Warner Discovery are launching a joint streaming app for sports. This announcement was made just ahead of Super Bowl LVIII and it caught many in the sports industry off guard. NFL executives felt that they were left in the dark regarding this deal according to John Ourand of Puck News. I find this interesting personally as we are seeing huge media factions teaming up left and right. With the marriage of Warner & Discovery Inc. as well as NBC and Universal joining forces this trend of a one stop shop for media consumption seems to be the future. Soon enough cable television will become completely obsolete and they will be forced into this monopolistic structure of getting all your entertainment from a few choice streaming platforms. I’m interested in seeing where this goes and what this means for the media companies who are left out of the mergers and acquisitions game. 

Six Picks

^{My six recommendations for music lovers.}

Note from the Editor