Apple Reveals $2K Foldable iPhone & NFL Australia Game Decided by Sleep?

0:01J.P.

0:01Jacqui Frank:Morgan has teams to support you at every stage of your growth. As former founders who have worked in local markets themselves, the bankers at J.P. Morgan bring deep sector knowledge and lived experience to their clients. J.P. Morgan can help you navigate complexity with confidence, backed by real-world insights and an entrepreneurial perspective. Get what your startup needs now at jpmorgan.com slash growwithoutlimits. J.P. Morgan is the bank of the innovation economy. Good morning Brew Daily Show. I'm Neil Freiman. And I'm Toby Howell. Today, how sleep can decide tonight's NFL game in Australia.

0:36Cody D'Angelo:Ben, Apple just released the first ever foldable iPhone. It's Thursday, September 10th. Let's ride.

0:50Jacqui Frank:It has come to my attention that an American legend is celebrating its 125th birthday this year. The peanut butter and jelly sandwich. The lunchbox staple first appeared in the Boston Cooking School magazine in 1901, introduced by Julia Davis Chandler as a fancy tea time snack for wealthy people. Since then, as mass market peanut butter and machine sliced bread became available, the old PB &J has become ubiquitous, whether in its traditional form or Rift On in all the ways you can imagine. Toby, I know the PB &J is near and dear to your heart.

1:24Cody D'Angelo:I had a peanut butter and jelly sandwich every single day from kindergarten through high school. Nature's own branded honey wheat bread, Jif peanut butter, Smucker's raspberry jelly, literally thousands of them in my life. I consider myself an expert. So if you're looking for ways to judge up your PB &J game, here's some of my advice. Add some salty crunch to it. Very easy to just put some potato chips in there for a little bit of a textural experience. Another idea, heat it up on the griddle. Sometimes that would be my dessert after my dinner. Just a hot peanut butter and jelly. Delicious. A little butter on the bread.

2:00Cody D'Angelo:Also, a fluffernutter. Not exactly a peanut butter and jelly sandwich, but I used to eat them at the camp I went to in Maine. Absolutely delicious. I don't want to know the nutritional value of that. If all else fails, just cut the crust off. Go Uncrustable mode. If Uncrustables ever wanted to sponsor this podcast, I would be your biggest proponent. but happy 125th anniversary to the goat, the peanut butter and jelly. And now a word from our real sponsor, Hotels.com. I just stayed at the same hotel as the competitors in an acapella competition for a work trip.

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3:11Cody D'Angelo:Apple hasn't entered a new product category since the Apple Watch came out in 2014. That changed yesterday with the announcement of the iPhone Duo, Apple's first foldable phone. Bringing a little origami to your doom scrolling is Apple's bet that consumers are ready for drastically different and pricier iPhone experience. This thing is built like Maurice Jones drew, short and stout. Its inside display stretches 7.6 inches, which is wider than a lot of the other Android foldables on the market, designed for watching video and multitasking. Its outside display is just 5.4 inches shorter than most iPhones to allow it to fit into your pocket.

3:49Cody D'Angelo:The other thing that will help it fit into your pocket is the fact that you will have no money in it. The Duo starts at$1 ,999 with the fully tricked out model reaching over$3 ,000 thanks to upgraded memory. The debut yesterday also marks the first new product released under new CEO John Ternus, who took over for Tim Cook at the start of the month. Ternus is the former hardware lead at Apple, so his fingerprints are all over the duo. Investors are hoping that Ternus can bring a little bit more of Steve Jobs' product flair back to Apple after years of steady financial stewardship under Cook. Investors, for now, don't quite know what to make of the duo.

4:26Cody D'Angelo:The stock briefly jumped after the duo was revealed, but closed essentially flat on the day. Neil, in typical Apple fashion, this is a very polished product where the software shines just as much as the hardware. What did you think of the first ever foldable iPhone?

4:41Jacqui Frank:Apple's back to innovation, and they just solved one of the main issues plaguing our society. People pointed out that Apple has solved the boyfriend photography crisis. And you're nodding now because you go through this. When you're taking a picture of someone, they don't know what they're seeing, what you're seeing, and how it's going to look. But with the foldable iPhone, there's a screen on the back that people who are the subject of pictures can see what they look like when you take them. So I think this is going to be a big unlock for you and a lot of other boyfriends or husbands.

5:11Cody D'Angelo:Husbands. Thank you very much. It was very interesting to see the use cases that Apple chose to highlight. That was definitely one of them. The other one I saw too is putting a little animation or something for a kid to look at. So instead of saying, here, look at me while I take your photo, they just look at you automatically because Snoopy's on the back display. The other big thing that whenever you talk about foldable phones, you got to think about the crease. How is this going to look when it unfolds? And Apple seems to have nailed it with the crease. Marques Brownlee writes that a big part of the visual minimization of the crease comes from the custom nanotexture matte finish that reduces reflections.

5:49Cody D'Angelo:Basically, what that means is it's not a very shiny screen, so you don't see the reflection of there is a crease there. It's impossible not to have some layer of crease there. But in terms of other phones on the market, it looks pretty dang good. The big thing yesterday as well on social media was Samsung chiming in. They tweeted about the foldable phone saying that, hey, their biggest tweet was, let us know when you're done reheating our leftovers. But they tweeted about it like 10 times. And it was really funny in the beginning, and then it got not so funny. But all this to show that this is a mature product category.

6:24Cody D'Angelo:Samsung has been selling this since 2019. So Apple is doing its typical thing where it arrives late to a category, but just brings a more polished version. they think they can pull it off again with this foldable iPhone.

6:35Jacqui Frank:It's mature, but like Maurice Jones, Drew, it's not big, which is why we didn't see a huge move in Apple's stock price, or this won't become a big line item for their revenue. Because last year, consumer electronics companies shipped about 20 million foldable phones. That's less than 2 % of all smartphone shipments. So they've been around for seven years. Yes, Samsung, but you haven't really sold that many. There's tiny, tiny fraction of rounding error in the entire smartphone market. This year, in just three months that Apple will be selling this, it's expected to ship about 12 million foldables.

7:09Jacqui Frank:That's more than half of the amount of foldables that were shipped last year. So it's expected to instantly grab 50 % of the market. The question is, can Apple with this particular release, with this$2 ,000, perhaps sometimes$3 ,000 phone, the flip phone, can they grow the pie for everyone and maybe revolutionize this category that is in some ways mature?

7:30Cody D'Angelo:This is my big question is, do people want a$2 ,000 iPhone? And honestly, Apple's internal data shows that yes, people are willing to pay something like this. If you just take a fully tricked out iPhone 17, you can get it up pretty dang close to that$2 ,000 mark. $3 ,000 is just a totally different story. But I guess you're treating this as a multi-purpose tool. Maybe you are a creator and you need it the other use case i saw uh in addition to boyfriend husband photography is you can put a teleprompter on the side and film yourself with a teleprompter looking at you that's a big use case for creators but that's my big question mark is one do people actually want this very bulky kind of awkward device in their pocket and two are they going to

8:15Jacqui Frank:pay you know upwards of three thousand dollars for it yeah the big uh example that apple wanted to point out was that you can have two apps open at once. That wasn't the only thing that they released yesterday. Just a quick recap of the other stuff. We had iPhone 18 Pro and the iPhone 18 Pro Max, which comes with better cameras and which come with greater battery life. They said this has incredible battery life up to 36 hours. We also had a new Apple Watch models coming out that include note taking. We've talked about AI note taking. Those include that as well. But we didn't see a base model iPhone.

8:51Jacqui Frank:That is going to come in the spring. The bottom line here is that the John Ternus era has begun. Moving on, Iron Man had Jarvis, Joaquin Phoenix had her, and now you too can have your own AI assistant attending to your every need. But user beware. On Tuesday, Meta unveiled its personal AI agent called Muse, joining a slew of startups and tech giants releasing individualized bot secretaries this year. Muse was previewed in CEO Mark Zuckerberg's AI manifesto last month when he predicted everyone will have an exceptionally capable personal agent that understands you, your goals, and everything you care about.

9:26Jacqui Frank:In practice, that means completing tasks like buying movie tickets, scheduling doctor's appointments, browsing for new clothes, or booking dinner reservations, all accomplished easily by integrating with your apps. Personal AI agents represent the next evolution of the chatbot. Similar to chatbots, you can type to them using plain language, but these agents go a step further. And instead of telling you what you need to do, for instance, cancel this subscription you never use, they just go ahead and do it. Sounds great, but people have reservations. Giving an agent access to your personal information, computer emails, and messages raises a number of privacy concerns, particularly with Meta, a company that has struggled to keep user data safe in the past.

10:06Jacqui Frank:For Muse, Meta says it's built a fortress around your agent using an extremely secure architecture, all while checking in with you before making any decisions deemed sensitive or important. Toby, have you entered your agent era?

10:18Cody D'Angelo:I definitely played around with some of these because it's kind of all over social media at this point. I found it difficult to figure out what to do with them. I realized I didn't need to automate most parts of my personal life. The things that I did do is ask it to go through and audit my subscription, see what I was paying for that I didn't need to pay for. And that literally just combed through my inbox to find that. I also just looked at what other people were doing with them. Look what Zuck was doing with his Muse as he rolled out this new product. He said he instructed Muse to plan a baking project every weekend for him and his three-year-old daughter.

10:53Cody D'Angelo:He asked it to also look for climbing permits for his older daughter and alert him when one becomes available. In the gym, he asked it to review footage of himself fighting. So it's a very vast use case. None of those are necessarily something that are intuitive. It's very person by person. The big question here, though, is how willing are you to give it access to all parts of your life? Because the more access you give it, the better it is. But the more access you give it, the more sensitive information you are putting in the hands of these tech companies.

11:25Jacqui Frank:Yeah. So just like Apple, Meta is a little late to the game when it comes to AI assistance. Obviously, the game just started. But there's a number of startups, including one that is favored by the tech community called Instinct. And that's big in the Bay Area. this is a big business. I mean, they have raised$350 million so far at a$2.5 billion valuation. They started last year. And I don't know, five years ago, if we said this company started as one year old and they're already at a$2.5 billion valuation, you probably wouldn't believe me, but this is the AI revolution. I actually asked my group chat, I said, is anyone using Instinct?

12:02Jacqui Frank:And they said, no, what is it? And then I explained and they were like, oh yeah, but I already used ChatGPT for this. And it seemed like that. And then one of them said, is it weird to put your credit card information into it? And then another guy was like, I don't have any money, so I give it full access.

12:16Cody D'Angelo:Well, actually, you actually hit on a very important point of why instinct might be able to achieve mass adoption is the fact that it doesn't live in your chatbot. It doesn't live in ChatGPT. It lives in your iMessage or WhatsApp. So they think that's the killer use case here is that being able to talk to an assistant in the place that you natively talk to everyone else, that is gonna help it become ubiquitous. Back to Muse for a second. The reason why they think they're gonna become ubiquitous is it lives on top of Instagram and Facebook. It lives on top of your social media. So the biggest use cases I was seeing is, hey Muse, go through all the bookmarks I have of cafes in New York that I never actually revisit.

12:56Cody D'Angelo:Put them in a list and tell me which ones I should go to this weekend. Or for us, we're looking at planning a honeymoon. We're trying to go to Japan and we've saved a million videos go through all of those saved videos and pull out actual itinerary recommendations. The fact that it is integrated to Instagram might make it the preferred agent for people because so much of their life lives there as well.

13:18Jacqui Frank:And MetaStock was up over 6 % yesterday on the news. So investors definitely like what they heard.

13:23Cody D'Angelo:Let's move on. The NFL kicked off last night with the Super Bowl champion Seattle Seahawks squeezing the life out of the tepid New England Patriots. But the more intriguing matchup, at least from a travel perspective, is happening 4 ,000 miles away in Australia. The NFL's first foray down under will see the Rams take on the 49ers in a game where sleep is as big a storyline as anything going on on the field. There is a 17-hour time difference between the U.S.'s West Coast and Melbourne, a problem both teams chose to navigate in exact opposite ways. The 49ers got there early, leaving eight days before the game, giving players ample time to try and adjust to the new time zone.

14:02Cody D'Angelo:The team arrived at that conclusion by consulting sleep experts and even sending staffers ahead on trial runs to see how their bodies reacted. The Rams presumably took the time change just as seriously and yet reached the polar opposite conclusion. They rolled in just 24 hours before game time with the hopes of keeping players on normal L.A. time. The reason it has confidence in the last minute travel plans is because it's worked before. The Rams arrived just before their game in London last season and trounced a playoff caliber opponent 35-7. As for the NFL, it is the league's first game in the Asia-Pacific region, as it kicks off a season that will feature a record nine international games.

14:41Cody D'Angelo:It will no doubt be hoping it can convert some ball-carrying fans from rugby and Australian rules football over to the American way of doing things. But Neil, I'm so curious about this logistical battle. same game, same sleep science available, and yet two very different approaches. Which one do you prefer?

14:58Jacqui Frank:Well, personally, if I'm going to Australia, I want to spend as much time as possible there because it is an extremely long flight. And the 49ers have been there for seven, eight days now. Some great quotes coming out of the players and the coaches there. Christian McCaffrey, who's the running back, said, the coffee here is unbelievable. I don't know why no one talks about that as much as they should have. I think it's kind of generally known that Australia has good coffee, but I'm sure in Melbourne, it's actually amazing. And then Kyle Shanahan, the coach, said, I don't see kangaroos and crocodiles everywhere.

15:31Jacqui Frank:I was expecting to see that. It looks like a very normal, cool city. I think this guy needs to get out a little bit more. I know.

15:37Cody D'Angelo:That is a classic American take on Australia. I'm taking the Rams approach, though, because the plane that they took over, it's a Qantas Airbus A380. It is the largest and most expensive commercial passenger airline ever built. And the reason is they have a live flat seats for every single member of the team. So the Rams were just posted on social media like, oh, my God, this plane is so bougie. They think that they are going to be able to get a good night's sleep, never really deviate from their actual schedule. And that is why they think this is a better approach. I do feel bad for one person in particular in this whole Australia saga.

16:13Cody D'Angelo:And that is 49ers defensive coordinator Raheem Morris. He turned 50 years old on Thursday, September 3rd, but that happened to be the day that the 49ers flew to Australia. So they left Wednesday night and arrived Friday morning. So quite literally, his 50th birthday just dissolved into a time zone ether. So sorry, Ricky Morris. I hope someone gave you a cake.

16:35Jacqui Frank:No matter whose sleep hacking wins out or is more effective for this particular game, it's another step in the NFL's big push internationally. I mean, they're going, they're going to be playing at Melbourne cricket ground. This is, this is a huge stadium. It has more than a hundred thousand seats. It's the largest stadium in the Southern hemisphere. It's sold out. Actually the 49ers are the biggest, most popular team in Australia because when the globe started paying attention to NFL in the 80s, the Joe Montana and the Niners were really good. So they love the Niners there. Roger Goodell earlier this year, the commissioner has said at some point there will be NFL teams outside the USA.