Answer the damn question!

This was why I was wary of Kamala being the candidate. She’s tainted by Biden’s record, which I actually think is pretty good. She’s not fresh, like Whitmer or Shapiro or Pritzker, who could run away from Biden’s policies, but Kamala is stuck with them.

But she is now the candidate, so let’s move on from that.

The very first question, re the above, she avoided. It was painful.

And contrary to scuttlebutt, Donald Trump spoke English, he did not look demented. His sentences made sense, at least in English. But then he went INSANE!

If you’re scoring at home, Harris won, hands down.

But we’re not scoring at home, we’re having an election in November, and that’s the only battle that counts.

The biggest news this week came on Sunday, when the “New York Times”/Siena College poll put Harris behind. Free link: https://t.ly/T47SB

Now if you live online, you know this has engendered amazing pushback. There has been an evaluation of polling in general. But I think it’s a good thing that Harris was behind, because hopefully this will make Democrats WAKE UP!

They think it’s in the bag. If you haven’t had a conversation with a self-satisfied Democrat since Kamala got the nomination, you’re a MAGA devotee living in a bubble. It’s been an endless victory lap. In its own way as myopic as the belief in Hillary back in 2016. Trump can’t possibly win! Nobody I know will vote for him. It’s a laugh, he’s toast!

But Trump could very well win this election.

Too many people are living in a bubble. Actually, that’s part of why we got into this mess. The so-called “elites” who believe they know better lording it over the “ignorant” blue collar voters. Let’s be clear, NAFTA screwed the union members, jobs evaporated. One can argue whether the jobs needed to go, but one thing is for sure, high-paying workers who owned vacation homes and boats, with two cars in the driveway, were suddenly forced to do service jobs for under twenty bucks an hour. And that’s quite a comedown. Good luck paying your bills on that.

Of course the minimum wage should be higher, but this election is not about the issues. Let me tell you once again, THIS ELECTION IS NOT ABOUT THE ISSUES! This election is about emotions. How people feel.

And a lot of people feel negatively about Biden and Harris. Period.

But that vitriol is nowhere near the hatred of Trump. But the game is rigged, it’s not the popular vote that matters, but the Electoral College, and Trump has a very good chance there.

Which means the Democrats should be afraid, they should be very afraid.

Now as a result of this NYT/Siena poll, there’s been a bit of a readjustment, and hopefully it will continue. Trump’s win in 2016 was a surprise. Everything’s in evidence today. This is not a walk in the park, a slam dunk for Harris, she’s going to have to eke out a victory. And if you think otherwise, you just don’t interact with enough Trump voters.

Forget the MAGA people. I was at UCLA Hospital for a checkup today. The doctor, educated and of great status in his field, said he was voting for Trump. He voted for him in 2016 but voted for Biden in 2020. He thought Biden would bring the country together, but now he believes the country is further apart so he’s back in the Trump camp.

Let’s not be logical. Let’s not even bother to be incredulous. This is how that guy feels.

Forget the idiots in the social media videos. Ignorance on parade. You’d be stunned how many people who are otherwise reasonable are in the Trump camp. Furthermore, many of them don’t vocalize it, which is why James Carville says the Democrats have to win by three points to ensure Electoral College victory.

But nobody wants to hear that. They want to take Nate Silver off the table because he works for a company in which Peter Thiel has invested. The left is as bad as the right, and it pains me. Is this how far we’ve come, that’s it’s attack politics all day long, that the facts don’t matter, where there are no agreed upon facts?

Looks like it.

Which is why emotions, feelings are so important.

I’d love to tell you I can warm up to Kamala Harris. But I just don’t feel it. Once again, it’s emotions. I’m not quite sure who she is. The smartest girl in school, the cool girl, I can’t find a slot. Tim Walz, midwestern teacher. Biden? Lifelong pol. Trump? Rich real estate baron who has skated on daddy’s money. But Kamala?

Don’t bother to push back. Because nothing you say can convince me otherwise. It’s how I feel, and you can’t argue with feelings.

I knew who Hillary Clinton was. An educated, intelligent wonk. Did she equivocate, triangulate, sure. But I had no doubt she could run the country. I voted for her. But it turns out enough people in toss-up states felt otherwise, and she lost.

I just bring up my feelings re Kamala to say that if I, a dyed in the wool Democrat, who is going to vote for Harris no matter what, I’m all in, am not sold on her emotionally, how many other people are not?

And this election comes down to very few people. A tiny number.

I’m burned out on the news. It’s insane. We had to listen to three days of predictions on this debate. Reams and reams of ink. Or pixels. All irrelevant.

It’s a media circle jerk. The for profit TV news loves it, the horse race, it sells advertising. And the newspapers are not much better.

Do you really think the average person cares about the issues?

I’ll make it very clear, the only people who really care about the issues are those who’ve already decided who they’re going to vote for!

All this malarkey over tips and tariffs, the media and those who live for politics eat this stuff up, the rest of the public have lives, they don’t want to waste their time.

And nowhere in the debate prep I read did anybody nail what happened tonight.

First and foremost, the cutting off of mics worked for Kamala. It let Trump’s insanity stand alone, it wasn’t a constant harangue, you could actually sit with what he had to say, and oftentimes it was so crazy.

Kamala evaded right off the bat.

But then Trump trumped her. He just repeated immigration issues over and over and over again. It was like the moderators weren’t even there.

And the moderators did call b.s. on some of Trump’s lies.

What I like best is after birth abortions. What exactly are those again?

And the trope that immigrants are eating pets. Sounds like something from “The Onion.” The city manager denied it. And Trump said that man was lying! There were people on TV saying otherwise! I mean you’ve got to believe what you see on television, right? No one of voting age believes that, NO ONE!

And then Kamala shined doing the one thing everybody told her not to do, which was act like a prosecutor.

The Democrats are wimps. Afraid of offending anyone.

When Harris stopped pussyfooting, avoiding questions, she drilled into Trump and it was a pleasure to watch. The key issue, ABORTION! This hangs on Trump’s neck, he cannot escape it.

And then came the Affordable Care Act.

After about fifteen minutes Trump was so off his game… Irrelevant of what he was saying, oftentimes non-responsive and incorrect, Trump became so intense, so obstinate, that the only thing that could go through your brain was…THIS GUY CAN’T BE PRESIDENT!

If some controlled debate, wherein he stood equally with his opponent, made him lose his sh*t, how would it be if he was pressured?

By foreign leaders, like Orbán.

How does this right wing card continue to be played. Harris didn’t nail Trump on this, but she should have. The fact that Trump and Carlson worship Orbán is all you need to know. Because nobody in America wants to live under Orbán, NO ONE! Dictators are loyal to no one, everybody’s expendable, just like those who worked for Trump. On a whim he fired people. And his argument against Harris and Biden was they didn’t fire enough people? That may work on “The Apprentice,” but in real life no one wants to lose their job. And the truth is it’s very hard to fire someone today. And on some level that’s sad, but if people lose their job the safety net might not catch them, future opportunities might be decimated and they’ll come back and shoot up the workplace. We used to call it “going postal,” but now it happens everywhere.

The border! Minnesota! Crime! On and on Trump went. Almost always inaccurately, he looked like the Nazi in “The Producers.”

And those on the right can save their blowback. This is your guy. You nominated him. If you’re pissed that I’m pointing out truths, how do you feel about Trump excoriating everybody in his path unless they kiss his ass? No one likes to live like this.

So you have to accept Trump on faith. As a two-dimensional character. But that is untrue, he’s three-dimensional. Not demented, but definitely insane.

So… Kamala should win, right?

Don’t be so sure.

This election is really going to come down to turnout. That’s probably enough for Kamala to win. But, the Republicans have stricken voters from the rolls, they’re doing everything to suppress the vote, in Georgia you have to wait in line to vote for hours if you’re Black, but if you’re white you can stroll right in.

We are not going to fix the system by November. If anything, the Republicans are trying to put their thumb even heavier on the scale.

Oh yeah, Trump avoiding the question on January 6th. Can you tell me how that could win over an undecided voter?

But once again, almost everybody has decided.

And what we’ve learned is the media likes the action.

And I’ve got no faith in the party brass, on either side. On the right, it’s all MAGA, all the time. But on the left, these are the people who tried to convince us Biden hadn’t lost a step and could win, who held back the truth from us, and then we saw the truth on national TV in the previous debate.

Which Trump is still contesting. Like they said after Inauguration Day 2017, the only place where Hillary is President is on Fox News.

Actually, it all started tonight with Trump taking the bait about crowd size. He couldn’t be the bigger person, he couldn’t let it go. He had to throw the issues overboard to lie about the size of his crowd.

Then you knew this guy shouldn’t be president.

I’m just hoping enough people saw Donald’s performance tonight and felt this way.

But the Jets won the Super Bowl in 1969.

It ain’t over until it’s over.

We’ve already learned that this year, with Biden’s pull out.

Don’t think you know how it’s going to work out.

And please do talk politics. Listen to the other side. And then discuss the issues. No one is going to change their view on the spot, but after they leave they think about what you have to say. If you’re reasonable and make reasonable arguments, they’ll percolate in the other person’s brain and…

This is not about MAGA. Forget MAGA.

This is about the very few undecideds in the middle.

And those who think their vote doesn’t count. IT DOES! 2000 proved that.

So tonight was entertainment. Not radically different from the WWE.

It was nowhere near as important as the media make it out to be.

But they were both together on stage, so you could see the contrast. Whereas in the future they’ll both be alone with their spin.

Once again, Harris won. By a TKO, not a complete knockout.

But it doesn’t matter.

I felt good about Harris when she pressed the case. Did enough of the few undecideds feel this way?

Or can people still not understand why we have inflation, at the lowest rate in the world. Do people still want change. Because Trump did make a pretty good case that a vote for Harris was a vote for the same damn thing, more Biden. But a vote for Trump is…SCARY!

But Shaboozey got nominated for a CMA.

Can the public accept that “Cowboy Carter” and its single “Texas  Hold ‘Em” were not country hits? NO!

So I’m reading the concert grosses in “Pollstar.” What’s interesting is not the first page, what sells out, but what does not.

Like Thirty Seconds to Mars. Which only had 38% sold at Merriweather Post Pavilion. 

Now in truth, that’s a shed, capacity is 15,000, but how many people want to sit way back on their ass and… A hit act will reach capacity. Thirty Seconds to Mars only sold 5,702 tickets. A gross of 400k, not bad, but the demand is just not there.

As a matter of fact, that was a trend at Merriweather Post. Acts that did not come close to selling out. Is demand for these acts diminished, do people just not want to go to this venue, or has concert mania declined?

Read the grosses and you sense something is off. People just won’t go to see anything anymore.

And what gets someone out of the house to pay so much money to see an act?

I mean the prices are so high, you don’t go on a lark. It’s not a casual investment, you’ve got to care. And you care about the classic rock acts, some MTV acts, some new hit acts and then…

If you haven’t had a hit lately, you’re in trouble, like the Chainsmokers.

But comedy? Comedy is raging. Because it captures the zeitgeist, provides something music used to but rarely does anymore.

But what impressed me most was Slipknot. Which played the CFG Bank Arena in Baltimore, not far from Merriweather Post, albeit less of a schlepp. Slipknot went clean in Baltimore, 11,334 seats, for a gross of $893,327 (tickets were $33.50 to $143.50). AND THEY’VE NEVER EVER HAD A HIT!

It’s not like Slipknot gets no ink. But the average American has no idea who the band is. Yet, eleven thousand people journeyed out of their homes, a big effort, to lay down their cash to see the band.

And it’s not like the support acts were driving sales, they were those well-known bands Knocked Loose and Orbit Culture, HUH? No, people wanted to see Slipknot.

You’re either a Slipknot fan or you’re not. Either you buy into their ethos or you don’t. And their ethos is one of the other. You’re different from everybody else, you go to the show as a pilgrimage, to unite with thinking people… Yes, Slipknot thinks, it’s easier to do a me-too rap song or appear on a TV singing show than create a whole new identity and culture. And that’s what Slipknot has done.

The script has flipped. It’s the late sixties all over again. A bifurcation. The bands with catalogs, with history, who have an identity, are the ones doing business. The ones with the hits? You live and die by the hit, and if you ain’t got one on the chart right now, good luck selling tickets.

We had a consolidation in festivals. Are we going to see a consolidation, a reduction in the number of live gigs in general?

It’s not cheap to go on the road. People have to buy tickets to make the economics work. And there might be a mania over Oasis, but for you?

And let’s be clear, Slipknot tickets are relatively cheap. Which augurs for return engagements if you deliver.

Of course one big hit will bring out the scalpers… But they didn’t scalp Grateful Dead tickets, people just asked for free ones, a miracle.

The news and the labels are enmeshed in an antique paradigm.

Was there demand for “Cowboy Carter”?

NOT AMONGST THE TRADITIONAL COUNTRY MARKET!

“Billboard” was afraid of racial backlash and considered “Texas Hold ‘Em” to be country, and it topped their chart. If you consider Bob Dylan klezmer, he’s going to top that chart with every release. As is his son Jakob and his son-in-law, Peter Himmelman.

You don’t need a hit to survive.

You have to reorient your vision. View the internet as your friend. Don’t complain about streaming payments, be thrilled people can readily discover you and become fans and give you money, year after year after year.

It’s not only the show, but the merch… It’s based on belief. There is little belief in a hit single. It’s about the body of work. The attitude, the culture.

If you’re just another me-too singer, you’ve got to be really damn good or lucky or both to break through. Homie don’t play that no more.

An evolution is happening right in front of our faces. And despite all the hype about the Spotify Top 50 and stadium sellouts, the action is occurring at the bottom. The bottom is growing, coming up, and the top is getting ever thinner and the middle is no-man’s land.

You’ve got to decide which side you’re on.

Once again I point to Zach Bryan. He could sell out stadiums before he had a hit. The internet, the people spread the word. It wasn’t radio action, it was not playlists, Bryan was selling authenticity, credibility in a sold out world.

This is the power of music. This is what you don’t get from the social media influencers.

And being on the awards show is much more important than winning. Quick, name two winners from last year’s CMAs… Almost no one can!

And fewer people are watching awards shows.

Which means you’re on your own.

All the infrastructure of the past is on life support. Radio promotion. Retail price and placement. The new world is much more vague, there are no rules, so those with the microphone default to the old rules and the only people who are buying them are themselves and those who really don’t care.

Meanwhile, tribute bands/shows are all over the chart. That sells tickets. And sure, there were hits, but Queen was much more than the hits, as were the Eagles and…

Interesting times.

Woke up this morning…

Actually, the first time I saw “The Sopranos” was in the morning, just before noon on a Saturday, with the curtains drawn, I heard the opening notes of that Alabama 3 song and…

I’ve watched “Breaking Bad,” never made it through “The Wire,” and there’s nothing like “The Sopranos.” I’ve never seen suburban life depicted so accurately, with the hippest rock soundtrack to boot. Remember the Kinks’ “I’m Not Like Everybody Else” after Tony whips Janice into a frenzy? That’s not the original, that’s the remake from the double album “To The Bone,” which you can’t find on streaming services, it’s another album lost to the sands of time, but the next morning I riffled through hundreds of CDs to find it, to hear it.

That was the power of “The Sopranos.”

Or when Meadow said her parents should take away her gasoline credit card as punishment… They thought it was a big deal, but she had them snookered.

America is a suburban nation. Not a rural nation, not a city nation, but a suburban nation. Its consciousness is based on those who grew up in single family dwellings with a yard, who went to the local public or Catholic school, who played Little League and grilled hot dogs and hamburgers. This is our shared experience. And “The Sopranos” represented that. We may not have been gangsters, but we knew about living outside the metropolis, knowing that there were bigger people in the city, but to us our world was everything.

And America is about friends. Your “posse” in hip-hop language. Some people set the world on fire, ironically the bigger you are, the more people you know but the fewer friends you’ve got. You need sharp elbows to make it to the top. But it’s this context amongst us that grounds us, keeps us together. Tony had his crew. You had…

This was 1999. Just when we all started to sing that Prince song in anticipation of the millennium. AOL was rampant, but broadband was not. If you wanted to know what was going on, if you wanted a date, you had to leave the house. It was the last hurrah for not only the century, but a certain way of life.

And then all hell broke loose.

It started in the music business. They talk about the dot com era, but that was really about fly by night companies looking to make a buck, but Napster was ground-breaking, nothing was the same thereafter. Not only in music, but the culture at large. Disruption became the word. Everything was up for grabs.

And now twenty five years later our nation is unrecognizable. We’re wired, we’re linked, but the system short circuits. We’re no longer connected. But one thing is for sure, if you want to know which way the wind blows, you watch a TV show. A streaming TV show.

And probably not on HBO.

But HBO had been pushing the envelope with original series. Hipsters knew about “Larry Sanders,” they were broken in by “Dream On.” “Sex and the City” burgeoned after the breakthrough of “The Sopranos,” when people hungered for more and found Carrie and her friends in “The Sopranos” time slot. But “Sex and the City” was a fantasy, “The Sopranos” was reality.

“The Sopranos” movie was a dud. And the documentary explains why, without saying a thing. It lacked the writers’ room, that had tiredly batted around stories for years. And James Gandolfini.

The strange thing about this documentary is you can see the acting.

At this point, everybody considers themselves an actor. Become a big enough musical star and you’ll get a role. But the pros have trained. They’ve got to get into the headspace. We see this again and again in the doc. How Gandolfini pushes and pushes himself. And if you’re looking for gossip, you’ll get a tidbit when David Chase says he wasn’t surprised by Jim’s death. We had no idea how far gone Gandolfini was. You had to be on the inside. Which is the same today, we think we know everything, oftentimes we know nothing.

David Chase. He’s Italian. Originally it was “DeCesare.” And they show his life from then to now. Growing up in New Jersey with an insane mother. That’s the theme of the documentary, mothers. That’s the point of connection amongst everybody involved. Shrink 101. Everybody tells you to get over it, but Chase can’t, most can’t.

Hopefully you wake up one day and realize your mom’s the problem. You’ve got to get yourself out from under. Which is what Chase does, he moves to the west coast, where he says the scum flows, or so he’s heard. He moves to the Bay Area to go to graduate school at Stanford, and then goes south to Tinseltown.

But he can’t leave his mother behind.

He has success in TV when really he wants to make movies, and he’s got this project about his mother and mobsters and…

No one wants to buy it.

That’s the difference between yesterday and today. If they don’t like it, oftentimes you can do it yourself. And there are more outlets buying. But having said that, we’re past Peak TV, and even Netflix is tightening the strings and going for broad-based rather than niche.

But the suits know nothing. They never did. Barry Diller may have come up with “The Movie of the Week,” but the executives can never make the product. It used to be in the music business they were hands off, they knew they weren’t musical, but it’s always been this way in visual entertainment, everybody’s an expert. But they’ve got no idea what really resonates with the public. Which is visceral. They’re afraid of the public, they’re second-guessing the public, but it takes an artistic visionary to get it right.

Like David Chase. He fought for his way. The nuances were important. They didn’t want Tony to kill that rat when Meadow goes to look at college. As for the deaths… You knew nobody was forever, everybody was up for grabs. It’s when they whacked Big Pussy that you realized this.

So I didn’t expect this documentary to be great, I held off watching it for fear of disappointment. Another return to the graveyard.

But that’s not what it is. Credit Alex Gibney, his documentaries are always a cut above.

But I’m watching the first episode and I’m reminded of what once was. And although I’m nostalgic, I’m not looking through rose-colored glasses. The show really was that good.

I’m not one to watch anything over. I like the element of surprise. After that, it’s no longer new. There are no do-overs in life, why should there be in art? But when the scenes unfolded on the screen…

I was brought right back there.

But one of the most interesting things is the actors have aged. Michael Imperioli has gray hair. As does Lorraine Bracco. No one seems to have succumbed to the pressures of Hollywood, they have not gotten plastic surgery in a failed effort o appear young. It’s only worked for Susan Sarandon, everybody else’s visage is off, everybody knows, but no one admits it. You cannot turn back the hands of time. You can only go forward.

And you’ll learn a lot about the making of the series. About making TV. People have no idea what a grind it is.

But mostly you will be returned to New Jersey. Your spiritual home.

Despite Bruce Springsteen and Jon Bongiovi, people outside the area have no idea how derided New Jersey is, still. Connecticut, New York, fine. New Jersey? Laughable. Second-rate.

What you’ve got here is the underdogs who got out from under to tell their truth, which turned out to be our truth.

I would hope we could return to the well, that we could have another show as good as “The Sopranos,” but we never got another Beatles, never mind another “Godfather” I or “II.”

Entertainment is America’s foremost export. And if you’re paying attention, you know that the internet and streaming services have undercut this in music. Now there is more regional talent. That spreads beyond borders. The days of U.S. and U.K. domination are done.

And they’re making better TV series than ever around the world, the Danes and Israelis especially, but it’s American visual entertainment that still dominates.

However it is faltering. “The Sopranos” killed movies. It was better than movies. If you wanted real life, grit, you turned on the flat screen, the theatre was for fantasy. As for the vaunted filmmakers of the day, neither Spielberg nor Scorsese have ever made anything as good as “The Sopranos.” Spielberg makes spectacle. Scorsese has always had a problem with story. Image and moments, but story? That was in “The Sopranos.” That’s the nature of television, story is superior to image.

Woke up this morning, and I did not get a gun, but I just had to tell you. If you were a fan of “The Sopranos” this is a must-see. This is the college reunion you dream of attending. These are three-dimensional people you know so well, at least on screen. In real life they were different, you can see this.

And in the tsunami of product and hype we heard about this documentary for a week or two, and now crickets. That’s the way it always is. The promotional complex does not know how to do it otherwise. But in truth, today most projects marinate in the public consciousness, are spread by word of mouth, taking ever longer to break through.

Just like “The Sopranos” itself. It was not an overnight hit. First and foremost, not everybody had HBO. It took the entire season for word to spread. And then…

It became America’s story.

But it’s not true. That’s what you learn during the doc. It was just another TV show.

Only it’s not.

Instant hearing aids.

That’s the big breakthrough announced by Apple today.

But everybody wants to know about the new iPhones.

Bottom line, you don’t need one…unless you do.

Smartphones are now like cars. They keep introducing new models, the advertising is overwhelming, but you’re only in the market every few years (obviously longer for automobiles). So do you need a new phone?

What stunned me at the Niall Horan show last week at the O2 is I only saw one Android on the floor (and I don’t mean on the floor, but in the GA section). We’ve been told that Apple dominates in the U.S., but not overseas. But unless you’re in a struggling or third world market, Apple is not only the premium product, it’s an issue of envy, or should I say ostracization. If you don’t have an iPhone, you’re an outsider. And if you’re young, you need to be a member of the group. If you’re old, you don’t see why you need to spend extra for a device that you only talk and text on. And if you’re a techie, you might prefer Android the same way you prefer Windows, for the ability to customize. But it’s Apple’s world and we just live in it.

So if your iPhone is old, on its last legs, if it doesn’t pay to invest in a new battery, you’re going to upgrade. Should you wait another year? They keep saying how the iPhone 17 is going to be a breakthrough, but for the first time in a long time, you’re going to be missing out on features if you don’t have the latest iPhones. Or an iPhone 15 Max.

Yes, always buy the ultimate iPhone. It’s all about future-proofing. This is not where you should cut corners. ALWAYS lay down for the Pro model.

To make it very simple, if you have last year’s Pro, you can use this year’s AI features. Which you’ll want to use.

AI has been overhyped. But most of the talk now is about the bleeding edge. I’ve got to give Apple credit for addressing everyday usage. The coolest feature is the ability to create emojis on the fly, and I never use emojis, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg.

The digital era has ushered in the elimination of the manual. Sure, most people didn’t read them. But if you chose to, everything was delineated in it. Whereas when it comes to the iPhone… You’re on your own.

Oh, you can get a free one on one session with a new iPhone, but that just teaches you the basics. If you want to know how to use the new features, you’ve got to experiment yourself, or have friends.

That’s the way most people will learn how to utilize these new features, via friends. You’ll be at a party, or a lunch, and someone will do something you didn’t know possible and you’ll want to know how to do it yourself. And people love to teach others. Assuming they don’t insult them about their ignorance in the first place. But if you’re an expert on every feature of the iPhone, you probably work at Apple.

Do I expect heavy adoption of the new iPhones because of this Apple Intelligence/AI feature? No. But if you have one, or last year’s Pro model, you’re going to use this new feature, primarily to create writing…it’s amazing what it can do, on a mobile device.

As for other features… There’s a whole host of new camera stuff. Most especially a slider along the side that allows you to adjust so many things.

But, bottom line, very few people are going to sit at home and see these new features and pop for a new device unless their old one is on its last legs.

As for AirPods…

You’ve got to get the Pro model for the better audio and hearing aid capability. But everybody buys the Pro model anyway. Just like people overwhelming pop for the Pro iPhones.

Bottom line… An incredible proportion of the public needs hearing aids but don’t know, or won’t admit this and take action. Furthermore, the longer you wait, the harder it is to adjust.

And here the government is your friend. It made available over the counter hearing aids, usually sold for under a grand, sometimes way under. But they don’t have the sophistication of the AirPods Pro. Because the AirPods Pro have a hearing test built in, and therefore the hearing curve is instantly adjusted on your AirPods. Once again, this will not be the big news you’ll read about (hear about?), but this is a huge breakthrough. Hearing aids have been dominated by companies lacking in technological expertise overcharging for mediocre devices, this is a natural space for tech companies like Apple to dominate.

Like in watches.

You may own a Rolex, or even a Breitling, but the truth is those are jewelry items, an Apple Watch delivers functionality.

And sleep apnea detection. This is almost as big a deal as AirPods doing double duty as hearing aids. Most people who have sleep apnea don’t know it, and then there are people who have it but won’t treat it.

Detection has required a sleep study, in the old days only at a facility, however now there are programs you can use at home, but they might cost you, whereas this is built into the AirPods Pro.

This is a breakthrough year for the Watch, because the face is bigger and the entire Watch is thinner and lighter. More screen real estate, that’s what everybody is asking for.

And the hidden star of the Apple presentation, yet hiding in plain sight, was San Francisco itself, the Bay Area. California and most especially the City by the Bay, have been excoriated. I could list the tropes, but if you watch this video you’ll want to move there, at least go there.

Everybody is dressed down at the world’s most valuable company, wearing trainers (U.K. English for Nikes, etc.) Even Tim Apple is wearing a polo shirt.

And usually, the presentation is based at Apple’s HQ, but this time it’s at different locations in the area and the camera flies from one to another, in a 2-D version of the Dead’s opening at the Sphere, and the light and the…

Nate Silver had it right. The mentality of the east and west coasts is very different. The rules are gone on the west coast, there are few boundaries. If you’re someone who likes to trade on their résumé, who your parents are, where you went to school, stay east, but if you dropped out, if you want to invent it as you go, come to the west.

Argue all you want, but the images in this presentation are very enticing.

So, do you have to watch this hour and a half video?

No. Apple presentations are not cutting edge like they used to be.

Oh, I forgot to mention Spatial Audio!

Despite Apple’s continued push, it looks like Spatial Audio is another audio format that is going to die on the vine. Apple’s all-in, you hear about them paying more for Spatial Audio mixes on Apple Music, it’s only that…

Apple Music is not quite the Zune, but it’s close.

Spotify owns streaming music. It’s got the lion’s share of subscribers who do more listening than they do on other services and furthermore, it’s growing faster.

Apple came too late to streaming music. And unlike in the Jobs era, it didn’t take the old technology and take a great leap forward, it’s really no different from Spotify. And Spotify keeps introducing one new feature after another. As for audio quality… Spotify is going to go hi-res, but the truth is it’s a canard, part of the pushback over digital audio, a passé argument if there ever was one. Hi-res and regular streaming are nearly indistinguishable, and you’ve got to have the right equipment to hear the higher quality. Yes, AirPods Pro will deliver it, but on your computer you need a separate DAC and…for almost all people regular audio is enough, otherwise people would have switched to Tidal way back when, and they did not. As for the CD, you can now get better audio streaming, higher resolutions, the CD is a dead medium, unless you’re selling souvenirs or trying to enter or maintain your number one chart position.

As for AirPods Max… A failed product. Apple has had a few, remember that boombox equivalent, and the giant HomePod? Bottom line is AirPods Max are overpriced and ugly. Steve Jobs would have never let this product be shipped. If this rectangular shape were great, someone else would have pioneered and stuck with it, and this is not the case. Also, the AirPods Max are way overpriced. They’ve got to be under $500. I’d make them $399 max.

So, once again, you know if you need new products.

If you do, go for the best, it’s barely more expensive.

It used to be that the regular iPhone, not the Max, used last year’s chip. This year it’s got a new chip, but the Pro models have one even better.

So get the new iPhone Pro, if you’re in the market for one.

Watches are cheaper, maybe you want the latest design.

AirPods? You wait until you lose ’em or they die.

But the Apple Store will be ready when you are.

Unlike in the Jobs era, almost all the breakthroughs today are in software, however you do need a device to employ them. But really, instant hearing aids and a sleep apnea test…these are utterly AMAZING!

P.S. Oh, the Weeknd video… This and the double-tracking in the Notes app illustrate how easy it is now to create. And the end result is the flooding of the channel with “music.” Everyone has the tools of creation in their pocket. Kids grow up learning/knowing this stuff. The Weeknd video looks cool, it makes people want to be involved in music, but let’s be clear, the tune itself was secondary and it didn’t sound innovative. We’re ready for the audio extremes. Either totally digital, using AI, or non-digital, using acoustic instruments or electric ones with no added effects, just like punk was a reaction to prog and corporate rock.