The Wall Street Journal on Monday:

Fox Corp. said it is acquiring Roku in a deal valued at around $25 billion, making a major bet on the future of ad-supported streaming. The deal — Fox’s largest to date — brings together a media company known for its live news and sports programming with the biggest provider of streaming platforms for connected TVs.

It will add scale to Fox’s streaming business, currently home to free, ad-supported streaming service Tubi, which the company bought for $400 million in 2020, and subscription-based Fox One and Fox Nation.

In addition to distributing other streaming services through connected TVs and devices, Roku has its own ad-supported Roku Channel. The combined company will better compete with the likes of Amazon.com and Netflix for ad dollars.

I’m late to comment on this, but this seems stupid. Roku sucks. I know they’ve got a 25 percent or so share of the smart TV interface market, but no one is attached to Roku. The entirety of their market share is people who don’t care. That’s not worth $25 billion. Shit platforms seldom last, and the ones that do last achieve monopolies. I think Roku’s share is going to slip, not grow.

Rolfe Winkler, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (gift link):

Apple plans to raise prices on its products to offset the surging costs of memory and storage chips, Chief Executive Tim Cook said in an exclusive interview with The Wall Street Journal.

“Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable,” he said. “We’re doing our best to mitigate the huge increases that are being passed to us, and we’ve been trying to shield our customers from the increases, but the situation has become unsustainable.”

Cook declined to offer details on the timing or scale of the planned price increases, nor which products would be affected. Apple’s next major product launch is likely to be in September when it releases the iPhone 18 lineup, expected to include a new foldable iPhone. [...]

Cook said Apple wouldn’t use its cash and silicon expertise to build its own memory and storage factories. “We can’t do everything,” said Cook. “We know what we’re good at.” [...] Cook said during his time working in the electronics supply chain, from IBM to Compaq to Apple, he had never seen a commodity price swing like the one from the past six months. “This is a hundred-year flood,” said Cook. “I’ve never seen anything like it in any area in over 40 years.”

Apple, to my recollection, has never before issued a warning about price increases. Keep in mind that Apple deals with prices in a very different way from its competitors. For Apple, prices are part of a product’s brand, so they don’t fluctuate with component costs. The trash can Mac Pro held its $3000 starting price for six years, despite its specs remaining effectively unchanged in that span.

So when Apple raises prices on the iPhone 18 Pro models this September (and, presumably, launches the folding iPhone “Ultra” with an eye-watering price), expect those prices to stick. And if Apple expects RAM and SSD component pricing to continue rising through 2027 — which is what many anticipate — they might build that into the pricing now. Raise prices by (say) $200 now rather than $100 this year and another $100 next year.

Also, credit to Tim Cook for taking this one personally, months ahead of the iPhone 18 launch, rather than leaving it to John Ternus to serve up a surprise shit sandwich in his first keynote as CEO.

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