If there is one thing I am a sucker for it is Apple services. I wish they would just go ahead and fully lean in and come up with one amazing offer. I already subscribe to Apple One Premium to get iCloud, fitness, news, arcade, and TV that I share with the family.

Now they are offering Apple Care as a recurring subscription. I’m doing my part to make sure these bay area employees can retire comfortably with their cozy salaries and RSUs stacking up in their accounts!

AppleCare One lets you cover 3 devices for $20/month and is $5.99/month/extra device. I actually got over $200 back by cancelling my existing plans and rolling them into a subscription.

I have my iPhone 16 Pro, 11” M4 iPad Pro, M4 Pro Macbook Pro and my Airpods Max headphones covered and that comes out to $26/month.

This also added theft/loss as coverage for me, which I never end up paying for. So I’m actually getting more coverage than I had before, even though I’m locking myself into a subscription now.

Apple got me again!

If you are not following me on Threads yet go check me out @williambmclean

This past week I ran polls on all of my social media, Threads being the primary, to have you pick what App I should talk about in September.

It ended up with a tie so I’m going to have to do one in September and the other in October, but I think you are going to like the choice and it pairs nicely as a follow up for my Apple Watch Battery Life video this past week.

This seems like a great time to plug that video. I personally love my Apple Watch and while other sports watches do have better battery life the features of the Apple WAtch are second to none.

I went hands on last year with the Garmin Forerunner 965 and it just doesn’t compare. Sure it does largely all the same stuff, but some of the key integrations like music and bluetooth are just a hassle, not to mention the lack of cellular functionality.

Check out those videos and let me know if you are like me and couldn’t pry the Apple Watch from your cold dead hands.

Featuring the 505 Podcast yet again, I love how much these rocks have grown up. They are getting some seriously impressive guests lately and the things they talk about have been some of the most insightful for me as a creator and wannabe videographer.

The episode I listened to this past week was featuring guest Oren John, hid instagram bio says he is “The Internet’s Creative Director”.

I’ve still been using Snipd to save pieces of podcasts into my Readwise. Here’s the top messages that I took away from this episode.

Experiment with content. I’ve now heard this from Oren, Gary Vee and next week I’ll bread down the episode with Caleb Ralston who says the same thing.

Basically find what is working, do 70% of your content around that, 20% should be an iteration on the main thing and 10% should just be wild speculation to see what else might work.

Not getting stuck with the same format for too long. I feel this, because doing the same thing over and over is not fun as the creator and I think it gets stale as a viewer quickly as well.

I need to get better about trying to experiment in my content, but I’m still getting my feet under me and haven’t really found my “main” content yet anyways so I can still experiment a bit.

The next one might be controversial but Oren believes that building in public is saturated. Everyone is building in public these days and people don’t give a shit anymore.

Oren still talks about content pillars being relevant. If I broke down my content I’m sure I could find pillars but I didn’t intentionally design it that way.

Next is planning BTS content. As someone who thinks they should be doing BTS I can never really figure out how to do it and not just have a mountain of content to sort through.

Coming up with a plan actually makes a lot of sense. Duh. I can’t believe Mr. Engineer didn’t think of that.

Then lastly it seems like everyone and their mother want to be influencers these days. Oren believes influencer marketing hasn’t peaked yet and that we will be seeing higher dollar contracts between influencers and brands, similar to sports contracts.

We will see how that plays out but it is an interesting thought.

What’s coming up

Connect and Engage