A frustrating watch – both in terms of Netflix’s new plans and Garmin’s leaked band upset our editor
Hi! I’m back! I had a lovely two weeks off, thanks, but it’s nice to be back talking back to you wonderful readers. But it turns out that I’ve left at a time when a lot has been happening, and prepping for this newsletter has been a great chance to get back up to speed with it all and read some thoroughly interesting stories. Mostly, if you share your Netflix password with anyone, you might want to give them a call soon and ask for a regular donation… Does your father use your Netflix account, meaning you get constant emails about a new login? Does your son still watch Netflix at college and stop you from bingeing Squid Games at the exact moment you managed to carve out 45 minutes in your busy life? If that’s the case, get ready to be even more frustrated: it’s going to cost you more to experience that annoyance in the future, as Netflix seeks to monetize password sharing. The reason is simple: Netflix has lost 200,000 paying subscribers since the start of the year, and that decline is going to increase rapidly, according to estimates. So the platform is “taking action” to stop things like excessive password sharing, charging users for the privilege of sharing (that charge is currently $2.99 for a trial in places including Chile and Peru). I was going to go into a rant about how this isn’t the cause of the issue, that it’s the price hikes, the increased competition, the lack of quality content… but then I read Axel Metz’s piece, and he’s done it all far more eloquently than I ever could, and he’s spoken to experts about it to. You should probably just read that… One of the quirks of being a phones journalist over the years has been the moment when a brand launches a new color variant of a recently-launched phone; it often provides a moment of simple joy in contrast to the hours spent talking about specs and materials. The iPhone 12 in purple made people happy. The HTC U12 in Flame Red was one of the most beautiful phones I ever saw. So when Samsung said the S22 Ultra was coming in red, our Phones Editor Tom Bedford predicted that it would be beautiful, and opined as such. How wrong he was. It turns out that Samsung thinks ‘red’ really means ‘a sort of burned coral with a reddish hue’, and many readers have got in contact with us to say how disappointed they are. Why not just make a lovely red phone Samsung? That’s what people want, clearly, so stop playing around with confected colors and make a proper red variant. I’ve been pondering which earbuds to get next, as my trusty and super-cheap Enacfire buds from Amazon are starting to irritate me just a little too much.
