Apple is beating Netflix the same way it beat everyone else: Quality

You won’t read this in many corporate mission statements, but subscription services thrive on laziness. The very moment that a customer signs on the dotted line, inertia enters the equation: it becomes a pain to cancel, and easier just to go with the flow. And from that point on, the customer is incentivised to do nothing, and the provider is incentivised to do the absolute bare minimum. Which is how they like it.

This is why gyms and banks and cable networks do everything allowable under a generous interpretation of the law to increase the friction and inconvenience of breaking things off. So sorry, they inform us solemnly, but you can’t cancel online/over the phone/at the branch where you signed up. You’ll have to visit our special Cancellation Center in Nova Scotia. On a Thursday afternoon.

In the early days, streaming services liked to present themselves as an antidote to the exploitative behaviour of cable companies, but this, it quickly turned out, was yet another example of the inertia strategy. Netflix and Disney and the rest were playing the long game: acting nice at the start, removing ads, letting us binge-watch entire seasons of shows, turning a blind eye to password sharing, and spending big on prestige projects. But once they’d secured a large audience of subscribers, they no longer needed to play nice, and all the old habits came rushing back.

The problem is that this generates resentment among customers, not loyalty; a fickleness beneath the surface that is constantly on the verge of escalation. Customers treated in this way may need only a tiny bit of extra motivation to cancel and switch to another service. Or to something even more drastic, such as piracy.

In an article last week, the A.V. Club discussed this phenomenon on a series level: Netflix shows are experiencing drastic drop-offs in ratings from their first to their second seasons, which the site puts down to multi-year hiatuses and unmemorable programming. That’s true, but I think there’s more to it. Many Netflix shows are neutrally lit, algorithm-driven “content” with no heart, and a tendency to decline in quality after the first few episodes. Simply put, Netflix is more interested in marketing than making.

But this is only a microcosm of a bigger problem, and a more serious disillusionment. Netflix, like most other streamers, cares disproportionately about getting new customers on board and nowhere near enough about delivering a quality product to the customers it already has.

Then there’s Apple, a company that, over the years, has showcased both the best and the worst of customer retention strategy. Apple fans, also known derisively as fanboys, or, if you’re a Twitter bore, iSheep, are notoriously loyal to and protective of the multi-trillion-dollar corporation that makes their favorite tech products. But the centrality of those products makes it, by late-capitalist standards, a comparatively healthy relationship. Apple makes great products, and we love it for doing that. That’s sort of how consumerism is supposed to work.

The moment when Apple’s relationship with its customers became rather less healthy was when someone came up with the idea of the walled garden. iPhone apps had to be installed from the officially sanctioned App Store. If you wanted to repair an Apple product, you had to get it done by a licensed repair company. Apple accessories had to use a proprietary connection standard. And so on, and so on. In each case, Apple softened the policy only when forced to by regulation, because locking in the customer gives it a massive advantage and the ability to charge more money.

When Apple launched a streaming service, therefore, things could have gone either way. Apple TV (or TV+, as it was initially called) could have showcased the company’s gigantic warchest and commitment to quality, or its love of a captive audience. In the event we’ve seen both.

Yes, Apple has given its streaming service an advantage over rivals trying to access the iPhone-owning public: if you buy an Apple product, you get a three-month subscription thrown in. Yes, it isn’t above using product placement in Apple TV shows to market other items in the Cupertino ecosystem. Some walled-garden tricks are going on. But above all, Apple TV tries to win over customers by simply making the best shows and movies it can.

Last week, the Emmy nominations for 2026 were announced, and several Apple properties were recognized in a big way. Pluribus, Slow Horses, and Your Friends & Neighbors got nods for best drama series; Shrinking, Widow’s Bay, and Margo’s Got Money Troubles for best comedy. (Netflix, by contrast, has one in each.) Apple TV shows earned 21 actor nominations, three for directing, and three for writing. And while this was Apple’s best year yet, it wasn’t a complete surprise. In 2025, the stand-out performers were Severance and The Studio, plus, inevitably, the perennially beloved Slow Horses. If we base our verdict on the contents of Apple’s award cabinet, it would appear that the product is good.

I’m hesitant, nevertheless, to make too simplistic a connection between awards nominations and content quality. Apple may have outshone its streaming rivals in the Emmys’ prestige categories this year–-and famously beat them to the first streaming Oscar for Best Picture–-but Netflix still got more Emmy nominations overall this year, by a score of 111 to 87. You can put this down to a deeper catalogue (with entries in more categories) and a longer track record: Apple is still the upstart in this field, and it’s impressive that the company has made the progress and built up the momentum that it has.

It’s not like other streamers are unable to make the kind of shows and movies that awards committees like. It’s more that they don’t know what to do with them when they come along. One of Netflix’s great successes of this year, Beef, got 16 nominations… but as the A.V. Club points out, it saw a 70 percent viewership decline from season 1 to season 2. Something has gone wrong there.

What I like most of all about Apple TV, by contrast, is its commitment. Widow’s Bay is a deeply odd comedy as well as being very funny (and frequently scary). Pluribus and Severance feel almost arthouse, the sort of niche experimentation nobody could possibly imagine as a mainstream smash. But Apple is backing all three with deep funding and heavy promotion.

It may follow the Netflix route at some point. For now, Apple is following its old tech hardware playbook: make good products, and everything else will follow naturally.

Welcome to our weekly Apple Breakfast column, which includes all the Apple news you missed last week in a handy bite-sized roundup. We call it Apple Breakfast because we think it goes great with a Monday morning cup of coffee or tea, but it’s cool if you want to give it a read during lunch or dinner hours too.

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