Not much happens in the dead week of blissed-out, post-party stress recovery between Christmas and New Year’s, least of all juicing the rumor mill. So naturally Apple caught us off guard when it posted a mysterious teaser tweet on X, née Twitter, current darling of the hate speech industry.
While no longer everyone’s favorite platform for raging against people in the Starbucks line, (some) large corporations still don’t mind using it to titillate the public indirectly. Let’s dissect this Apple.
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making cider from the apple rumor mill
So who’s that in the teaser shot, and what can we glean from it? It’s Gary Oldman’s character, Jackson Lamb, from Apple TV+’s original series Slow Horses. A spy thriller series on its fourth season, it’s gotten rave reviews from critics and the public, with a 98% positive rating on Rotten Tomatoes. The kind of show that, uncharacteristically for Apple TV+’s mostly unappreciated and under-championed original series, has seen loads of positive press lately.
Reddit users have pounced on the mysterious tweet like piranhas on a meat apple. Of the theories floating around, a couple seem most plausible to us. One is speculation that Apple will launch a free weekend of viewing to hook new viewers in the hopes that they’ll stick around to watch Apple TV+’s better shows, such as Slow Horses.
Keep in mind that January 4 and 5 fall on a weekend. Does Apple want to capture the whole weekend and keep people glued to their television and laptop screens? Apple TV+ famously doesn’t do free trials, unlike most of its streaming competition. Restricting a free trial to a particular weekend could be one way to concentrate reporting and social media interaction for a larger, more conspicuous bang over that weekend than just doling out free two-day trials.
would you line up for this lineup?
The other major theory floating around is that Apple TV+ will announce its 2025 lineup. This one I find less compelling. It isn’t like the annual Apple Event announcement carousel every fall, where new MacBooks, iPhones, iPads, and more are spread out on a daily drip feed of news. Apple TV+’s 2025 lineup just isn’t big enough potatoes to justify being spread over two days, although if Apple’s flying pigs do use this weekend to solely announce new Apple TV+ shows, I’ll eat my words and those potatoes, fried in olive oil and speckled with a little rosemary.
Apple TV+ is surprisingly close to Hulu in terms of subscribers, although it captures a little less than half of the numbers that Netflix or Prime Video have. Apple seems committed, at least for now, to nurturing Apple TV+, but it may be growing impatient as it sees its rivals continue to out-compete it for viewers and, more crucially, begin shoring up their return on investment for the reported $20 billion they’ve sunk into Apple TV+ over the past five years, according to Ars Technica.
Given that Apple provided just enough to pique our interests and not much more than a two-day range of dates, we can’t blame Will Ferrell for looking as perplexed as he does in Apple’s second teaser. Not exactly thrilled, he seems like he doesn’t quite know what he’s looking at or if it’s good at all. Welcome to the club, Will. You can wait out this rumor with the rest of us.
