Well, we learned something interesting in Netflix’s earnings report. Netflix raised the prices of some its plans over the last quarter, and people still signed up.

I suspect that accounts for how the service is changing. Now that there’s just so much stuff on Netflix — so many comedies, so many dramas, so many dumb movies, so many smart movies — it has become not just another premium cable channel but something like a replacement for TV itself. In other words, it’s indispensable. You can expect to keep paying for it forever.

A Smart, if Tardy, Speaker

Remember HomePod? Probably not. Last summer, Apple unveiled a smart speaker inspired by Amazon’s Echo and Google’s Home, because it is apparently the rule in the tech industry that if one big company does something, every other company has to do it, too. Think Same.

Then, nothing.

A new Apple device is usually a Big Deal event, one of those campaigns that Apple rolls out with the precision of a military conquest. But nobody heard anything more about the HomePod until late November, when Apple announced that the timing had slipped and that HomePod wouldn’t come until after the holidays.

It was a crucial miss — the Echo seems to have had a gangbusters holiday, with Amazon expanding its head start in the category by probably tens of millions of devices. In a widely passed-around post, the venture capitalist M. G. Siegler wondered whether Amazon was so far ahead that HomePod was essentially dead on arrival.