Each Saturday, Farhad Manjoo and Mike Isaac, technology reporters at The New York Times, review the week’s news, offering analysis and maybe a joke or two about the most important developments in the industry. Mr. Manjoo is off this week, so Mr. Isaac is conversing with fellow tech reporter Quentin Hardy.

Mike: Hello, Farhad! How are you do ... — wait a minute. You aren’t Farhad. You’re my very intelligent colleague, Quentin Hardy! What are you doing here, and what have you done with Farhad?

Quentin: The working theory is that we have reached Peak Manjoo, and from now on we must ration his wisdom wisely so it lasts longer. I will try to drop something like his wisdom bombs.

Mike: Okey-doke. So, it has been a strange week in tech, though I think I say that every week, so I guess it has been a normal week in tech.

We’re all still on the lookout for who will take the chief executive position at Twitter, a process that seems to be moving about as fast as the Iran deal did. China’s stock market is basically imploding, which I guess is also bad for American tech start-ups. Oh, and McDonald’s is now serving breakfast all day, which is really much bigger news than any of this other tech stuff combined.

But as you are this week’s substitute Farhad, I leave it to you to set the topics of discussion. What’s tickling your fancy this week?

Quentin: Like almost everyone, I’m wiggling my toes in the wading pool and nursing an appropriate beverage as the Labor Day holiday calls an unofficial end to summer. Traditionally, college students pack off for school, new cars and fashions show up and we all get back to business.

In tech, it means we start a round of conferences and product announcements, maybe even a few big deals. Usually we ease into these events nice and calmly, but not this year — and not just because Apple is having a bunch of product announcements next week.

You know, Apple has these big announcements, real rolling-thunder stuff. Amazon seems to like it the other way around. Out of nowhere on Tuesday, they announced that Prime members could now download (some) movies and TV shows to iOS and Android devices. In order to watch programming offline previously, you had to have an Amazon Fire tablet, so this gives Amazon a much bigger potential customer base. It’s a pretty huge deal, if Amazon can negotiate a decent inventory of titles. And it brings the pain to Netflix, which hasn’t been interested in offering offline media.

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Mike: This is cool! If only I used Amazon to watch movies. At this point, I’m basically beholden to Netflix — by the way, their new show “Narcos” is awesome. So even with all the cool little features, I only buy an Amazon flick every once in a while.

Amazon’s big problem is people like me: People who don’t register “media” when they think of Amazon. They think about diapers and dog treats. Which reminds me, I need to buy more Greenies for my dog.

Quentin: I’m just starting “Narcos.” Don’t tell me how it ends!

Your dog should be on Amazon Prime — not only would she get treats delivered free, she could download “The Newsroom” or the excellent 1974 James Caan movie “The Gambler” and watch it on your iPad, even if the dog park’s Wi-Fi is down (you can see what I mean about needing more titles). It’s all about selling more Prime subscriptions — you pay a fee and hang around Amazon more.

By the way, Netflix is coming back from the beach to more competition. Hulu, which many people think is a follower in the streaming-services arena, started a $12 a month commercial-free service. Subscriptions! It’s something journalists like us should love.

Mike: Enough about tech media. What about plain old tech?

Quentin: I guess Google is finding out a painful truth: When you’re a global tech company that is basically into everything from advertising to computers to cars, you’re going to get hassled. Possibly with good reason. Last week in Europe, the company faced a new online platform meant to help companies there sue for antitrust violations. In India, the authorities raised the same kind of charges about anticompetitive bullying.

Mike: But they have a new logo. You can’t sue a company if it has an attractive logo. I’m pretty sure that’s a law.

Quentin: Yeah, sometimes watching older tech companies try to cope with a changing world is like having your parents come down to your basement party to “relate” to your friends. Maybe it works, but it doesn’t feel natural.

Mike: O.K., give me one more piece of tech news before I go celebrate Labor Day in the appropriate manner, by not working.

Quentin: Here’s something from the enterprise world. Last week, Cisco announced that it was working with Apple to sell more iPads and iPhones to businesses. It is similar to an Apple-IBM collaboration last year, only the Cisco-Apple deal is more vague about the details.

Further into the world of enterprise spending, VMware and Microsoft — which have disliked each other pretty much since VMware was created so that buyers wouldn’t need as many Windows servers — smoked the peace pipe, figuratively, of course, onstage at a VMware user conference. Both companies are looking for ways to stay relevant now that their customers are buying fewer servers, opting instead to move over to cloud computing.

Mike: The only Enterprise I know anything about is the kind I rent a car from, so I’ll trust that you know what you’re talking about.

O.K., that’s enough, time for the weekend. Thanks for pinch-hitting for Farhad. I’ll try to stump him with an enterprise question next week.

Quentin: Sure thing. Let me know if you need a primer on virtualization.