Signal: Decidedly Not Live from CES... 📧
...and we're back. Happy 2026 everyone. And Happy Endless-Barrage-of-CES-Posts in all of your feeds, if you celebrate. Which I do not.
Last week, I sent out some predictions for 2026, and a few days before that, looked back on the 2025 predictions. Below, some other things I wrote over the break.
I Wrote...
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
I Note...
📝 Satya Nadella Blogs – To me, the content is less interesting – AI is gonna be big in 2026, you heard it here first! Though I do appreciate the "scaffolding vs. substitute" & "slop vs. sophistication" framing. And, of course, referencing the "bicycles for the mind" without mentioning you-know-who... – than the meta aspect of Nadella deciding to blog. Presumably, this is an attempt to establish some sort of "thought leadership" position as Microsoft navigates the extremely competitive AI waters. He perhaps even learned a thing or two from his friend Sam Altman, who oscillates between his own personal blog and OpenAI's official blog – or even other ones – seemingly on a whim. To that end, Nadella's post isn't a blog on an official Microsoft site or even Microsoft-owned LinkedIn, where many such thought leader-y posts are born, but instead on "snscratchpad.com" – there wasn't a better URL available?! That perhaps led it to fly under the radar, with Techmeme just posting it now, even though Nadella posted this a week ago. Maybe this was a new year's resolution to write more, which I can certainly appreciate! We'll see how long he keeps it up... [SN Scratchpad]
📱 OpenAI Latest App Store Attempt – Rolfe Winkler tried to use some of the initial apps in ChatGPT’s latest attempt to re-create the magic of the App Store. The result? Predictably not great. OpenAI says it’s early, which it is, but the real issue is how much easier/better it is to use the partners' services via their actual apps and/or websites. The App Store worked because it took advantage of a new device and form factor in the form of the iPhone. OpenAI’s hope here is to leverage the fact that people already have ChatGPT open, but these other apps really are just a click away, be it in another tab or another app. Which is to say, maybe this strategy works when OpenAI has their own device (if that device is compelling enough), but then again, Amazon has been trying that for years too without much success… I can see some business use cases here, but consumer use cases are going to remain a challenge unless OpenAI can figure out something truly novel (perhaps by using ChatGPT’s knowledge about you?)… [WSJ 🔒]
📽️ Hollywood Had A Slightly Better 2025 – $8.9B in ticket sales (in the US and Canada) was 2% better than 2024 — but such numbers are still down over 20% versus the pre-pandemic levels. And that’s before you take inflation into account. This naturally brings up the "is this the new normal?" question, which it probably is unless Hollywood actually does something to change the equation here. Netflix could help, but the industry will do everything in their power to stop that from happening so… Still, one of my predictions for the year is that the 2026 box office will be up pretty significantly, sequentially. And it may even touch those pre-pandemic numbers (again, before inflation). The slate looks that strong with franchises galore (not that those helped much this year). But it will likely be a mirage. Real change — reel change? — remains needed. [NYT]
🥽 Apple Cuts Vision Pro Production & Marketing – Many in Apple's orbit seem to be quick to call this latest report a "nothingburger" – mainly in that it's nothing new (IDC's market report notes that Luxshare halted production last year), but I would just note that the company did ship an updated version of the device since then (also IDC's sales estimates do keep falling below even their muted expectations). Sure, it was a small spec upgrade, but many Apple updates are and they still manage to move needles year to year – that does not seem to be the case with Vision Pro. IDC believes they shipped just 45k units in the holiday quarter; Apple sells something like 600k iPhones and about 60k Macs a day. Still, I think that small update was probably the right strategy with the product already in market (they should have launched it as a dev kit, not a full-on consumer product in its current state, but we're way past that now...). Rather than seeing them try to do a lighter/slightly cheaper Vision Pro right now, I'd rather see them meet Meta in the market for Smart Glasses (which is clearly happening). And build up from there. There's just still no real market for headsets yet – Meta dominates it, but even they're seemingly pulling back. [FT 🔒]
📺 Versant Lives! – And more importantly, the now-spun-off new public company sets a potential price for WBD's television assets, which could ultimately make or break the Netflix deal. Right now, Comcast's old TV assets look to be valued by the market somewhere around $6B. At 4.5x forward-earnings, that would make WBD's assets worth... a lot. But it's not that straightforward because those assets are also going to be saddled with... a lot of debt. So at least right now, we're... likely somewhere between what Paramount thinks they are worth and what WBD (and Netflix) thinks they are worth... Funny that. (Don't be shocked if Paramount raises their offer.) [THR]
I Quote...
"Labubu doesn’t actually have that much of a story behind it, it’s just a strange-looking doll."
— Chris Pereira, founder of consultancy iMpact, noting that Pop Mart, the Beijing-based company behind the phenomenon, needs to focus on evolving the brand, lest we hit "Peak Labubu" (which we may have already). Currently, the company is focused on expanding their retail footprint around the world. And yes, the movie is coming, directed by Paddington helmer Paul King, for Sony…
Asides...
- The best performing Big Tech stock of 2025? Alphabet, up 65% – which was almost entirely in the back-half of the year, so this was a good call! [Information 🔒]
- Still nothing compared to Sandisk, up 559%! Thanks, data centers.
- “Foldy Bird” is exactly what it sounds like: Flappy Bird for foldable devices. A clever way to quickly degrade your $1,000+ device… [9to5Google]
- Fun profile of June Paik, CEO of Furiosa – yes, named after the Mad Max character – trying to go head-on against NVIDIA with their RNGD chip for doing AI inference far more efficiently. [WSJ 🔒]
- A general angle we're clearly going to hear a lot about in 2026, with energy build-out bottlenecks, from NVIDIA and Google on down...
- Prediction markets letting you bet on the housing market? Isn't that a little too on-the-nose? [CoinDesk]
- Just in case you're itching to try out Alexa+ (it's fine, if a bit underwhelming) but don't have the right type of device, everyone now can on the web. [Verge]
- China’s box office shot up over 20% to $7.4B (roughly $1.5B behind the US per above) — largely on the back of two sequels, one local, one not: Ne Kha 2 (China’s biggest movie ever at $2.13B) and Disney’s Zootopia 2 (now Hollywood's biggest movie in China ever). Both, of course, are animated. [Variety]
I Spy...
Everyone has long joked about how CBS was the "old person's network", but it really is wild seeing these two charts side-by-side. The most popular channels watched by "younger" audiences are almost exactly the opposite of the most popular channels overall. I mean, CBS even lost to a cable channel in ESPN amongst those 18-49!
Overall, TV as we knew it sure seems screwed – hence, spinning out Versant, the WBD channels, etc. How long will even YouTube TV really want to be in that business? It's increasingly a headache dealing with the channels over carriage fees. And that means constantly having to jack up rates and piss off customers. Just like the cable companies of old! As soon as most live sporting events are shown elsewhere...
