Dispatch 017

All my snark aside, for the record, I think it's a good thing that Threads is hustling to meet Bluesky's feature set and I don't think Bluesky should be too concerned about it. They should keep doing what they've been doing that has made Meta start to chase them. It seems like they have the right ideas/mentality in building their network, whereas I don't think Threads does and so these changes, while good, feel rather soulless. Maybe that changes with time. Maybe not.

Meta Launches a Bluesky Competitor

It’s called ‘Threads’ -- perhaps you’ve heard of it…

SpyglassM.G. Siegler

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I Think...

📱 Apple Hits Hurdles in China with AI Rollout for iPhones – Tim Cook is back in China – third time this year – and this trip seems to be mostly about securing an AI deal of some sort, so Apple can roll out Apple Intelligence at some point in China, ideally next year. Interesting that the report notes that Apple considered deploying their own LLMs to power the features there, but that still would likely mean a lengthy approval process, so a partnership with a local player like Baidu or Bytedance is more likely. But any hesitation Apple has in partnering with US-based AI companies must be ten-fold in China of obvious reasons – a lot more is at stake than just potential investments and board roles. At the same time, without any AI features – no matter how limited and rudimentary – the iPhone would be at a huge marketing disadvantage in the region versus Huawei and others, which are all ready full-steam ahead on AI. (You can bet tariffs have come up too – perhaps there's a trade Tim Apple can make there... again!) [FT 🔒]

📲 Apple’s Thin iPhone Has No Physical SIMs – In other news that could hurt Chinese iPhone sales, with no physical SIM tray, the 'iPhone Air' would be a no-go in China, unless China is about to relax this specific rule for Apple (perhaps another reason Cook is in China at the moment)? More interesting to the West may be a reported shift from titanium back to a-lew-min-e-um for the frames of all of the new models. This would certainly make them lighter, but we were all just sold, quite literally, on how premium titanium was... It also sounds like the camera bump will finally feature a new design, which is long overdue as with each passing year it just gets more and more absurdly asymmetrical. [Information 🔒]

🗣️ Perplexity Mulls Getting into Hardware – While I'm not sure he should drive his startup down the path of spending millions on hardware R&D – let alone as the result of likes on a tweet – I do remain intrigued by the high-level notion of what Aravind Srinivas put out there: "a simple, under $50 hardware device, that will reliably answer your questions voice to voice." I wrote about this back in April, "I would probably start with a super simple voice-only pin. One that's tied to your phone which you're going to have on you anyway. You tap it, you ask it questions, you get your information, you go about your day." And the technologies required to do this have gotten much better since then. Perhaps if they can chalk it up to sheer marketing for Perplexity in a failure mode... [TechCrunch]

💜 From Susan – A posthumous post by Susan Wojcicki that YouTube ran as it was her intention to post this for Lung Cancer Awareness Month, which is this month. As she notes, lung cancer is now the number one cause of cancer death in women and this is even though smoking-related lung cancer is on decline – Susan herself was not a smoker and was diagnosed out of the blue, which took her life not even two years later. [YouTube]

I Link...

• Speaking of Tim Cook and tariffs – with Trump coming back to the White House, everyone in corporate America would now like to replicate the playbook Cook ran during the first administration. But there's only one Apple... [WSJ 🔒]
• And speaking of the iPhone and AI – Huawei's new flagship phone is going on sale with AI features the iPhone lacks. While Apple's device likely has powerful chips, working with SMIC in China has allowed Huawei to tout a sort of "made in China" national ethos. But because of the chip technology trade restrictions, SMIC is having a hard time keeping up with demand... [NYT]
• Starting in 2026, GM/Cadillac is aiming to join Formula One. Some push-back though as it would mean 11 teams and more revenue dilution. Still, this team has Mario Andretti, the last American F1 champion on its board. [FT 🔒]
• The Margrethe Vestager publicity farewell tour continues. This profile includes the revelation that she cried when the EU's court ruled that Apple had to pay back taxes to Ireland. I mean, what a thing to get emotional about. Probably time for a change of scenery – for everyone. [NYT]
  • Some of the tweaks that Google is proposing to search results in order to comply with the DMA: a return to "ten blue links"! [Reuters]
  • Meanwhile, Bluesky is working with the EU to comply with the DSA in creating a nice "About Us" page to tell the EC where their HQ is. As if they have nothing more pressing to be working on... [Bloomberg 🔒]
• While they had been waiting to see the outcome of the election – and while that outcome is presumably more favorable to M&A, Qualcomm is still opting not to go down the path of buying Intel. At least for now. It seems like the deal would simply be too big and gnarly for Qualcomm to swallow. (And they have other headaches to deal with.) [Bloomberg 🔒]
• Anthropic's Model Context Protocol (MCP), an open standard they're putting out there for moving data between bots/agents and systems sounds sort of OpenSocial-y. Naturally, and ironically, OpenAI won't be on board as they have their own method for such data movement. [TechCrunch]
• I honestly haven't really followed the Drake vs. Kendrick Lamar beef, I'm aware of it, but only at the highest of levels. So the fact that there are now legal threats by Drake claiming UMG (the label that houses Lamar's work and his own) was using bots and other means – Siri is somehow a part of this too! – to inflate the "diss" track against him makes me think it's all just some sort of promotional puffing. Then again, the way it makes Drake look – it's impossible to put it better than a post I saw on Bluesky: "Suing Kendrick for having a superior diss track is something Kendrick would say Drake does in a diss track" [Billboard]
• Did Elon Musk just admit that Xitter downgrades any external links shared on the network? Sure seems that way. And it remains maybe the dumbest move in all the dumb moves by that networks in the past couple of years. [Mediaite]

I Quote...

“For a 20-person company with no marketing and no revenue to get this many users, we must be doing something right. Or somebody else must be doing something very wrong.”

-- Aaron Rodericks, Bluesky's head of trust and safety, talking about good and bad sides of growth with Casey Newton for Platformer. To that end, with the recent surge in new users, Bluesky is quadrupling their content moderator task force to try to meet the moment.

I Spy...

Yes, I'm quoting myself. But yes, the dad joke was that good. Also, so is the head strap! Using it right now to type this in the Vision Pro. Much, much, much more comfortable. To the point that it's wild that Apple didn't ship with such a strap...