Dispatch 050: Black Monday 2
Just back from a week on the road – in a couple different countries, no less: Ireland and the US. And I'm working on about 3 hours of jet lagged plane sleep here. As such, I'm still catching up on a lot of news from last week, though the only thing that really matters right now seems to be those tariffs. It's seemingly all anyone wanted to talk about (and protest about) in America. And for good reason, we're now in Black Monday territory when it comes to the stock market with whispers swelling of 1929... But it's a hard thing to write about because it's such a fluid situation, shifting on dimes – the S&P500 gained a few trillion in minutes earlier today on what was seemingly misconstrued "fake news" about a tariff delay. But I may have an angle, or at least a title for tomorrow.
For now, catching up...
I Think...
🗣️ Apple and Amazon Promised Us Revolutionary AI. We’re Still Waiting. – Joanna Stern keeps Amazon's feet to the fire with the Alexa+ "roll out". She got the company to confirm that "a small number of customers" currently have access, but they wouldn't put an actual number on it. Perhaps more tellingly, "our goal is to get to millions of customers using Alexa+ in May." Yeah, so that "March" launch – on the last day of the month – isn't even really more of an April launch. At best, it's a May launch. And also missing from their statement is that a lot of the features touted won't be ready to roll by then. There is obviously a, um, echo of Apple's Siri fiasco here. Which doesn't surprise me – at all – but let's see how the features that do ship actually work... For now, I'll continue Stern's music quips: it's gonna be May. [WSJ 🔒]
🔮 How Trump Could Make Larry Ellison the Next Media Mogul – A fun, quick profile of Ellison who has gone from a player largely in the unsexy world of enterprise database software with Oracle into one of the main players in all of tech. Obviously, he's been one of the wealthiest people in the world all along the way, but now his clout extends beyond money, it seems. At 80 years old, no less. It would have been hard a decade ago to see him as one likely "winner" in any American TikTok deal – not to mention the guy bankrolling the takeover of Paramount. Oh yes, and AI. Not mentioned here, but I'll also give a shout-out to his help with Michigan recruiting... #GoBlue [NYT]
💳 Visa Offers Apple Roughly $100 Million to Take Over Credit Card From Mastercard – One of the strangest elements of the original stories about how Goldman wanted to dump Apple Card was the implication that it wasn't a good product offering. In fact, it's a great credit card, the issue is simply Goldman wanting to get out that business entirely in order to better focus. (Something which Apple themselves seemingly understand here – and the bungling of their early roll-out probably didn't help.) But for a bank and/or issuer more focused on this world, it's little wonder that there's a bidding war for the Apple Card underway. Beyond the nice product, it's undoubtedly a pretty great demographic to go after for these companies. Selfishly, I hope Apple sticks with Mastercard as the issuer simply because it's the only card on that network that I have. I already have two other Visa cards and one AMEX and I just like the notion of diversification in this regard. But it sure sounds like it's going to be hard for Apple to turn down Visa's offer – especially given their dominance in the market (and around the world – which presumably they'll push for at some point with any such shift in control). [WSJ 🔒]
⌚️ Apple Readies Its Biggest Push Into Health Yet With New AI Doctor – For years now, we've been hearing about Apple's "holy grail" when it comes to Apple Watch and health: blood glucose monitoring. But that's still years away, sadly, according to Mark Gurman. Instead, in the near term, we're likely to see some sort of 'Health+' service which, could be interesting given the data Apple Watch gathers. But also sort of terrifying given Apple's track-record to date with AI! Well, perhaps less terrifying, and more, do we really think such a service would be any good given what we know about Apple and AI? Tim Cook clearly cares about Apple Watch as it's related to health and clearly his de-facto #2 in Jeff Williams does as well. There's a lot of talk of Cook's eventual swan song, but what about Williams, who is just a couple years younger than Cook and seems unlikely to be the next CEO at this point? Might such Apple Watch features be his last big projects? Also, hard to imagine he can focus on much of anything right now with the tariff fiasco at Apple's doorstep... [Bloomberg 🔒]
I Wrote...
I was able to jot down a few thoughts while on the road...
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
M.G. Siegler
I Note...
- Llama 4 is here, and the benchmarks look good, if a bit misleading. This is good news for developers, it's less clear how meaningful this is for consumers, at least until we get that stand-alone Meta AI app. [Engadget]
- Undoubtedly related to the above, the arms race continues as OpenAI now says that o3 and o4-mini will come "in a couple of weeks". So much for that imminent UI unification, I guess. We'll still have to wait for GPT-5 "in a few months". [TechCrunch]
- Oh yes and Microsoft has seemingly thrown every feature every other AI player promises into Copilot as well... [Verge]
- Also finally back in the arena is Midjourney, with a new version 7 of their image generation tool in testing. [TechCrunch]
- I'm still not 100% clear on the framing of the launch of CNBC+ on Apple TV and Roku as a "distribution deal" – didn't they just launch an app? [Variety]
- David Zaslav is reportedly meeting with candidates to replace the current heads of Warner Bros. Discovery studios – which is even more awkward after their mega Minecraft movie opening. [Bloomberg 🔒]
- The founder of Ring, Jamie Siminoff, is back at Amazon, which he left in 2023, five years after selling his startup. Most of the time when you hear about "boomerangs", it's so-called "lifers" at big companies who try to leave but are pulled back, not the more entrepreneurial types like Siminoff... [GeekWire]
- Speaking of Amazon (and bidders for TikTok – currently on hold, thanks yet again, tariffs!), it's sort of wild that they made a last minute bid, but even more wild that apparently no one took it seriously? I mean, it's not Microsoft, but it is a $2T company with an obvious consumer angle... [NYT]
- Speaking of Microsoft, it seems like not a day goes right now by without word of some "pull back" on data center spend/commits/etc. They continue to downplay it, but it's clearly a bit shift in posture – and I continue to believe it's mainly about the shift in their relationship with OpenAI... [Bloomberg 🔒]
- Where is SoftBank getting all that money to support OpenAI going forward? Debt, of course. That seems like a decidedly riskier proposition in the current market environment... [WSJ 🔒]
- Pierce Brosnan gives his thumbs up to the notion of Aaron Taylor-Johnson as the next James Bond. While the buzz in this regard has died down a lot, perhaps more time passing between Bond films actually helps him as it distances him from the Kraven mess. But it's presumably back to square one with Amazon now with the license... [THR]
- Some people are upset by the new Superman footage – I think it looks pretty solid. It's different! [THR]
I Quote...
"The music, we’ve got Nine Inch Nails, man. You’re in for a treat."
-- Jeff Bridges on stage at CinemaCon last week with Jared Leto promoting Tron: Ares. While I was initially disappointed that the film is not more of a direct Tron: Legacy sequel, I was even more disappointed that Daft Punk wouldn't be scoring any future Trons – or any movies, period, since they disbanded. But getting Nine Inch Nails is quite the save here. And I now think I like that it will sound quite a bit different than Legacy.
The first trailer looks pretty solid.
I Spy...
Speaking of Apple Watch, Chance Miller was able to track down some shots of a 10th anniversary band that was clearly meant for release last year but never came. It's sort of odd that it's dated from 2014 since the device actually shipped in 2015, of course. (We're exactly three weeks away from the 10 year anniversary of that launch.) Though yes, it was announced in 2014. And perhaps this was just meant to be an internal reward for folks who worked on that project (which Apple has done from time to time).
Also fun: the color specs match different color releases of bands over the decade.
