I Saw the Colors Fade Away 📧
As some of my recent writing has undoubtedly made abundantly clear, I'm fascinated by what seems to have been a misstep by Apple with the Vision Pro. The company will never admit it – at least not any time soon – and many will be quick to say it's too early to judge the product. Maybe. But as Meta and Snap have both made pretty clear in the past couple of weeks, Apple just seemingly had the wrong strategy mixed with bad timing.
If anything, the Vision Pro should have been a dev kit for at least the next year, if not two. I've been beating that drum for months, but the Meta and Snap strategies for their AR glasses really just drive that point home. It doesn't even matter if neither of those products end up being successes, the companies are at least putting them in the best possible position to succeed. Apple is just going to have to try to push through now that the Vision Pro is out there in the wild, but the problem is that the product now is what it is. And what it is is a pain to use on a regular basis, even if there was a wide-range of compelling content to use it for, which there's not. Hopefully at least internally, Apple is being honest about this. Because they will need to reset at some point.
But really, VR/AR/XR aside, how cool would it be now for Apple to have something like Meta's Ray-Bans in market? (Or the OG Snap Spectacles.) A sort of version of AirPods that were also sunglasses and cameras for capturing life while out and about. You can say they're too trivial, I guess. But they're fun. Apple used to excel at fun products. They need to get back there. Bring some color back into everything. Maybe literally!
Some Thoughts
💍 Oura Nears $500 Million in Annual Revenue and Readies New Ring – I had the first generation of the ring and found it interesting, but too big and gaudy for my taste – my wife mockingly referred to it as my "mood ring" – but the subsequent versions have gotten very good and pretty slick. You see them everywhere. I don't currently wear one as it seems like overkill with the Apple Watch offering much of the same functionality, but I'll very much debate this next version as I do each cycle. One area it feels like such devices could help augment – quite literally – is AR. Given what Meta is doing with their new neural wristband for their "Orion" glasses, they're showing a way to use such wearables to make interactions more seamless, subtle, and accurate than simply relying on cameras. Apple should do this with the Watch – this report states they're not currently working on a ring, but have clearly thought about the form factor – and Oura should partner with someone on such functionality. [Bloomberg 🔒]
🤖 Strategies to Beat the AI Bots – While I wouldn't say I see eye-to-eye with Aswath Damodaran on many things – he of "Uber is not worth $17B" fame/infamy – I sort of like his framing for how to prove (and improve) your worth in the era of AI. Notably, "AI will empower generalists, comfortable across disciplines, who can see the big picture." Also, for him, building valuation models around a business story rather than just pure numbers – which AI will be able to do better, faster. In general, the future probably rewards more original thinking and insight rather than facts and numbers-based work. [FT 🔒]
🥽 Microsoft is Discontinuing HoloLens 2 – Speaking of companies who were too early/misguided in their approach to the XR space... The writing was on the wall here for the past couple of years as Microsoft executed the rare pivot-to-enterprise-then-pivot-to-military maneuver. And despite some less-than-stellar early reviews of that work, it's going to continue – with the help of once-upon-a-time Oculus founder Palmer Luckey (now, of course, in charge of military tech company Anduril). What a strange project for Microsoft. [UploadVR]
🛩️ Microsoft Gives Copilot a Voice and Vision in its Biggest Redesign – While the "newscaster" element of this leaked the other day, this is actually a much more comprehensive reboot of the consumer version of Copilot. Some of the features are catching up with others – including, awkwardly, with OpenAI and its new voice capabilities. But other elements are new – the ability to "read" a webpage you're looking at, for example. To be clear, this is opt-in, as Microsoft obviously did not want to go down the recall of Recall path again... While it's stated that at least some of the features use OpenAI's tech – "Think Deeper" sounds like o1, aka "Strawberry", rebranded – it's not clear if all of this is just reskinned ChatGPT or something else... They're clearly working towards "something else" but it's not clear that's ready yet. [The Verge]
Some Analysis...
M.G. Siegler
Some Remembrances...
Sadly, these things tend to happen in waves, and here are a few major obits I've read in the past week.
⚾️ Embattled MLB Legend Pete Rose, All-Time Hits Leader, Dies at 83 – Baseball is a game of stats and Rose had some of the best of them. The all-time leader in games played, plate appearances, and the NL-record 44-game hitting streak. But his hits were the key: 4,256 of them. My favorite line on how crazy this is: "It was a total so extraordinary that you could average 200 hits for 20 years and still come up short." Rose was also, of course, a deeply problematic human. The gambling issue, which seems quaint now in our era of the leagues, Disney-owned ESPN, and even Apple (!) to some degree, embracing its role in sports, was always known to him and everyone at the time as the one thing you could not do in baseball. Plenty of other things – notably um, steroids – were looked the other way from, but Rose not only gambled, he gambled on his own team (even if it was always on them to win). But given his was a "lifetime" ban and his lifetime is now over, I'd put him in the Hall of Fame. There are no shortage of problematic ballplayers in there already – notably, his idol and the man he passed as the hits king: Ty Cobb. I got Rose's autograph once when I was a kid. He was having dinner but he was nice about the interruption. [ESPN]
👵 Maggie Smith, Grande Dame of Stage and Screen, Dies at 89 – A career that started in the 1950s saw her win two Oscars, a Tony, two Golden Globes, half a dozen BAFTAs – with many more nominations. But as she jokes, no one knew who she was until Downton Abbey. Well, that's not exactly true, as many children knew who she was about a decade before thanks to the Harry Potter films. I recall her well from Gosford Park, Robert Altman's film that came out the same year as the first Potter movie and which clearly directly led to Downton Abbey's 'Granny' (both written by Julian Fellows). Amazingly, she claims to have never seen the show, mainly because she felt like she didn't have time to catch up on it. But the rest of us certainly did! She later won four Emmys as well – three thanks to Downton. [NYT]
🎭 Kris Kristofferson, Country Singer, Songwriter and Actor, Dies at 88 – Despite the headline, the ending tells the tale: "'Writer' was the occupation listed on Mr. Kristofferson’s passport." What a wild, circuitous life. From being a promising boxer (featured in Sports Illustrated!) to an award-winning short-story writer, to a helicopter pilot in the military, to turning down an appointment to teach English at West Point – so he could start from the bottom in Nashville. He worked as a janitor during the recording sessions for Bob Dylan's "Blonde on Blonde" album and got his break when Johnny and June Carter Cash pulled him up on stage a few years later. Sort of like that scene in A Star is Born, which was his most famous movie role, the other career that took off after Janis Joplin, his one-time girlfriend, recorded his “Me and Bobby McGee” song, just days before she died – only to have the song hit number 1 in 1971. See also: the life in pictures the NYT pulled together. [NYT]
Some Links...
- There's seemingly a new "America's Team" in the NFL – the Kansas City Chiefs are now consistently beating the Dallas Cowboys in national television ratings. Why? Part Patrick Mahomes. Part Travis Kelce's relationship with Taylor Swift. And part the Cowboys not having won anything in nearly 28 years. How bout them Apples, 'Boys? [Front Office Sports]
- Google is adding a bunch of AI features to Chromebooks but the most notable one is the "quick insert key" which will open a menu including quick access to Gemini. Unclear why it's not a full-on Gemini key like the one Microsoft now has for Copilot, but presumably it's so other Chromebook partners can do other things with it if they choose. Makes you wonder if Apple will bring back a "Siri" key after the demise of the Touch Bar. Maybe where the F5/Mic button is? [TechCrunch]
- More on that CNN subscription product – $2.99/month or $29.99/year for "heavy" users, but most users won't see a change, yet, it seems. Over time things will be added behind the paywall, but it's still pretty vague as to what. Also still weird: this is a different product than 'CNN Max' which was a different product than 'CNN+' [Variety]
- Um, is Daniel Day-Lewis – perhaps the greatest living actor we have – un-retiring with his first movie in 7 years? He sure seems to be driving around with Sean Bean on a movie set... [Daily Mail]
- If true, it's the biggest news out of the UK since at least the news that Chick-fil-A is coming to this side of the pond. [Daily Mail]
Some Quotes...
"Every summer, three things are going to happen. The grass is going to get green, the weather is going to get hot and Pete Rose is going to get 200 hits and bat .300."
-- Pete Rose, talking about himself, naturally. But he also wasn't lying. It's simply ridiculous for someone to play 24 seasons and still have over a .300 lifetime average – he played until he was 45!
“I’m super close to all the discussions in Europe and as the biggest software company we have a certain voice in that. I think the right discussion is happening in Europe right now: how can we regulate the impact on businesses, on end users? Don’t regulate the technology. Regulate the outcome.”
-- Christian Klein, the CEO of SAP speaking to The Financial Times about EU regulation around AI – it sounds like the tide is shifting a bit from the quick-trigger regulation where it started...
“I thought to myself, ‘Well, we could go do the same thing and spend billions of dollars and compete with everybody.’ And just from experience, it was obvious that if you do the same thing as everybody else, you’ll end up in the same place.”
-- Tony Vinciquerra, the outgoing CEO of Sony Pictures Entertainment, commenting on his decision not to enter the streaming wars and instead license their content to Netflix – in hindsight, a brilliant move that saved the company billions of dollars.
But also some of us thought it looked brilliant at the time.