Inklings #030 📧

Happy iPhone Duo Pre-Order Day to those who celebrate. Which is apparently almost no one because either Apple's inventory is comically low or demand is comically high – or both. Personally, I teed up my pre-order the moment the Apple Store came back on line and I still got stuck with a November delivery date. I'm really not sure how I possibly could have done it any faster. I even tasked Muse with backing me up (mostly as a test) and sadly, Moneypenny struck out too.

Current ship dates are in late January. Yes, of 2027. That should be about seven months before the next iPhone Duo is announced. Ouch.

So instead I'll choose to celebrate this as You Can See Everything Release Day. I saw a screening last night and it's as good as you're undoubtedly reading about. There's almost nothing of interest I can say about it that won't spoil elements, so I'll hold my tongue for now. But I sort of knew what to expect and yet I found it quite different and unexpected in many ways...

I Note...

🤝 Apple and Meta Ternus the Page – What is in the water in Cupertino these days? First, Apple teams up with Google, their old "thermonuclear" enemy over Android, now their core AI model partner. Then, Apple signs up to use chips from NVIDIA, their adversary for even longer (a relationship once perhaps soured to the point of falling behind in AI) to help with Apple Intelligence (in Google's Cloud!). Now they're working with Meta, which has been the most heated of their rivals (though OpenAI is quickly moving up those ranks!) in the past several years. I mean, this is great and is providing great quotes from Alexandr Wang, "We're excited for mommy and daddy to be playing nice again." Wang credits Daniel Gross (who of course worked on Apple's early AI efforts and now is at Meta), but presumably the change atop Apple helped too. Who is next, Epic?! Anyway, this is a clear win/win. Apple gets to showcase how good their hardware is at running local models (just as that narrative is under assault from Microsoft) and Meta gets to showcase how well their "open" models (but not their flagship models) can work on local machines. As Ina Fried points out, AI is creating quite a few strange bedfellows, but this one has actually long made some sense. [Axios]

🐝 Will Amazon's 'Bee' Sting? – I'm sort of surprised Amazon is pushing forward with their always-on device explicitly for listening to conversations. Yes, they bought the company because of the product, and yes, it could very well be a useful use case for AI, but as backlash builds against the Meta Ray-Bans for their cameras and as even Apple takes pre-emptive heat for a future future AirPods with cameras – "PervPods" – and a future Apple Watch feature that can yes, listen to conversations to later summarize with the help of AI, it just seems like there are a lot of signals that the mass market might not be quite ready for this product. Sure, Amazon is also saying all the right things with regard to not storing conversations, and encrypting any data, etc, but I'm just not sure it matters right now. All people see and hear with these devices is "surveillance". That will change with time, but it's early in the cycle. And as Amazon should know better than anyone, being early can bee a problem... $75 is a pretty good price though! [Verge]

🍿 Netflix Shakes Itself Up – After losing out on Warner Bros while increasingly losing out to YouTube, Netflix clearly was in need of a shake. Sadly, this was in the form of mass layoffs, but also major changes at the top with Chief Content Officer Bela Bajaria out "immediately". Ouch. Of course, as all the stories on this news paint clearly, such firings are the name of the game, sort of like swapping head coaches in sports. Bajaria came to Netflix after she was fired from NBC. And she rose to the top of content after Netflix fired Cindy Holland. Holland, meanwhile, was just pushed out again from the newly-merged Paramount. And while Peter Rice seems like a great get for Netflix to take over this role, remember that he too was fired from Disney (though for what some viewed to be an internal power move by – now fired – CEO Bob Chapek). I've long argued that part of Netflix's (literal) growing problem was simple: their content, especially movies, simply weren't very good. While the algorithm still made many of them popular, this kind of bad build-up lingers in peoples' minds in terms of perceived quality (and the awards circuit stumbles don't help). Could Rice, who helped Fox and Disney merge, also signal a plan to expand through an acquisition of, say, NBCUniversal, as Matt Belloni (who scooped this news for Puck, though there were previous whispers) throws out there? [Variety]

I Wrote...

I Quote...

"A lot of investors have no clue what they are investing in. They set very extreme expectations only to find out that it’s almost like they are in a casino."

– Hock Tan, the boss of Broadcom, with the boss quote – which may or may not have led to the recent nosedive in the stock market.

Thoughts On...

Asides...

• When I pointed out that we could have another foot-in-mouth situation with AT&T CEO John Stankey scoffing at the notion of a SpaceX launching a true cellular service, I didn't expect the foot to be inserted six days later when SpaceX announced a big spectrum buy explicitly to compete in cellular. [Bloomberg 🔒]
• Alongside the release of Gemini 4 (which seems pretty solid so far, but reception is still muted!), Google quietly snuck Antigravity into the Gemini app, sort of backing into a "Super App". Also, quietly 'Task' is the new 'Spark'?.. [9to5Google]
• We sort of already knew this, but FCC documents confirm the HomeView was being tested and nearing release back in 2024, thanks Siri. Yet more weirdness about the product... [MacRumors]
  • And yes, they clearly thought of it as a HomePod of sorts. [MacRumors]
• Is 38-year-old Charles Lamanna the next CEO of Microsoft? Undoubtedly not anytime soon – Satya Nadella is just 59 and seemingly going strong – but "Multiple senior Microsoft executives" think he may be on that path... [Information 🔒]
• 'ESPN JV' brings back memories of 'SI for Kids' – well, before 'SI' stood for "Super Intelligence" by Presidential decree. [Variety]
• Steven Soderbergh stepping in to finish filming The Batman Part II for Matt Reeves (who remains on personal leave, but hopes to come back for post-production) sounds like the best possible outcome of a rough situation. [Deadline]
• Just how much money is Digger going to lose at the box office? One estimate puts it at $245M – Waterworld, eat your heart out. (Fun fact: that movie actually made a slight profit back in 1995 thanks to the international market.) [Variety]

At the Movies...

I Spy...

A literal spy! Speaking of surveillance... I mean, there are several layers of the OpenAI Spy story that are almost beyond belief. A Saudi national, who had worked as an engineer at OpenAI for well over a year – and at Meta for five years before that – (allegedly) uses ChatGPT on his wife's computer to try to conceal his queries for how best to spy on his company... the company which makes the product he's querying. He (allegedly) hides his makeshift eavesdropper behind a TV and somehow there's a surveillance camera back there which captures the most perfect picture of him (below) doing the (alleged) deed. He has (allegedly) wrapped his contraption in toilet paper. Like a fucking pro. And OpenAI quickly figured out it was (allegedly) him by using ChatGPT to look at the evidence – which they're clearly bragging about in the stories about this situation. What. The. Fuck.