Inklings #026 📧

Happy iPhone Launch Day to those who celebrate. Though admittedly this year is more complicated to celebrate given that only the iPhone 18 Pro models are launching today. The iPhone Duo comes next month. And the iPhone 18 "regular" models should come in the Spring. So yeah, perhaps a bit more muted than usual. Still, there I was at the Apple Store today and the line seemed nearly as long as it had been in recent years. (Though the Apple Store employee who helped me did note they believed next month might see a bigger rush as everyone will simply want to see the iPhone Duo, even if they don't buy it.)

Wait. Aren't I getting a Duo? Yes, that's the plan. But I picked up an 18 Pro today too sort of as a hedge. While everything I saw about the Duo looks great, I'm still unsure how much I'll care about not having the best camera/battery system possible with me at all times. And the form factor is something I simply can't judge until I use it. Also, who can resist Burgundy? Not John Ternus, that's for sure.

I Note...

😎 Meta's Camera-Less Smartglasses – While this reads like an almost instant reaction to the growing backlash against the "surveillance tech" quickly coming into our lives, if Meta is truly going to announce these next week at their Connect conference, it seems reasonable to think they've been working on them for a while. And if that's the case, perhaps they were able to read the room a bit early. To be clear, the "glasshole" problem has existed for over a decade now, but Meta was able to fly largely under this radar with the Meta Ray-Bans for a while. But it was always inevitable these issues would come up again as the devices grew in popularity. And it's something that Snap and even Apple are going to have to contend with now. I will say that Muse makes Meta's wearables decidedly more interesting to me – a halo effect?! Also, the "Phoenix" AR glasses (the artist formerly known as "Orion" or something else – see: below) sound ready to perhaps blow Snap further out of the water – holograms! screen mirroring! – which is undoubtedly part of the reason why they had yet another pre-release event to announce/showcase the Specs them for the third or fourth time. [Information 🔒]

⌚️ Apple's Attempts to Redefine Surveillance – Speaking of... while I personally don't mind the notion of the new 'Audio Intelligence' and 'Live Rewind' features of Apple Watch, and think they sound interesting, and generally trust Apple to have done the legwork to back up their security claims here, I can certainly see why others might not like the notion of me wearing my Apple Watch around them with this enabled! And so the strangest thing to me about this is that Apple didn't seem to realize what backlash this would garner. Or just didn't care? And now it's spiraling into a privacy fiasco for them – and it's not even out yet! I'm reminded of Microsoft's 'Recall' feature for Windows. Which also sounded cool/interesting, but was also obviously going to be problematic, even if just optically, for them (though the security vulnerabilities certainly didn't help matters!). And so I wonder if Apple may have to backtrack here as well. I believe this feature is just as much about trying to 'prime the pump', as it were, for the forthcoming (and self-leaked) AirPods with Visual Intelligence, which will be similar in nature, but more entirely built around such functionality. Instead, this might imperil those? I think all of this is inevitable eventually, but the timing may not be right yet... [Wired]

🤖 Anthropic Merges Claude Chat and Cowork – I obviously get why these were two separate prompt boxes for different workflows, but you know, if AI is so smart, shouldn't it be smart enough to route such requests automatically? Well, now it is, it seems. Sort of humorous they're doing this just as OpenAI shoved ChatGPT and Codex into one "super app" (more like super bloated, amirite?) with two different areas – but that's better than the five or six areas they launched it with, I guess. To be fair, Claude Code (not to be confused with Cowork, which it often seems to be) is still a separate area, which is more akin to the Codex situation (since OpenAI mostly, but not completely, killed off the strange 'Work' sub-brand). It seems fine to keep coding in a separate area, obviously, but in general, we should have one box per service! Another point for Meta's Muse here (as 'Muse Code' just runs in the Terminal, at least for now – though yes, they also have the 'Meta AI' app, which they should probably just get rid of?). [TechCrunch]

📺 Prime Video's Big Niche Bundle – The great un-bundling of cable was always going to lead to a re-bundling of streaming. It's simply too expensive and too chaotic without a more central hub. While a bunch of individual bundles came relatively quickly, now we're seeing bigger moves – like Peacock's inclusion in YouTube Premium. But Amazon's move here points to bundles beyond a couple services with five of their 'Channels' offerings being offered as one $30/month package: AMC+, Starz, MGM+, PBS Masterpiece, and BritBox. Yes, they're all second-tier streaming services, but that is a nice savings (nearly 40% off versus each of them individually). And they're not as niche as what Roku is trying to do with their 30-some bundle options (all of which are still simply two services bundled together). Everyone is waiting to see what Netflix does here, Disney has their own convoluted internal bundles, and Apple may want to follow suit too. [THR]

🥁 Spotify Lets Parents Exclude Kids Music from 'Wrapped' – I can't imagine why this took several years to implement – does no one working at Spotify have children?! – but my god, FINALLY. [TechCrunch]

✍️ The Awesome and Alarming Writings of Dario Amodei – A fun dive into the Anthropic CEO's essays over the years. David Streitfeld's takeaway seems to be: maybe don't take what Amodei writes (and, by extension, says) too literally. Even if he means it, such proclamations have a long history in the broader industry of being off, if not wrong. That's not to say they will be here, of course – and we should probably at least consider that for the downside scenarios! But as Streitfeld notes, Amodei's visions have also morphed over time in ways big and small – most notably perhaps when caught in some political winds as Anthropic has grown in importance. Such doublespeak, in turn, has obviously fueled some of the current backlash. [NYT]

🤵‍♂️ Bond, Jack Bond? – With Slow Horses officially back (which I've long loved and believe is the best show on Apple TV), I'm reminded that I never linked to the reports that Gary Oldman believes the next James Bond has already been cast. Which is of course interesting given that his co-star in said show – a spy show, I might add – is the current odds-on favorite to be cast as said character. He humorously notes that his "fingers are crossed" that it's Jack Lowden. The fact that the man writing the script for this Bond also seems to know who is it with a first draft apparently done just adds more fuel (though I admittedly fall down these rabbit holes often). That said, with the news that Slow Horses has also been renewed for seasons 7 and 8 might create some scheduling conflicts? Then again, they pump these seasons out like no other show at the moment. In an era of years between big show seasons, it's a truly impressive cadence. [Deadline]

I Wrote...

I Quote...

"Mazdas do a fine job getting you where you need to go, and Maseratis are simply not worth the investment."

– Jerry Tang, the CEO of Atlas Cloud, speaking to the notion of "open" models slowly taking over corporate America as they "offer a better bang for your buck."

Thoughts On...

Asides...

• Speaking of Claude and feature creep, its also getting its own Docs and Slides feature as it slowly morphs into a full-on productivity suite... [Verge]
• 'Agentforce', maybe the dumbest branding attempt in recent memory, may not be totally dead, but it's mostly dead and certainly no longer going to be what Salesforce fully rebrands to anymore! [Information 🔒]
  • The company seems to have come to their senses with AI, as their new purpose-built model, Koa, built on top of NVIDIA's Nemotron open models and unleashing 'Claudeforce' make sense! [TechCrunch]
• A "hackquisition" that actually comes under legal scrutiny? Weird. [NYT]
• Is AI killing the app economy? By at least one measure – YC startup trends – it sure seems like it. [Bloomberg 🔒]
• For all the hand-wringing and FUD at the moment, it's nice to see AI bringing people together, you know like Bernie Sanders and Steve Bannon. [NYT]
• Woz Hoodies! WOZ Chardonnay! Woz Merch is here for all your Steve Wozniak-as-a-Service needs. [@stevewoz]

I Spy...

Not to be outdone by Apple leaking their own AirPods with cameras via an OS build, it looks like Meta has done the same for their aforementioned 'Phoenix' glasses. These certainly look more Quest-y than Snap's Specs, but they also look make the current Quest (and Vision Pro, for that matter) look like a brick strapped to your face.

And they even have old school nose-pinchers to be extra nerdy! (This will undoubtedly help with stability and weight distribution, but may hurt your nose?)