Inklings #020 📧
Snap's stock is down again today and it's now below an $8B market cap. Safe to say the market doesn't think Specs will ignite a turnaround. But they're also in a weird position where thanks to super-voting shares, the "normal" market mechanisms, don't really apply here. So is it crazy to think they should team up with PE and go private again?
M.G. Siegler
Thoughts On...
🍎 “Unfortunately, price increases are unavoidable." – It has come to this. Apple, the company which prides themselves in price stability for consumers is being forced to raise prices due to the chip crunch. Tim Cook clearly knows what a shock to the system it will be – even a $100 raise here or there will undoubtedly dent sales, and if the iPhone price increase needs to be substantial, watch out. It's really pretty wild that this is one of Cook's last moves as CEO. The operations master who has priced Apple products to perfection (from a margin-perspective) has been sideswiped by the market. And it's coming at the worst possible time given that the new Siri AI functionality relies on more RAM, which means Apple has to boost it across their devices to ensure the features will work well – so they can't really just offer options with less memory. A real sort of changing of the guard moment, not just for Apple (John Ternus will have to be the one on stage in September unveiling the new iPhone pricing) but also for the industry, as it's now the various AI players, led by NVIDIA, that commands inventory more so than Apple. Rolfe Winkler has a nice, quick overview video for his scoop too. [WSJ 🔒]
⚔️ Epic's 'Team Open' Plea – When he's not busy battling Apple in (and out of) court, Tim Sweeney returns to his day job running Epic Games which, App Store issues aside, is... in a bit of a precarious place. Why? Roblox. Sweeney is clearly terrified that it's eating Fortnite and making the case that it's taking the whole industry with it. So he's calling on everyone else to link arms and fight for an "open" ecosystem – which sounds less like an "open" alliance and more like an anti-Roblox alliance. Only tangentially stated is his hope/belief that Epic will power all of this via their Unreal Engine and/or – more ideally – banding together with Fortnite directly. He obviously still wants to make the Metaverse – his Metaverse – happen, and he sees it slipping away. Help us, Josh D'Amaro, you're our only hope? That is, unless maybe Microsoft wants to shed Mojang to merge Minecraft into the effort? [GamesBeat]
🔨 Siri to the Studs – Why does the new Siri work now whereas previous attempts the past 15 years or so have not? They had to completely rebuild it from scratch. So said team lead Mike Rockwell at the smaller, more technical event following the WWDC keynote last week. He noted that while they quickly built a new version last year that was on top of the existing Siri, it was "sort of incremental", so they scrapped it and completely rebuilt it, which obviously took longer. In other words, it sounds like Apple went through the exact same exercise that Amazon did with Alexa. This could not be less surprising to me as I've written about this very topic numerous times – that Apple and Amazon were in particularly bad spots when the LLM revolution came because of their previous success with Siri and Alexa, respectively. While those original systems seem comically rudimentary by today's AI standards, they were breakthroughs at the time and as such, gained millions of users – users neither company wanted to just abandon. But whereas both clearly thought you could build a bridge between the two technologies, you really couldn't. Even Google keeps seeing endless edge cases break as they update 'Assistant' with Gemini. Anyway, good to see Apple took the harder, needed steps, though they probably should have known they'd need to do that a few years ago... [9to5Mac]
I Quote...
"This is a hundred-year flood. I’ve never seen anything like it in any area in over 40 years."
– Tim Cook, in his interview linked to above about Apple's need to raise prices due to memory chip shortages.
Asides...
- I had long been wondering what hardware project the AI image generator Midjourney could be working on and... it's a full body ultrasound scanner. And a spa to compliment it. [Verge]
- Two thoughts: 1) Cool? 2) What?!
- A third thought: what does this mean for Midjourney's partnership with Meta? Might they just acquire that part of the business?
- This is perhaps the most wild pivot since Allbirds became 'Smartbird', making the shoe startup an AI infrastructure company. Yes, that' real. [Reuters]
- Meanwhile, Mastodon isn't exactly pivoting to newsletters, but is trying that angle to rope-in would-be creators. [TechCrunch]
- The 'iPhone Air 2' – as in two cameras, looks set for Spring 2027. Could it end up working as the 'Pro'/Premium option for the new bifurcated release schedule? Otherwise, bye bye? [Bloomberg 🔒]
- Apple is about to make their 'Hide My Email' feature useless, which seems dumb. [Arseniy Shestakov]
- They missed Spring by a few days, but Gemini-powered Google Home Speaker is finally here next week. You're up next new HomePod + Siri AI... [Verge]
- Craig Federighi sort of joked about it during the WWDC keynote, but is Apple slowing shifting macOS towards simply using the version numbers (now tied to years, of course) instead of the fun, quirky names? There are signs... [9to5Mac]
- Threads hits 500M MAU, which is likely very close to Xitter, just took a few months longer than I guessed. [TechCrunch]
Below, members of The Inner Ring will find thoughts on:
• AirPods with Cameras Set for Late 2027
• OpenAI Poaches Google's Hackquired Talent
• SpaceX's "Cheap" $60B Deal
• Anthropic's Breach... of Trust
• Meta's Ongoing Turmoil