Inklings #029 📧

Hard to remember a time when there was more going on product-release-wise for Apple. Obviously, the iPhone 18 Pro models just launched (along with the new Apple Watch models and AirPods 5) and we're still a week out from iPhone Duo pre-orders. But before we get to that, we're clearly going to have a handful of other new products announced next week. If the 'HomePod Hub' and new Apple TV and HomePod minis don't ship immediately, it will be presumably be soon. And then two weeks after that, we're likely to hear about the 'MacBook Ultra' – aka the touchscreen MacBook Pro. And a new iPad mini. And maybe a few other M6 products.

Tim Cook was not lying when he said he was teeing up John Ternus well to hit the ground running. It's honestly almost too much in such a short span. A bit dizzying.

I Note...

💫 Google Announces Their 16th Agent and 12th Gemini – On one hand, I get it: Google is combating Microsoft, which just unified Copilot after a few years of confusing and conflicting sprawl. On the other, they're seemingly running the old Copilot playbook, by launching Gemini anywhere and everywhere in such a way that no one knows what to use for what. This new 'Gemini Agent' is not 'Gemini Spark' nor 'CC' nor any of the other agentic projects they have at the moment. Nor is it Gemini (chatbot) itself. Even better: this new Gemini (agent) can be powered by Claude and not Gemini (model). Too many cooks. Too many kitchens. Patrons confused. Going elsewhere. [VentureBeat]

🧮 The Mathpocalypse – First, they came for coding, and we said nothing. Then, they came for math, and... honestly, people are saying a lot about this. And it's probably both overblown and yet under-appreciated how much AI is impacting the field. The technology is seemingly solving things in ways we don't understand, which feels a lot like that Good Will Hunting scene, but with a robot. But here, it's yet another example of not just smarts, but scale. AI can run nearly infinite scenarios to brute force its way to solutions in ways humans cannot. And while everyone is just starting to gear up for the future where quantum computers can leverage similar dynamics to crack our encryption protocols, what if AI beats those machines to it? That feels like the real thing we should be focused on here and not academics complaining. [Scientific American]

💸 OpenAI's "Missing" $20B in Revenue – Immediately, another movie scene pops into my mind, the viral clip of Robert Pattinson as Chris Hansen, "You see how this looks, right?" And clearly, Wall Street agreed with that (damning) initial assessment. But actually, if you read beyond the headline, it's clear what happened here, and it's mostly optics (and a lack of visibility into private company numbers). As many are well aware by now, Anthropic and OpenAI's reported (as in via leaked reports and presentations, not by the company's themselves to the public) ARR numbers are not apples-to-apples. Because OpenAI largely strips out the cut of revenue that goes to their cloud partners while Anthropic does not (there are accounting reasons for doing this too, so it's not just about number inflation). So OpenAI (or their investors) tried to showcase what their ARR number would look like if they used Anthropic's method and, well, it's a lot higher than the number they usually report. Duh. This is also why ARR is not a GAAP number (though those have issues at times too!) – because there are about two dozen ways to twist it for your own means. Better to just state revenue but that's obviously going to look less impressive (and, if we want to be fair here at all, doesn't showcase huge growth as clearly). Anyway, don't trust everything you read! [FT 🔒]

🥧 First Googlebooks Taste Underbaked – The Verge seems a bit kind in their initial assessment here. Everything I'm reading points to a product not just underbaked, but half-baked at the moment. The move from Chromebooks to these should-be-called-Androidbooks seems filled with creaky or janky bits and the app ecosystem, while robust, sounds like a mess to actually use quite often (multiple versions of apps to choose from, issues with x86 compatibility, etc). Also, there's no Samsung phone support yet (they've said it's coming – but it's also interesting that Samsung is not actually making any Googlebooks, at least not yet), which seems like a massive issue given the scale of those devices. At least the "Glowbar" sounds better than the Pixel 'HiLight'... [Verge]

Apple Assassins...

Asides...

• Sort of wild that Meta is blocking ByteDance ads now, years after the company used the tactic to grow TikTok into what it became. It's obviously part of the back-and-forth about the US social media settlement. [Blooomberg 🔒]
• Apple makes a 'hackquistion'! It sounds like some of the Huxe team, which had originally helped built NotebookLM within Google could do some interesting AI product work... [MacRumors]
• Samsung is set to take the profit crown back from NVIDIA, which had just taken it back from Samsung. They're guiding towards $80.1B in operating income for the quarter on the back of memory chips. Just insane. [Bloomberg 🔒]
• Recently thinking back on "Antennagate", it seems a little underreported that Apple has a legitimate "Red Ring of Death" problem right now. I suppose it's just one specific model, iPhone 18 Pro Max, and only US models (thanks, Qualcomm?) but still, they have to replace the entire device to fix! [MacRumors]
• Apple may have dominated the Emmys, but Amazon now controls them, grabbing the rights for Prime Video. After YouTube grabbed the Oscars and Disney got the Grammys for Disney+ (and ABC, I suppose). [NYT]
  • Disney will also stream the next Super Bowl (and New Year's Rockin' Eve) on Disney+ in an ongoing attempt to 'super app' it up. [Variety]
• It sure feels like David Ellison wanted to tee up some big Transformers news for Paramount as they formally merge with Warner Bros. Steven Spielberg is back – perhaps to help creatively guide also-returning director Michael Bay. [Deadline]
• More exciting to me: Blunt, Brolin, and Del Toro back for Sicario 3! No Denis Villeneuve (he's a bit busy) but the guy writing Bond for him is writing this too. [THR]

Thoughts On...

I Quote...

"AI is certainly powerful enough to drive events that, you know, cause a billion deaths."

– Bill Gates from the top rope! Seriously, why not a trillion deaths? I can't be the only one who finds his doomer approach pretty weird? He's hardly the only one, but he's the only one who is Bill Gates, which lends credibility, warranted or not, to this specific topic.

I Wrote...

I Spy...

The LG smart home devices, when rendered from the leaked skematics in the FCC filings look awfully Nest-y...