M.G. Siegler • #from afar • May 17, 2024

(Not) Sent From My iPad 📧

The future of computing remains frustrating

I tried. I really did. I tried to put together and send this newsletter from the iPad – the shiny new M4 iPad Pro. The effort lasted about 30 minutes.

Then I was back to the Mac.

I thought perhaps I could do it with this iteration of the device thanks to the new Magic Keyboard. It's a brilliant bit of hardware that yes, makes the iPad Pro feel more like a MacBook when docked. Unfortunately, the hardware upgrades didn't upgrade iPadOS. And that remains the real problem here.

I know I've already beaten this dead horse this week. But this remains a very real and now very tangible frustration. It's not some nebulous "I can't do my work" on this device complaint. I literally can't do my work on this device. And this isn't some crazy, bespoke software that requires a Mac. It's the web. I pushing this site via Ghost, and while the web-based editor works well enough on Safari on the iPad, there are little bits that don't work as well as say, Chrome on a MacBook. For example, when I post a URL in the CMS it auto-populates the nice little link cards you see below. But on Safari on the iPad, this fails quite a bit. Unclear why.

So just use Chrome on the iPad right? Wrong. The issue may very well be with the rendering engine, which, of course, Apple controls (except, soon, not in the EU any longer). Anyway, that's just one real world example. There are a dozen little nits of why the UI of iPadOS makes it very hard to put even something as simple as a newsletter together. It's a multi-tasking mess.

But guess what? If I could run macOS on this iPad Pro with the Magic Keyboard, I'm certain I could do what I need to do. It's not about screen size or anything like that. And again, the iPad Pro is now more than fast enough for my tasks – it's faster, in fact, than the MacBook on which I'm now typing this.

I'm lucky enough to have both devices. And to be clear, the iPad is a wonderful device for so many things. Which is why I have it! I just want an option to use it with macOS when I need to, as a power user who is more than happy to buy a super expensive keyboard accessory. I understand that it's too much to ask. But it shouldn't be.

Anyway, more thoughts on the new iPad Pro next week. It's an amazing piece of hardware. Which makes the above all the more frustrating.

🍺

Enjoying a Fuller's ESB

🌍

Sent from London, England

Briefly...

Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Megalopolis’: What to Know – If you were on social media this week, you probably got whiplash from the reports about this premier at Cannes. One thing – and maybe only one thing – seems clear: it's a really weird movie and experience. Give Coppola credit, you almost have to see it now just to see why everyone is so confused. It perhaps transcends bad. 🏙️

Microsoft Will Launch New 'Call of Duty' on Game Pass – Some late-breaking news here, but is clearly a big deal/scoop (and follows up on a link from last week's newsletter). Especially since Microsoft's Xbox division has seemed in disarray of late – is this ripping off a band-aid to chart the new way forward? A last hurrah attempt? Both? The biggest game franchise in the world is about to be sold an entirely new way. 🕹️

Apple Want to Change How They Pay Hollywood Stars – Speaking of changing the dynamics of an industry... it seems like the streamers are moving more old school. Away from the up-front payments that Netflix made the norm in streaming (in exchange for total control) and back towards back-end earnings to better incentivize the players and ensure they get paid in success states. Apple appears to be leading this charge (which makes sense), according to Lucas Shaw, but Amazon and Netflix seem on-board with the general concept as well. 💸

🧿 The Inner Ring 🧿

The following are the columns sent to paid Spyglass subscribers this week – sign up here for full access and future emails...

Enter The Inner Ring

It may seem subtle, but there are large implications of OpenAI's new release...

This is less about a merge of the two devices and more about an *option*...

Quotable...

"There’s so many people when they die, they say, ‘Oh, I wish I had done this. But when I die, I’m going to say, ‘I got to do this, and I got to see my daughter win an Oscar and I got to make wine and I got to make every movie I wanted to make.’ I’m going to be so busy thinking of all the things I got to do that when I die, I won’t notice it."

-- Francis Ford Coppola, with an argument that's hard to argue with. For what it's worth, he says he's already working on writing his next film after Megalopolis.

Some Thoughts On...

💍 Andy Serkis and crew returning to Middle Earth with Gollum

💳 Basically no developers are using payments outside of Apple’s

🤖 GPT-4o may open a path to AI hardware...

🎸 Samsung wastes no time riffing off of Apple's "Crush!" ad

🍪 Microsoft sure seems confident in these new Qualcomm chips...

Quickly...

Frank McCourt wants to buy TikTok, which is nice except that he doesn't have the money and the company is refusing to sell.
Apple is finally gearing up for an international launch for Vision Pro – likely after WWDC in June.
- Another rumored launch at WWDC: a much-improved Voice Memos app...
Meta is shutting down Workspace, their enterprise chat service that no one used except for Meta employees (who, to be fair, seemed to love it).
Amazon's Rings of Power is coming back in August, and here's the first glimpse of it. The first season wasn't great but wasn't awful, Sauron and the Stranger are naturally the most interesting characters, and both are back.
- While waiting, perhaps you'd like a $460, 5,471-piece Lego Barad-dûr?
The UK government would really like to create the next $1T tech company, because of course they would. Though the US would sure seem to like to get rid of their's at times. And the EU would like for none to exist.
I think the logo and name for the Bay Area's WNBA expansion team are pretty great: the Golden State Valkyries – even if it did mean not going with "Golden Girls", which was really under consideration, apparently!
EA Sports is back in the game of college football, and a Michigan Wolverine is back on the cover (alongside two others), just as one was when the franchise left us over a decade ago. The difference now? The players are getting paid to be a part of the game. #GoBlue
- In other Michigan news: alcohol will be sold at The Big House for the first time this season – to a mere 110,000+ fans (well, those of age, of course). That's a lot of beer. 🍺〽️
Following his report about John Ternus perhaps being in line for the top job, Mark Gurman breaks down the likely succession plan in every Apple org
Those pretty Northern Lights the world got to see last week? The result of the first "G5" "extreme" geomagnetic solar storm in 21 years.