Signal: Apple TV++ for You++ 📧
Everyone, including myself, had fun dunking on Apple yesterday for the seemingly odd strategy around rebranding 'Apple TV+' to 'Apple TV' – which is, of course, the name of not one, but two other products they operate. Presumably there's a bigger strategy here and perhaps it's a part of a larger home play. But it's just really, really strange to announce such a shift at the bottom of a tangential press release...
M.G. Siegler
Take Two...
🍪 The OpenAI/Broadcom Deal – Another day, another massive OpenAI chip deal. This time, Broadcom is helping them make their own chips — something which has long been rumored, but you'd think the NVIDIA and/or AMD deals would have slowed that roll. Nope. This deal is said to be for enough chips to consume 10GW of power – same as the NVIDIA deal and more than the "mere" 6GW of power the AMD chips are targeted to consume. Can OpenAI actually scale brand new chips built from scratch to this level? We'll see, they say they've been working together on the chips for 18 months with the first set to come online the second half of next year (apparently in both OpenAI's own data centers, which presumably won't be online by then, but also in partner data centers). Perhaps most notably, there's no funny business arrangement here as Broadcom is neither investing in OpenAI nor is OpenAI investing in Broadcom. Just straight cash, homie. Well, probably debt – to someone. That said, naturally, Broadcom's stock shot up on the news and it's now nearly a $1.7T company. The 'all boats rise' strategy still going strong... [WSJ 🔒]
📺 TBPN's Rise – Fun profile of Jordi Hays and John Coogan. In some ways, it does feel like this is an evolution of what TechCrunch was back in the day – of course, we routinely and sometimes famously pissed off those working in Silicon Valley as much as we boosted it, whereas they're more intentionally "tech-positive". But it's a different world now, with the tech and startup industry so much larger than it was back then (and with every major news org having the tech criticism angles more than covered), to the point where a "SportsCenter for Tech" makes a lot of sense. In some ways, it reminds me of what we sort of thought TechCrunch TV would be (true story: OMG/JK was modeled, in part, on Pardon the Interruption), but again, the timing is better now, both from an industry perspective and a technology perspective – the process of "going live" was a lot of work back then. Hard to believe this was over 15 years ago. [NYT]
Below, members of The Inner Ring will find thoughts on:
• Is Xbox Imploding?
• RIP TiVo
• Meta's Ray-Ban Display Review
• and more...