Signal: How You Like Them Apples? 📧
Forget about whether or not Apple it matters right now that Apple is behind in AI. The reality is that without the right talent, they'll never be able to catch up and that's... well, it's increasingly an issue, it seems. Is Mark Zuckerberg specifically going after Apple's team sensing the weakness? As payback for ATT back in the day? Or is that just the cherry on top? Regardless, it's not a good situation in Cupertino...
M.G. Siegler
Thoughts On...
💻 Touchscreen MacBook Pros – While the rumor isn't new, Apple can't love the timing of Mark Gurman's report here given that they just announced the M5 MacBook Pro (with the M5 Pro and M5 Max models still to come early next year). Because of course who would buy an M5 version when the M6 version is going to be completely overhauled to allow them to become the first touchscreen Macs? Then again, they'll undoubtedly be more expensive as a result. And we'll have to see how Apple tweaks macOS to allow for the combination of a "refrigerator and a toaster" – hopefully such words have been in the fridge all these years as Tim Cook will now apparently be eating them. But this was always inevitable, literally this morning I had to stop my daughter from touching the screen on my MacBook because all she's ever known are touchscreen devices. It seems weird to kids that there are screens you don't touch. And now you also know why Apple doesn't just let us run macOS on the (very capable) iPad Pros... [Bloomberg 🔒]
📉 Oracle's Margins – "Let's not talk about my margins, by the way... being nice and fat. That's a nice shirt, do they make it for men?" It's one of the best scenes in The Big Short, and what popped into my head reading about Oracle's situation which is clearly highly fluid with regard to their margins as they transition to becoming more and more of a GPU reseller/data center play. The one key question buried in here – which has long been the key question – just how much do margins improve on older NVIDIA chips, since everyone is clearly losing money on initial deployment? The numbers aren't clear and they're clearly obfuscated. The fear, of course, is that while they can be operated with far better margins, the demand isn't there for obsoleted chips. In a way, this feels like the whole ballgame, at least for the neoclouds. [Information 🔒]
🎬 Hollywood Has No Idea What To Do About AI – No surprise that an industry which famously leans on legacy and is slow to change with any times seems befuddled about what to do as AI enters their picture. The vanilla talking points seem to betray a "damned if we do, damned if we don't" mentality. As Alex Heath notes, the music industry seems to be handling it a bit better, undoubtedly because they've been through a version of this battle in the Napster era. Hollywood had the YouTube situation, but it was far less existential than some believe this to be (but it won't be). The reality here will be that the technology will always be not just one step ahead, but about 3 steps ahead, and gaining steps each year. So the strategy has to be a very high level one, because playing whack-a-mole won't work. [Sources]
🛢️ Fracking Data Centers – Forget OpenAI working on magical new methods of financing to build their own data centers, we now have two year old startups doing the same. Poolside teaming up with CoreWeave feels like yet another layer in the cycle. They clearly think they have a unique opportunity thanks to a natural gas pipeline in Texas, which sort of feels like a variation of Patrick Collison's old joke about SaaS ads and airports – only this isn't really a joke as much as it's reality: if a pocket of power generation appears, a data center will form around it. CoreWeave will be the anchor tenant in 'Horizon', supplying Poolside with enough NVIDIA chips to train their own models for their coding products. Naturally, NVIDIA is an investor in both CoreWeave and Poolside. The startup is also in the midst of a new $2B round ($14B post) led by Magnetar, the largest investor in... CoreWeeeeeave. [WSJ 🔒]
🍎🦚 Apple TV + Peacock – With the great re-bundling well underway, Apple finds their first partner in the form of Peacock, the other sub-scale player in the space – especially if Paramount scoops up HBO Max (preventing Apple from doing the same). This makes sense as it gives Apple TV subscribers more sports while it gives Peacock subscribers better content. It also creates a new incentive to sign up for Apple's own 'Apple One' bundle, as you get an even better deal on Peacock. Mainly, I enjoy that Apple dropped the '+' just in time to partner with a service which brings their own '+' to the table in the form of 'Peacock Premium Plus' – alliteration FTW, redundant branding FTL. Assuming any takeover of WBD takes months, if not years (if it ever happens), might Apple add HBO Max and/or Paramount+ to the mix next? [THR]
I Quote...
"Yes, I do love Winds of Winter. I haven’t lost interest in it. I’m still working on it, but honestly, I love these other things, too. I don’t have any kids. Some of you probably have kids. Maybe you have more than one kid, Johnny and Freddie and Susie. Maybe some of them become coke heads, and you still love them."
– George R. R. Martin, ostensibly explaining the status of Wild Cards, but also explaining where on Earth the next Song of Ice and Fire book is – over 14 years since the last one was published. Hell, even the show ended over six years ago. With many other projects coming and going in between. Is that movie still in the works too?
Asides...
- We're entering a strange world where living celebrities are trying to entice people to use their images on AI networks, while the likeness of deceased figures are being pulled – MLK being a prime example on Sora. [TechCrunch]
- Videos can now be longer with storyboarding capabilities, as capacity constraints seem to be easing while content restraints keep closing in... [@OpenAI]
- Speaking of data center power sources, Amazon is offering a "first look" at their Washington nuclear plant (due in the early 2030s) which would use small modular reactors to output just about 1GW (if it works). [Verge]
- There's both a monetary black hole joke and a singularity joke to be made in OpenAI's move to hire an actual black hole physicist, so I'll just leave it there. [Axios]
- Good on Ron Conway for backing away from Salesforce in protest of Marc Benioff's buffoonish comments in ongoing attempts to get a seat at the table he's seemingly not invited to without the (in)appropriate fealty. [NYT]
- It doesn't take much reading between the lines at Dreamforce to see that Benioff is sweating the AI revolution washing over his company, as he has to backtrack on his strong stances on the competition in the past. [Information 🔒]
- Does the M5 iPad Pro's new chips signal Apple's broader efforts into home automation? Including, eventually with the 'HomePad' new device? [Verge]
- One clear side effect of the end of the penny is likely to be an increased push to use mobile payments. [NYT]
- I missed this last month, but Joseph Kosinski's reboot of Miami Vice is underway, targeting an August 2027 release. I guess Top Gun 3 and F2 will have to wait. Still sad he didn't get his crack at Tron 3... [THR]
- A wild story about the cracking of the Kryptos code found in the statue outside of the CIA headquarters. It's a combo of inadvertent social engineering mixed with a bit of perhaps illness-related sloppiness, and there's quite the legal unease about the whole thing with an auction for the final key upcoming... [NYT]
I Spy...
The limited edition $1 California Steve Jobs coin which will cost $13.25 to purchase during its run in 2026 (or you can get all four in the current collection, one of which is also the Cray-1 Supercomputer in Wisconsin, for $27.50 – Trump coin not included). Maybe not the best likeness, but still sort of wonderful. And yes, they are legal tender.
