Signal: Pumpkin Spice iPhone Day 📧

iPhone Launch Day! I made my annual pilgrimage to get the iPhone 17 Pro Max (yes, the Pumpkin Spice variety) and... the Apple Store was packed! Certainly more packed than I've seen in the past few years of such launches.

Seems like a good sign for Apple, obviously. Though also perhaps to be expected given that one of the devices, the iPhone Air, is something you really need to see and hold to make a decision about. (It has a pretty awesome feel in-hand, but I'm sticking with the battery and camera of the Pro.)

Currently, I'm in the middle of porting my old iPhone over to the new one. Knowing how insanely long this has taken in the past, I opted to use a wire this time, like an animal. The good news? I don't believe it will take 11 hours. The bad news? I'm well past 3 hours at this point and it's still going strong...

So yes, this method is faster than the WiFi method, but still just an incredibly long time. (I know doing a backup to your computer and restoring from that is faster, but I actually ran out of room on my hard drive – that's how much storage iPhones have these days!) You'd think this would be a much more solved problem at this point. How can we not just do an exact image of one device to the new one in minutes if not seconds? Obviously there are reasons or they would do this. But four-plus hours still in 2025?

A Couple Takes...

🗣️ 📰 Meta Approaches Media Companies For AI Deals – It's been about 18 months since Meta last pulled the rug (or the football, if you prefer) on their publishing partners, so that means it's time to start the process all over again. Meta is working to strike new deals with various news organizations to pay for content to use in their AI and in a few years they'll decide they don't want or need that content anymore and will stop paying while the publishers scramble to figure out how this could have happened and how to make up for the lost revenue. And then this process will repeat again until the heat death of the universe. [WSJ 🔒]

💣 Jimmy Kimmel Tick-Tock – Starting to feel like there's no need to overthink what happened here, it seems pretty obvious. The FCC head's comments on a conservative podcast started an avalanche of moves, the biggest of which was Nexstar, owner of a ton of ABC affiliates and in the middle of a massive M&A deal for which they need FCC approval, pulling the show. Sinclair, which owns even more affiliates, followed the move. Advertisers, in turn, started talking about shifting ad budgets, and communicated some of this to Disney. At the same time, threats to employees added internal pressure for Dana Walden (one of the front-runners to be the next CEO of Disney) and Bob Iger to do something – and the timing of the whole thing was the cherry on top of the shit sandwich, since Kimmel was about to go back on air to address the situation, which could have further enflamed it all. Instead, they took what they thought was the best, quick call to "pause" the show. They're not idiots, they had to know there would be pushback, but perhaps they underestimated the amount, undoubtedly exacerbated by the other recent tangential media moves, including the Trump settlements and the cancellation of Stephen Colbert's show ahead of yet more M&A being approved by the FCC. Iger clearly needs to address the situation now – this will be one of his last official acts as CEO – and he will undoubtedly explain it as trying to make the best, quick call around a bad situation, not something nefarious around free speech. But the damage is done because the "corporate cowardice" and self-censorship evidence keeps mounting while Trump takes victory lap after victory lap with no pushback, so he keeps pushing... [NYT]

I Note...

• Sort of buried under the 'Meta Ray-Ban Display' launch, the new 'Oakley Meta Vanguard' sport glasses seem like a smart update to take over the GoPro market. [TechCrunch]
  • Aside: can we figure out the naming convention here? These and the non-Display Ray-Bans go by 'Oakley Meta' and 'Ray-Ban Meta', respectively. But the new 'Meta Ray-Ban Display' use 'Meta' first. That's clearly intentional – perhaps to show Meta is far more in control of the 'Display models? – but it's confusing as hell!
  • Speaking of the 'Ray-Ban Metas' (also confusing if you pluralize the 'Meta' part?!), they may end up the big winners of the announcement, as the halo effect of the 'Display' announcement, may lead more people to try the more accessible model – now with twice the battery (though a slightly higher price). [Verge]
  • Meta would like us all to know their Connect demos did not fail because of WiFi issues, thank you very much. It was software/hardware bugs/glitches – is that supposed to be better? Thanks for the honesty, I guess? [Verge]
• It looks like the "transcendent mobility" vehicle teased by ALSO, the spin-off company from Rivian has leaked ahead of its unveil in a month. And it's... an e-bike – a seemingly heavy-duty one, likely designed with help from Jony Ive's LoveFrom team... [Electrek]
• The day before that unveil, we might see Samsung's XR headset – aka "Project Moohan" – aka their Android-based Vision Pro knock-off, which seems like a weird product to want to knock off when Smart/AI Glasses are all the rage right now... [9to5Google]
• With TikTok apparently, maybe, on the verge of an actual deal, ByteDance secondaries are up to $400B, behind only OpenAI's $500B mark. [CNBC]
  • And sure enough, it sounds like other VC and PE firms are going to be involved in the new TikTok deal too. ByteDance? They'll apparently be cut back to exactly 19.9% ownership. Lol. [Information 🔒]
• Like the aforementioned Meta/Media rug-pull, SoftBank is back to their seemingly regularly scheduled strategy shifts with Vision Fund, this time laying off 20% of the team to focus fully on their concentrated AI bets, namely in OpenAI. [Reuters]
• It sure looks like Google's new home speaker will be called... 'Google Home Speaker'. And yes, powered by Gemini – though using Gemini Live will require a premium subscription, it seems. [9to5Google]
• NVIDIA does a hackquisition! $900M to hire Enfabrica's CEO and a number of his team while paying for a "licensing agreement" with the company that may or may not even be used. [Information 🔒]
• Satya Nadella is paranoid about Microsoft surviving in the Age of AI. And his employees are clearly feeling the brunt of that tension. [Verge]

Below, members of The Inner Ring will find thoughts on:

• Apple Injecting Talent into OpenAI
• Google Injecting Gemini into Chrome
• Prime Video Adding 'The Masters'
• Optimus vs. the Global Economy
• and more...