Son of a bitch. They did it.

Warning: Spoilers ahead. If you are not caught up on the Disney+ show WandaVision through Episode 5 do not read on. 

The first episode of WandaVision — the first Marvel Cinematic Universe show to roll out on Disney+ — is weird. That’s a nice way to put it. A less nice way is boring. An even less nice way is bad. It’s a gimmick. But it’s also a full episode of that gimmick. It’s tedious. And it’s clearly intentional.

Episode 2 gets ever-so-slightly more interesting. Episode 3, more so as at the very end we finally get a teaser of the point of the gimmickry. By Episode 4, we’re basically back in the MCU we all know and love, though it’s unclear how long we keep going with the faux suburban sitcom schtick. The opening of Episode 5 makes it very clear: we’re sticking with it. But the seams are fully bursting. As is Vision. Then comes the end.

Wait. Who is that? Is that silver hair? Waaaaiiiittt. They can’t do that. Can they? Can they?! Whoa…¹

I somehow avoided spoilers despite watching the episode a few days late and I sincerely hope you did too, because it’s great. Well, it’s great assuming you’re in the subset of viewers who are both MCU completists and X-Men completists. Given the comicbook lineage — and specifically, the Marvel comic book lineage — presumably there is a high level of overlap. But undoubtedly it’s not 100%. First and foremost because the MCU has historically been much better than the X-Men franchise.² And that’s because Disney — and specifically Kevin Feige — was in charge of one, while Fox was in charge of the other.

Maybe you heard: those two companies are now one company. And while that wasn’t enough to save Dark Phoenix (or, apparently The New Mutants), there’s now reason to see real light in this tunnel.

Yes, ladies and gentlemen, WandaVision, this seemingly bizarre spin-off that seemed like it was at best going to be a quirky throw-away is now the full-on missing link. The show rope-a-doped us for 4.5 episodes and then landed the knock-out punch.

Well, presumably.

I say that because I obviously have no idea what WandaVision intends to do with Pietro — the X-Men version of Quicksilver — back in the picture. But it almost doesn’t matter. The fact that he’s there points to a future where the rest of the X-Men find their home in the MCU, either one-by-one in the sideshows, or, presumably, in a major way in a major motion picture.

But the Pietro appearance — specifically this Pietro/Peter — points to a world in which the “younger” X-Men cast is also now free to enter the frame. Does that mean that James McAvoy, Michael Fassbender, Nicholas Hoult, etc,³ would all agree to reprise roles after already playing the characters four times — the last two of which must have already been like pulling contractual teeth?

I wouldn’t put it past Feige.

An even better question may be Patrick Stewart, Ian McKellan, and yes, Hugh Jackman, who had previously stated he was done after playing his part 60 or so times. But come on, he’s the Tom Brady of playing Wolverine.⁴

This unification was always the promise — and perhaps in its own small way, even part of the point — of Disney taking over Fox. But while we were all hoping and waiting for a huge movie reveal a la Spider-Man (still controlled by Sony, but under lease of sorts to Disney), Disney went for the total screwball curveball reveal.⁵

The long-lost brother trope meets the not-so-subtle character recast trope as a bridge between two universes and studios and franchises. Brilliant.

¹ It was a particularly big “whoa” for me as I had done the work years earlier to look up the fact that the the X-Men movies Peter Maximoff and the Avengers movies Pietro Maximoff were indeed one in the same character, despite the very different backstories. I like these kind of quirks — especially here since the two characters debuted within a couple months of one another in 2014: Pietro Maximoff first appeared in an end credits scene in Captain America: The Winter Soldier, which was released on April 4, 2014; Peter Maximoff first appeared in X-Men: Days of Future Past, which was released on… May 23, 2014— but you almost never see them attempted to be reconciled. And so cleverly!

² Yes, a few of them are good to very good. The first two Bryan Singer films are good. Third meh. The first of the rebooted franchise with the younger cast, First Class, is good enough with fun retro-vibes. The second of those, Days of Future Past, is actually good. And then there’s Logan, the James Mangold Wolverine spin-off, which is just legitimately a good movie (the first Wolverine spin-off is awful, and second one is decent). X-Men: Apocalypse is pretty bad. Dark Pheonix is a mess (for very clear reasons).

³ Presumably not Jennifer Lawrence who is— again, spoiler, but less so — dead at the end of Dark Phoenix. But maybe Sophie Turner, who they set up to be resurrected, of course.

⁴ He’s also only a mere 9 years older than Tom Brady. Also, the Tom Brady + Wolverine reference is intentional. #GoBlue

⁵ And yeah, can’t wait to see how they work Deadpool into this…

WandaVision’s Missing Link was originally published in 500ish on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

It’s finally time for a premium Twitter

The idea of a premium version of Twitter — ‘Twitter Pro’, ‘Twitter+’, ‘Twitter Max’, ‘Twitter Prime’, call it whatever you want — is basically as old as Twitter itself. In the early days, users were just trying to come up with a way for Twitter to stay afloat — hello Fail Whale — and to make money, since it clearly never would as a silly little service.

Fast-forward 15 years and Twitter is now a quite big and decidedly more serious service.¹ It is also a very real business. Twitter reported Q4 2020 revenue yesterday of $1.29B. With net income coming in at $222M. Yes, our little old twee service is making money! As a result, the stock hit an all-time high today, and Twitter’s market cap is now past $50B.²

And all of this has happened without the need for a premium Twitter. The service was able to get to a scale — 192M (monetizable) daily active users — where the preferred method of monetizing social networks, advertising, finally started working. That’s all good news, but it’s also exactly why now is the right time to switch things up a bit.

And to get back to the idea of Twitter Premium...

Twitter has been talking about the idea of a subscription service — or multiple subscription services — for a while now. Both in interviews and even in earnings calls. Such things would seem to be inching closer, as earlier this week, Kurt Wagner of Bloomberg reported on the various paid options being explored and some other ones likely on the table.

In that report, at least one analyst tried to poo-poo the idea of moving beyond advertising-based monetization:

Michael Levine, a senior analyst at Pivotal Research Group, doesn’t think people will pay for ad-free Twitter, but agrees that the company’s best option is to start selling some type of exclusive content.

“If they’re going to do this and they’re going to get this right, there needs to be some premium content that they are going to lean into that’s going to require investment,” he said. Levine also worries that Twitter won’t be able to entice enough signups to make a subscription business work. Even if Twitter, which had 187 million daily users in the third quarter, were to reach 10 million subscribers, Levine said, it wouldn’t be enough. Building a subscription product that’s only interesting to a small subset of users would be “an utter waste of time and a distraction,” he said.

I mean, define ‘enough’? 10 million Twitter users paying $10/month is $100M a month in revenue. Twitter is not Apple, $300M in revenue a quarter for a company doing $1.3B in revenue a quarter right now is certainly meaningful! That’s adding almost an extra 25% to the top line! And sure, maybe $10/month is too high a price point (it depends on what is being offered, of course), but I would also argue that 10 million subscribers — just 5% of their DAUs — is also likely too low (again, depending on what is offered — more on that below).

I also think that mentality, mixed with the idea also talked about in the article that social networks need to be fully ad-based in order to reach the widest possible audience is ripe to be questioned.

In a way, I’d think of Twitter more like a streaming television service in this regard. No, not Netflix in this case, which would be all “premium”, but more like Hulu or Peacock — both of which offer entirely free tiers, supported by ads, but also have paid tiers with either reduced ad-loads, or that remove ads entirely.

Again, social networks have largely shied away from this idea in the past — though, notably, YouTube does this as well with Premium, if you want to consider that a hybrid social network and streaming video service — because of the aforementioned scale aspirations. But it should be clear to everyone at this point — first and foremost, Twitter themselves — that Twitter is never going to be Facebook.³ And they were also long ago passed by Snapchat in daily users. Others are coming. And that’s fine. Twitter is still growing their user base, but it also feels like that base is at a certain general level where it’s going to remain.

This is why the time is right for a premium layer to augment the ad-based monetization layer. Twitter should take advantage of the fact that they’re not Facebook, that they don’t have this amazing ad business which they have to keep growing to appease Wall Street. They have just a pretty good ad business. And that means they can try to build a pretty good subscription business as well. If — yes, a big ‘if’ — done well, it will move the needle.

To me, it’s a no-brainer right now that boils down to what you bake into such a package. Per Wagner’s post, there’s a lot they can try and a lot they likely are thinking about. But I would argue that they need to keep it pretty simple too. Two options, with a third that encompasses both.

Twitter Plus

This would be the premium consumer offering that I think could encompass a few things. First and foremost, it would remove the ads from Twitter. To me, the ads on Twitter suck. I know they’re having some success with app install ads, like Facebook before them, but I don’t need to or want to see any of that. I often mute every ad I see in my timeline. And at times, the ad load is really annoying. What I value most from Twitter is information flow. Anything that gets in the way of that, be it annoying ads or annoying Fleet bars taking up space, is a distraction and something I would gladly pay to remove to clear up and speed up my information feed.

I think this package also includes some premium customization options. The ability to preview new features. And a set amount of tokens to do things like tipping/paying for certain types of content on the platform. And things like access to premium content — perhaps via a paid Twitter Spaces layer. Or Periscope live video streams. Revue newsletters. Etc. There’s a lot you could do here, obviously. This might be $9.99/month.

Twitter Pro

This would be the premium version of Twitter geared more towards professionals and creators. I think that means more powerful analytics. Better tools for the aforementioned Spaces and live video features. I’m sure they could do something with Revue here too.

I think this would include access to TweetDeck as well, as a power user/pro tool. The ability to have multiple tweet streams all updating at once in real time. Maybe even the ability to edit tweets?! (Who am I kidding — still, there could be an “unsend” grace period option or whatever.) Given the professional target group, this might be $14.99/month.

Twitter Prime

I think the most hardcore Twitter users would appreciate the features of both ‘Plus’ and ‘Pro’ and so I would have a ‘Prime’ offering to bundle everything together as well. Maybe it’s $19.99/month.

Yes, that’s a lot of money to pay for a social networking service for which you’re currently paying $0. But for a feed without ads, with professional creation tools, with some baked in ability to help creators monetize, and with the ability to unsend tweets, I think it could be worth it. Or maybe it’s Plus: $4.99/Pro: $9.99/Prime: $12.99.

Or maybe Twitter Prime is $280/year. Get it? Yeah, in a world where Amazon Prime is $119/year, that feels like a lot. How about $140/year? A nice call back to the humble beginnings.

I don’t know what the exact pricing should be — Apple One is $14.99/month but the ‘Premier’ layer is $30/month, Twitch Turbo is $8.99/month, YouTube Premium is $11.99/month, Discord Nitro is $4.99/month or $9.99/month — but you get the picture of the intent here. Something to augment the ad business which is either going to hit a growth wall, or will try to burst through it by shoving more ads in our faces. Now is the time to roll out premium, but to keep it simple.⁴

I’m also sure Twitter could come up with far more on-brand, cuter names than ‘Plus’, ‘Pro’, and ‘Prime’. ‘Robin’/‘Hawk’/‘Eagle’? ‘Nest’/‘Egg’/‘NestEgg’?

¹ Some might say a little too serious these days — with former U.S. Presidents being banned and whatnot — at the very least, a service where many tweets have very serious ramifications in the real world.

² As a longtime Twitter shareholder, I will just add: finally.

³ Nor should it necessarily aspire to be anymore! With great scale comes… well, a lot of headaches.

⁴ Though, for the record, I do like the idea of Twitter attempting to monetize via a 5% cut of Revue subscriptions. I think that for businesses which are being run separately, it’s fine to monetize them outside of these simple bundles, though perhaps also giving some options there for Twitter users.

‘Twitter Prime’ was originally published in 500ish on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Apple Watch on 100 million wrists…

The Apple Watch now has an installed base of 100 million, according to analysis from Neil Cybart of Above Avalon:

At 100 million users, the Apple Watch is Apple’s fourth-largest product installed base behind the iPhone, iPad, and Mac. At the current sales trajectory, the Apple Watch installed base will surpass the Mac installed base in 2022. Surpassing the iPad installed base will take longer and likely be measured in a number of years based on the current sales trajectory.

That is 10% of Apple’s recently announced 1 billion active iPhone base, but the percent is more like 35% of the iPhone base in the U.S., Cybart suggests. Anecdotally, this rings true as you seem to see them everywhere these days — something which was not true in the early days of the device, as it searched for a use case. One other big reason? Perception shift:

The Cool Factor. People want to be seen wearing an Apple Watch. The Apple Watch brand has evolved to become cool yet approachable. The device has wide appeal across gender, age, occupation, and social status. Apple Watch wearers are able to add customization to the wrist through various Watch band, case, and face / complications combinations. Thanks to Apple Watch’s comfortable bands, it’s easy to wear the device all day, every day.

While Apple went to great lengths — and prices points! — to try to make the Apple Watch a fashion accessory on day one, it didn’t play out that way. The first version of the hardware was a bit of a clunker, and the apps were pretty poor. And it still seemed like a fairly nerdy thing to wear until the health angle of the device, mixed with the device feeling comfortable in its own skin — er, watch straps — allowed it to become normalized and even cool in daily wear.

This has been a slow build to huge success, but that’s not exactly a surprise. As I wrote nearly five years ago:

So will the Apple Watch be the next iPhone (slow to start, then nearly exponential) or the iPad (explosive growth to start, then trickled off)?

Impossible to say right now, of course. But it seems entirely unrealistic to think it will match the iPhone’s trajectory. Because, again, no other business ever has. If I had to guess, I’d imagine the Apple Watch lands in between the two product categories in terms of how it progresses. I think it will be more upgrade-worthy than the iPad, but less so than the iPhone has been thus far.

The caveat here is that it has to get better than it is right now. But if history is any guide, this is always what happens with Apple products. I happen to believe Apple Watch is a bit more “v1” than a lot of other products the company has put out there. But that may just mean that it has more opportunity to grow into something truly unique, useful, and worth upgrading for as iterations come.

And indeed, it has.

As an aside, this past year of pandemic has truly proven the Apple Watch’s worth to me. I went from paying with a credit card 80% of the time (because Apple Pay uptake was oddly mixed in the U.S. versus, say, Europe) to paying with Apple Pay nearly 100% of the time. And because of our mask reality, it’s 100x easier to pay with Apple Pay on Apple Watch — something which was easier before, but I just always forgot to do. Now it’s a godsend as no Face ID fail/passcode input time is needed.

Speaking of, the new ability in iOS 14.5 to unlock your iPhone while wearing an Apple Watch and a mask may be reason alone to get the device. I’ve been using the beta for a couple weeks now and it’s fantastic. “It just works” as the saying goes…

An Overnight Success, Six Years in the Making was originally published in 500ish on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Can Airbnb ever turn a profit?! (Oh, aside from the profits they’ve historically turned.)

Look, losing $3.9B in a quarter, as Airbnb just did in their first quarter as a public company, is a big number, no question. At the same time, the framing of this New York Times blurb on the results is silly:

Airbnb’s loss approaches the $5.2 billion lost by Uber in its first full quarter as a public company and renewed questions about whether unprofitable tech start-ups can turn a profit. Although most money-losing tech companies say that they are spending money to fuel fast growth, Airbnb’s shrinking revenue makes that argument a harder sell.

It’s true that Uber has yet to turn a profit — though they continue to make inroads there, and seems likely to later this year or next. And they may or may not have already had the world not completely shut down for the past 12 months, all-but eliminating Uber’s core business.¹

Anyway, that’s Uber, and it’s fair to question the company in that regard until they can prove otherwise, but lumping in Airbnb and trying to make this some sort of trend piece on unprofitable tech giants — never mind Amazon’s famous/infamous strategy in this regard — strikes me as decidedly silly.² Hell, you don’t even need to read between the lines for the story here — it’s right there in the paragraph above the one just excerpted:

The company brought in $859 million in revenue in the last three months of the year, down 22 percent from a year earlier. Its loss was driven by $2.8 billion in costs associated with stock-based compensation related to its I.P.O., as well as an $827 million accounting adjustment for an emergency loan it took out last year to weather the pandemic.

Simple math: $3.6B of the $3.9B loss was due to one-time charges. Every company that goes public has these³ — including Uber in that huge loss mentioned above. If you click on that link you’ll find:

For the second quarter, Uber said it lost $5.2 billion, the largest loss since it began disclosing limited financial data in 2017. A majority of that — about $3.9 billion — was caused by stock-based compensation that Uber paid its employees after its I.P.O.

Again, one-time. Those go away next quarter. And if you took them away this quarter for Airbnb, the picture was much brighter. Again, simple math: a $300M loss. Still a loss, but that’s actually a pretty incredible outcome given the pandemic and Airbnb’s core business. Something which, of course, is also directly responsible for the year-to-year revenue decline obviously.

With that in mind, you probably shouldn’t be shocked to see that Airbnb’s stock is trading up nearly 15% today on the earnings news. If you just read The New York Times attempted framing of the situation, you would be shocked. But it might also shock you to learn that in the years before the pandemic, Airbnb was actually a profitable company.

This is not complicated. Airbnb, a travel and experiences company, was one of the businesses impacted the most by the lockdowns over the past year. So much so that it derailed the original IPO plans. But the company rather miraculously found their footing (thanks in large part to local stays for people looking to break up the work-from-home monotony) and regrouped to still get out in the public market.

If you believe the world is going to open up again, and signs are finally looking very good in this regard, there are few businesses better situated than Airbnb to take advantage of this. And if that happens, the company is likely to quickly return to profitability. “Renewed questions about whether unprofitable tech start-ups can turn a profit”, aside.

¹ Disclosure: I am an Uber shareholder, and have been since the firm where I’m a partner, GV, invested back in 2013. But I remain one despite the bumpy ride in the public market because of the belief in the world swinging back to a state of normal and Uber being a key cog in that transportation picture once again.

² Non-Disclosure: I am not an Airbnb shareholder — though I’m tempted given the narrative I just spun and the negative view point above which I view as totally irrational. In a way, it reminds me of buying Facebook stock almost a decade ago as it went below $20/share. Or Snap stock in late 2019, as it approached $5/share. My reluctance is that unlike with those stocks, where the public market was being irrational, the public markets still love Airbnb stock despite the press narrative and it’s valued highly. But if you believe this is a transformational company in travel and experiences…

The above is not stock buying advice, by the way! I’m not a public stock market professional. This is just my own commentary as I think through what to do!

³ Though no, not every company has the emergency loan charges — but again, we’re in the middle of a pandemic!

“Whopping” was originally published in 500ish on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A standoff for one of the last great movie theater chains

Well, this sucks. The news hit this morning that Alamo Drafthouse — perhaps the last best theater chain in the country — was filing for Chapter 11 bankruptcy. Here’s Brent Lang with the news for Variety:

Alamo Drafthouse Cinema, the Texas-based theater chain that has become a favorite with cinephiles for its dine-in service and fan-forward approach to exhibition, has filed for Chapter 11. The bankruptcy filing comes as part of an asset purchase agreement with Altamont Capital Partners, a previous investor in the company, as well as affiliates of Fortress Investment Group, a new backer. The company says that operations will continue as normal and the Chapter 11 process and sale will give it the capital it needs to continue operating as it emerges from a public health crisis that left many of its locations closed for months. The agreement involves “the sale of substantially all its assets.”

Now, Chapter 11 is hardly the end of a company. In fact, it often does help save certain companies as it protects them in a vulnerable time to allow them to restructure finances and get out from under debts. Unfortunately, this almost always means big changes to the underlying operations of said company in order to make said finances work.

The hope would be that this really just has been a year of extraordinary (in the worst way possible) circumstances for the movie theater industry, as we’ve all read about ad nauseam. In a way, it’s a small miracle than any of them are still alive one year into lockdowns. If this was just a blip on the radar, and if Alamo can go back to 2019 levels of business, a record for the company, they can emerge from this relatively quickly and relatively unscathed. Perhaps, one oddly hopes, Altamont (as noted, a previous investor in the company) and Fortress (a new investor) just saw this as a chance to “be greedy when others are fearful” and buy up to give the business time to bounce back as the world corrects itself. Please.

This line remains rather scary, though:

The agreement involves “the sale of substantially all its assets.”

So the investors will basically have complete control. Again, everyone from the CEO (Shelli Taylor, who just joined in April, is staying) and founder (Tim League, who is now Chairman, and is staying) are saying the right things right now:

“Alamo Drafthouse had one of its most successful years in the company’s history in 2019 with the launch of its first Los Angeles theater and box office revenue that outperformed the rest of the industry,” Taylor said in a statement. “We’re excited to work with our partners at Altamont Capital Partners and Fortress Investment Group to continue on that path of growth on the other side of the pandemic, and we want to ensure the public that we expect no disruption to our business and no impact on franchise operations, employees and customers in our locations that are currently operating.”

So the short term concerns seem mild. They will have to close some theaters, and undoubtedly tweak some other things, but again, if the world starts to open up — theaters just started opening in NYC, for example — perhaps there’s a window to do a quick turnaround with relatively little disruption. But the longer term concerns are far less mild. It basically boils down to the fact that investors like to meddle. And it’s human nature to exert your own will on something when you own it. The longer the time horizon, the more likely this becomes (see: Facebook with WhatsApp, Instagram, etc).

You need look no further than what has happened to the Sundance theater chain. The once-great brand changed hands not once, but twice, and was all-but ruined as a result. Now it’s owned by AMC, which is the largest and worst chain. One has to wonder/fear if this isn’t the most likely outcome for Alamo as well. The only thing we can take solace in here is that AMC is in arguably worse shape than Alamo — diamond hands, aside.

But the real fear is even bigger picture: that the theater-going experience is forever changed. And this actually seems likely not only because of the pandemic and fears of future ones, but also because what it has enabled. That is, massive change in the industry at a speed which is remarkable. We now have 17-day windows for new releases in some cases and no windows in others. Netflix is more powerful than ever, and there are now a half dozen other credible streamers buying up rights to movies left and right.

The movie theater industry will come back, but it will come back smaller than it once was. It will be the land of blockbusters more than ever as more nuanced fare goes streaming.

Now, I do believe there is still a place for Alamo in this world. As they were already good at what you need to be good at going forward: the experience of seeing a movie. It’s not just the massive screen (though that’s a big part of it!), but it’s also the food, the drinks, the night out. The two hours away from your goddamn phone.

With its mixture of popular and eclectic movies, Alamo was the best. And they can be again, I’m just really worried both that the meddlers are going to meddle and that the world is forever changed, which hastens the former. I hope I’m wrong, but I fear I’m not.

And thus would be the end of the last great big theater experience in San Francisco. To be clear, there are other nice, small theaters. But you can’t count on them to have the latest popular movie you want. And their aesthetic is often more decidedly old school. This can make for a great experience too — take the Castro Theater with its famous organ, for example — but it’s going to be a challenge to make work in the world we’re entering as we leave COVID behind. Alamo was our last, best hope.¹ Pray.

¹ If the pandemic also ends Electric Cinemas in London, I’m done.

Remember the Alamo Drafthouse was originally published in 500ish on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The meta brilliance and annoyance of the Oprah interview

Like seemingly the rest of the country, last night we watched Oprah Winfrey’s interview with Prince Harry and Meghan Markle. I’m not nearly qualified to opine on the actual meat of the interview — parts were certainly compelling, others disturbing, and there were a lot of shots of chicken coops — but I did find the meta layer rather fascinating.

First and foremost, I can’t recall a program I’ve watched in recent memory with a higher commercial load. Granted, I don’t watch all that much content with commercials these days any more as I long ago cancelled cable. But alongside the half dozen streaming services I now pay for, I also have YouTube TV, which is very nearly the cable bundle of old by itself — cost and all! — just with newer form factors. And I have that basically for one thing: sports.¹ And even compared to all the sporting events I watch — even the Super Bowl — this seemed like an obscene amount of ads.

Now, there’s a reason for this — those ads paid the big bucks to be there. Apparently upwards of 2x the amount ads in that time slot normally command. And so CBS not only was happy to shove them in, but really needed to in order to hope to pay back the reported $7M to $9M they paid to air the interview (which Oprah’s company produced).

That’s why billing this as a “two hour interview” was ridiculous. At best, it was a one-hour interview with one hour of ads. It may have actually been less content than that — at one point, there was a segment that could not have been longer than a couple minutes surrounded by five solid minutes of ads on either side.

It was a good reminder of two things:

1. I hate television advertising. The Airbnb ad I saw was good. Everything else was crap. Sure, I’m not the market for most of these ads — so many pharmaceutical ones — but that’s part of the problem, I suspect! To me, the ads had almost the opposite effect of their intent, everything I saw I’m less likely to buy because I was so annoyed by the ad load. If the goal was simply memory recall, I guess that’s a win for them. But I do wonder about all of this as kids increasingly grow up in the age of Netflix, what will they think of ads? Will they tolerate them at all?
2. We’re not in that world yet. Again, 17.1 million people watched this program, high ad load and all. And the advertisers were undoubtedly happy to pay for all those eyeballs. The system, no matter how barbaric to me, worked well. And we’re undoubtedly going to see more of this type of content as a result.

And this system worked even though the program aired on the west coast three hours after it aired on the east coast! If you cared about this interview, it made the internet basically unusable for those three hours. That’s a bonkers strategy for 2021.

Speaking of Oprah and ads — she was everywhere during the ads too. They promoted other Oprah content. What a massive win for her — not that she needed it! Oprah seemingly has deals with every network and streaming service these days. It’s pretty incredible, really. “A billion pockets y’all” and all that but probably more than a billion eyeballs too!

This was also a massive win for Harry and Meghan. While they were not paid for the interview (something very specifically noted at the outset), this is the type of publicity no amount of money could buy. I won’t be so cynical to think they did it just for that reason — taking control of your own narrative, catharsis, revenge was perhaps served very cold too! — but it certainly can’t hurt for a couple that talked a lot about being cut off from their money pipeline and now have new ones thanks to Netflix and Spotify, which were talked about, naturally. Interest in the two of them will only explode even further from here. Well played.

¹ Well, and now the Oprah interview, I guess!

Royals, Flush was originally published in 500ish on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The brilliance of Rick Steves’ ‘Monday Night Travel’

A full year without travel has been tough. But I take some solace in the fact that as hard as it has been for me, there’s no way it’s as hard as it has been for Rick Steves.

This was pretty evident over Zoom the other night. Not because I know Rick Steves well enough to do video calls to commiserate over the lack of travel, but because I signed up for his “Monday Night Travel” event. Each week, he invites hundreds (thousands?) of his best friends to join him in walking through previous excursions he’s taken as you watch it together on video. He drinks wine, you drink wine. It’s about an hour. It’s great.

He does this not once, but twice every Monday. Back-to-back. Drinking wine and telling stories both times. That is how much Rick Steves misses travel.

Anyway, while enjoying Rick’s “Great Italian Wine Experience” this past Monday night, I found myself thinking back to something I had written years ago about another famous world traveler: Anthony Bourdain.

Actually, before I go there, let me just say that I feel very weird when talking about Anthony Bourdain these days, both because it remains a complete and utter travesty that he’s gone, but also because I feel something almost akin to comfort knowing that he didn’t have to live through this era of no travel.¹

Back to Bourdain, the TV tour guide. Seven years ago, I wrote about the desire for Twitter to come up with some sort of “DVR-like” feature to allow us to augment any show we may watch along with the “director commentary” from people like Bourdain who would live tweet during certain airings of one of his shows. Twitter still has not done that, which is crazy, but it almost doesn’t matter anymore because Zoom beat them to it with a more immersive experience via video.²

And it sure feels like Clubhouse or the like (Twitter Spaces?) could do an even better job at offering an actual director commentary-like feature for people who want to listen to and/or interact with their favorite talent live during airings of their shows/movies.

Anyway, that’s where my mind wandered while traveling the Italian countryside with Rick Steves this week. From my couch in my home in San Francisco, with Rick Steves on Zoom, two bottles of wine deep.

¹ The depression of him being gone is such that my wife and I refuse to watch all of the remaining episodes we haven’t yet seen of Parts Unknown. We’re letting them sit there, aging both like fine wine and like Anthony Bourdain sadly didn’t, and savoring them in very small doses on certain special occasions, or when times are tough. It’s similar to the way I’m refusing to let Halt & Catch Fire end for me, but decidedly more poignant.

² And yes, you can watch the recordings of them if you miss them live.

At Home, On the Road was originally published in 500ish on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Rest in peace, HomePod

Bust out the gym shorts folks, it’s time for a victory lap. Earlier this evening, Matthew Panzarino got the scoop and the quote for TechCrunch: Apple would be discontinuing the HomePod.

This is both surprising for a product which Apple launched just three years ago to much pomp and circumstance, and entirely not surprising if you happened to read this here site back in 2017, ahead of the launch:

As we’re all well aware, Apple had to delay their foray into the space, the HomePod, into 2018. But not only did they miss the all-important holiday shopping season, I’m increasingly thinking that they may have missed the boat.

Believe me, I know how dangerous this line of thinking is with regard to Apple. Apple is almost never the first-mover in a market. Instead, they prefer to sit back and let markets mature enough to then swoop in with their effort, which more often than not is the best effort (this is both subjective in terms of my own taste, and often objective in terms of sales). But again, I increasingly don’t believe that this will be the case with their smart speaker.

Now, it’s true that people often shit on new Apple products and mock them relentlessly (until they inevitably buy them).¹ I am not one of those people, obviously. I buy every Apple product. Including the HomePod, by the way. I’m all in. It’s a sickness, really. The only cure is more Apple product. Anyway, despite my predilections, it seemed to me that the HomePod strategy was uniquely flawed from the start. Per above, Apple is rarely a first mover in a space, but the issue here was that Amazon had changed the entire game with their Echo/Alexa strategy before Apple entered it.

Said another way: Apple brought a Sonos to an Alexa fight.

Apple was fighting yesterday’s battle and didn’t know it. But what’s really wild is that they should have known it. One of the very few times when Apple was a legitimate first-mover in a space was in the digital voice assistant world, thanks to their purchase of Siri back in 2010. Apple should have owned this space, which makes Siri’s continued shortcomings all the more frustrating.

Imagine a world where Siri was hands-down the best digital assistant on the market. I still think trying to sell a $350 speaker as your only in-the-home end-point for that functionality would have been dumb, but it may have actually worked to some extent. If the product was pure magic — or the centerpiece of the home — the people would have come. Instead, Apple focused the HomePod on music and Siri was secondary at best. And so we got the iPod HiFi 2.0, failure and all.

As I said at the time, it seemed reasonable for Apple to focus on music to start as it was a strength and core competency (whereas Siri clearly was not).² But they needed that to be just the entry point and to build from there quickly. Otherwise, you had a $350 speaker. (Eventually discounted to $300.) Again, that’s the Sonos market, and it’s fine. But Apple should have aspired to more. They should aspire to do what Amazon and Google were doing in the space.

At the time, some were quick to jump on that notion as misguided because Apple would never want to sell cheap devices. The focus would be on quality and profit over ubiquity and red ink. The Apple playbook. I get it, I really do. As stated, I just didn’t think it would work here. And it’s hard to read today’s statement as anything other than an admission of complete and utter failure:

HomePod mini has been a hit since its debut last fall, offering customers amazing sound, an intelligent assistant, and smart home control all for just $99. We are focusing our efforts on HomePod mini. We are discontinuing the original HomePod, it will continue to be available while supplies last through the Apple Online Store, Apple Retail Stores, and Apple Authorized Resellers. Apple will provide HomePod customers with software updates and service and support through Apple Care.

The quote about the end of the HomePod is mainly about the HomePod mini. Ouch. But it makes sense. The HomePod mini is what the strategy should have been from the get-go. No, a $99 speaker still couldn’t quite match Amazon’s $30 or $50 (and often cheaper!) ubiquity, but this is Apple. $99 is their throw-away price.

The bigger issue remains Siri. Over a decade and many overseers later, she’s still horribly flawed. The only thing that out-numbers the excuses Apple makes for Siri’s performance is the number of mistakes she makes on what should be routine tasks. I don’t know that we’re at the scrap-it-all-and-start-over point, but my god, there’s a necessary level of trust that is going to be very, very hard to win back.³

Well, rest in peace, HomePod. You were a legitimately good speaker for music brought into this world years late and the opposite of dollars short.

¹ Exhibit A: Apple Watch. A “flop” unlike any other. Now clearly a massive success to everyone. Perhaps their “best” device.

² Also, if the focus was going to be on high quality music, it continues to be bizarre — from a marketing perspective, if nothing else — that Apple isn’t matching their rivals with a high fidelity music streaming offering…

³ Does Siri need a rebrand? Could Apple even do that at this point? It just feels like the service is the butt of a few too many jokes, to the point where even if you believe Apple is improving the service by leaps and bounds, the perception will always be tainted.

I Was Right That Apple Was Wrong was originally published in 500ish on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

20 years ago, I was a freshman in college. I was also a PC user. I distinctly remember being home from school — where I had left my 20 pound Gateway tower and 44 pound CRT monitor behind— and visiting a CompUSA store.¹ It was the same store where my dad had taken me five years earlier to the midnight launch of Windows 95. That’s how PC I was.

This particular trip to CompUSA, I found myself drawn to the Apple side of the aisle — and I do mean that literally, they had a small section for Macs. Maybe even just a couple. It was there that I first got to play around with OS X. I don’t recall if it was the public beta version or the first released version, but I do recall thinking it was beautiful. The dock with those big icons was amazing. They seemed massive. They were massive. The entire thing looked lickable, as Steve Jobs intended. Especially on those candy-colored iMacs.

That moment is what initially whet my appetite for Apple. Sure, like most kids growing up in the 80s/90s, I had used Apple products in school — namely the IIe (and to a lesser extent, Macintoshes) — but I always sort of thought of them as less powerful machines with fewer software options and little gaming support. Yes, Apple’s operating systems were always better-looking than Microsoft’s, but Windows 3.1/95/98 was king of that world.²

Anyway, I was still about five years removed from buying my first Mac, my first OS X machine (the iPod was my “gateway drug” into the Apple universe, while working in Hollywood, which was all-Apple, got me hooked). But the stage was set by that random encounter 20 years ago with OS X. It’s wild to me how much it still — now macOS, and now “11”, of course — looks the same at a high level. And how that in no way looks dated. A beautiful OS. Timeless.

¹ Remember those?!

² Windows XP — Microsoft’s attempt at more “lickable” software — would come out just about six months after OS X was released.

OS X, 20 Years Later was originally published in 500ish on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

On the return to the office…

“You’re on mute.” Three words I look forward to never hearing again, let alone several times a day, sometime soon. This possibility has been on my mind recently as the U.S. seemingly races towards reopening. With each passing day, we’re moving from cautious excitement to actual excitement.

Of course, the reality of the world we’re returning to is going to be far more nuanced. While it does seem like we’re moving fast now with regard to vaccine distribution and business re-openings, it’s not going to be a 0-to-60 overnight thing. The return to “normal” is going to be slow and staggered, as it should be. And so Zoom fatigue isn’t fully going away anytime soon. We’re still going to be on mute by accident while talking constantly.

That said, talking to various folks over these past few weeks has been rather interesting. It’s anecdotal, but my perception is that the tone has shifted from one of caution to one of exuberance. Not in a reckless way, I just get the sense that if and when the world is ready for us, and things can fully be open again — say, late summer or early fall (hopefully) — we are going to get a bit of a rush back to the office.

All the talk over the past many months (year!) has been about how the pandemic has forever changed the way we work. And I’m sure that’s true. But I do wonder now if we’re not going to get a more immediate reaction that’s almost the opposite: when we’re allowed to and it’s safe, everyone will want to come back to the office full time, all the time.

The reason why is obvious: we’ve all been stuck in our work-from-home hells for over a year. Yes, things about it are great. But eating ice cream is great too — unless you have to do it every single working minute of every single day for a year straight. You will puke. We are collectively at the point of puking from overconsumption of work-from-home.

We need a palate cleanser.

And that cleanser will be work-from-office.¹ All those things we disliked about working from a strict office environment are memories lost in time at this point. We desire to go back and remember what we hated.

So I’m now thinking there will be an almost unnatural surge the other way. And this could last for a few weeks until we settle into some sort of new equilibrium. The new “normal”.² A few days in the office. A few days at home, on Zoom. On mute.

Update 3/27: On the other hand…

The Rush Back to Rush Hour

¹ With a taste of work-from-cafe and the like mixed in.

² Not for everyone, or all companies, of course. Two big factors why. First, a number of companies have now been started that are remote-first and that’s not going to change. But even with those companies there will be a strong desire to meet up in person with colleagues — some of whom you will have never met in person, which is wild! Second, a number of people have moved from their main hub during the pandemic and will not or cannot move back. Still, same idea: I suspect business travel to surge in the first few months back so that people can catch up in person.

We Have To Go Back was originally published in 500ish on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Apple Events

Some thoughts on Apple’s ‘Spring Loaded’ event…

Several things stand out about Apple’s ‘Spring Loaded’ event today. But the first remains a meta point. Apple has gotten very, very good at producing these presentations. So much so that I think it’s fair to call them a “show” at this point. The Apple Show.

The first such show, created nearly a year ago for WWDC as the world was first grappling and coming to terms with the reality of COVID, was already good. I mean, it’s Apple. But I honestly thought Snap’s first attempt at such a show was better. More “native” as it were. More focused. Now, a few shows in, I think Apple has these nailed. Right down to the run time. Today’s event was almost exactly one hour. Again, it’s like a TV show.

And it’s especially impressive when you consider what Apple announced today. It was sort of all over the place. Apple Card stuff. Podcasts+. Purple iPhones. AirTags. Apple TV updates. Colorful iMacs. New iPads Pro. Aside from the continued migration to the M1 chip for the latter two, there was nothing really tying everything together today. And yet the event still flowed and felt nice and light and fun. Some of our favorite recurring characters were there, and some new faces. A solid sitcom.

I know I’m hardly alone in hoping that Apple sticks with this format for events going forward. But I also know that they certainly won’t for something like WWDC — well, after this year, HOPEFULLY — where convening the developer community is so important. And hands-on time has been paramount for things like the iPhone event in the past. But I’m not sure they can’t just do that as a separate event with the press and keep streaming these unveils. It’s great television!

A few other thoughts…

Apple Card Kids

You knew the event would be a bit all over the place product-wise when Tim Cook kicked off talking about Apple Card (after a bit on renewable energy, while walking outside). He called it the most successful credit card launch ever, which may very well be true, but I also have no idea how you measure that. Number of cards activated? Purchase volume? Something else? Making the card more accessible to spouses/partners is a smart/good move, as are the tools for kids.

Apple Podcasts+

This is something that’s going to be talked about a lot more after the fact than it was in this presentation. In noting that Apple basically launched the entire category 15 years ago, Cook said today’s update would be the largest since then. And while he may have meant design-wise, the design actually doesn’t seem all that different. The real difference is in the model and what it means for the medium as a whole.

With the launch of subscriptions, which sounds a lot like Apple “Podcasts+” though it’s interesting he explicitly did not call it that,¹ Apple is clearly joining Spotify and others in moving the system off the RSS rails on which it was built. This will freak some people out, and piss off others. But it was inevitable. In our creator economy world, we need better infrastructure for all of this. Details were light today, but we should expect to hear a lot more on this in the coming weeks.

Purple iPhones

Okay, when I said there was no unifying factor in today’s announcements, if there were to be one, it would undoubtedly be color. The ‘Spring Loaded’ logo, the intro, the iMacs, and Cook’s sign off at the Apple Park Rainbow. And… a purple iPhone!

Not gonna lie, it looks beautiful. It’s just a great shade. Personally, I probably would have intro’d it to Prince, but the “Candyman” song was fun. I wonder if this becomes a thing for Apple, to launch a new phone color in the spring. I believe they’ve done it with the (Product) Red phones in the past, but it could be a nice little mid-cycle refresh.

Of course, that also points to one thing not launched today, or at least not talked about in the event, new color iPhone cases and Apple Watch bands for Spring. Presumably they’ll just do that more quietly, but it would have played into the color motif!²

Find My

Apparently, Apple is approaching a billion devices which have opted into some level of “Find My” at this point. That’s wild. And exactly why Apple can do something like AirTags. It was a fun little “couch-diving” commercial to announce them. And the engraving is a nice touch. The U1 chip would seem to be the other real killer feature, as you can seemingly pinpoint the tags via a clever software layer.

And, of course, Apple played up the idea of privacy when launching um, tracking devices. But yes, they’re perhaps the one massive tech company that can do this at scale. And with 4-packs for $99, they should scale nicely.

Oh, and a Hermès version, naturally. I’m surprised we didn’t get a solid gold version. Like an old gold coin.

Apple TV 4K+

This one was underwhelming and it would seem that Cook knew that going in as he kicked off with the trailer for Ted Lasso season two. Play to the crowd. And the crowd ate it up. The crowd includes me. July can’t come soon enough.

As for the new Apple TV hardware itself. Again, sort of ho-hum. We get an A12 Bionic chip in the era of M1. We get HDR at a higher frame rate? Cool, I guess. The color balancing using the iPhone is legitimately cool — though there’s a reason such things are buried deep in settings. BORING. It’s still called the “Apple TV 4K” though I might suggest the “Apple TV 4K+” with the addition sign denoting a minor uptick in this case. They barely even mentioned gaming for like the 10th year running. And of course no mention of any sort of “FacePod”-like functionality (though the iPad Pro is moving in that direction — more on that in a bit).

Oh would you look at that? I’ve buried the lede. WE HAVE A NEW GODDAMN REMOTE. In the history of “finally” this may be the biggest FINALLY. The current version of the Apple TV remote isn’t just bad, it’s an abomination. It’s user-hostile. It’s one of those things they thought would look nice and sounded interesting conceptually but didn’t consider Steve Jobs’ most important element of design. How it works. In that, this remote for the most part doesn’t.

The new one? I mean, the fact that they added buttons galore says pretty much all you need to know. If you can’t beat ‘em, go back to the drawing board and find the designs of your old, original Apple TV remote and go with that, basically. I kid, I kid. This looks like a solid melding of old and new. An aluminum finish so you can distinguish the actual buttons you wish to press. A touch pad that’s actually a click wheel too — and, in a nod to the OG iPods, a jog wheel too! A power button! A MUTE BUTTON! Siri shoved to the side, quite literally. We are cooking with gas now.

Why on Earth there is a $179 32GB version and a $199 64GB version I have absolutely no idea. It almost seems like a mistake? I get having a cheaper version, but $20? For half the storage? If you want to do a fully streaming version, why not do a 16GB version for $99? Or better yet, a stick/dongle/remote smaller version? Weird.

Lickable Macs Are Back

Cook noted that not even halfway through the two-year transition to Apple Silicon, the M1 machines are already a majority of the Mac sales. This shouldn’t be too surprising, they’re that good. But it’s still impressive.

Then we cut underwater (?) to a secret layer that looks suspiciously like one of Batman’s R&D caves (good eyes, Aaron) where John Ternus, clearly a rising star in the Apple universe, talked about the first Mac “built from the ground-up around M1”.

And then we cut to a video filled with color. Glorious, beautiful colors. Lickable Apple is back. And these look like popsicles.

The full glass front has a neutral color accent and notably no Apple logo. It looks so good. And while it’s business in the front, it’s a party in the back with bright, bold colors to “bring joy to any space”. Does this mean we’re going to start to see MacBooks with such colors? It might be a way to make us forget the glowing Apple logos we all miss… But the side view here is the real killer angle and highlights the intention to “make the computer disappear”.

Speaking of, a dive inside the device reveals a device that is basically all screen and little else. It’s wild how tiny a computer can be these days, but we already know that thanks to the iPad and more specifically, the iPhone. The overall volume of the iMac is down over 50% apparently. I’m reminded of my old CRT monitor. That was 44 lbs. This is 11.5mm thin. Wow.

The display itself, now 24” — notably, only one size option — seems great. But it’s not 6K like the Pro Display, it’s 4.5K. Still, my current 8-year-old iMac isn’t even a “Retina” display at all. This will be a massive upgrade. As will be the front-facing camera now that it’s 1080p. It’s wild that the iPhone/iPad cameras are still so much better, but compared to how bad the cameras on these devices were previously, this should be a nice upgrade.

Talking through the M1 specs, I’m mildly surprised that it’s the same M1 in the laptops (and Mac mini) and not some new variation since energy efficiency and battery life are of no (or less) concern here. I suppose that speaks to how powerful these chips are, and the fact that Apple can throttle them up and down but doesn’t really want or need to talk about that. Presumably these machines will run faster than, say, my M1 MacBook Air? But we’ll have to wait to see!³

More ports? Nice. Two of which are Thunderbolt? Great. Color-coordinated cable? Awesome. And it leads to a brick which has a built-in Ethernet port? Clever!

Not one, not two, but three keyboard options. A simple one with a lock button. A less simple one with Touch ID (and a processor in the keyboard to make that happen). And a more robust one with Touch ID and a numeric keypad. And yes, all the colors of the wind.

Speaking of, it’s interesting that the $1,299 entry-level version of the iMac “only” comes in four color options (Green, Red, Blue, and Silver as best as I could tell). If you want all seven options, it will cost you an extra $200 (at least). And, just as with the M1 MacBooks, that upgrade will also get you access to one more GPU core, it seems. (And more ports.)

iPad Pro and iPad Pro for Pros

Next thing I know, I’m watching someone who looks like Andy Dick repelling down an air shaft Mission: Impossible-style in order to steal an M1 chip. Wait, that’s not Andy Dick, it’s Tim Apple! And he put the M1 into… the iPad!

That may have been the biggest, albeit subtle surprise of the show. Everyone was expecting the new iPad Pros to run a chip akin to the M1, but it’s running the actual M1. Again, there may be some tweaks to the chip that Apple doesn’t wish to talk about. But it’s interesting while at the same time very Apple to have so many of their machines running on the same chip. What does this mean for this year’s iPhone? Presumably it’s another A-series chip, but I would not have guessed the iPad to get an M-series. Maybe they really want to convey that the iPad Pro is not only Pro, but it’s “desktop/laptop class”? Not sure.

Again, the proof will be in the tests of these running versus the M1 MacBooks and now the iMacs. Apple claims these new iPads will be 50% faster CPU-wise than the last iteration — and, humorously, 75x faster than the first generation of the iPad.

Storage is faster. There’s now Thunderbolt. And yes, 5G. Not “5G, 5G, 5G, 5G, 5G, 5G, 5G, 5G, 5G, 5G, 5G, 5G, 5G, 5G”, mind you. Just a few 5Gs.

The Pro camera system sounds cool mainly due to the “Center Stage” feature which allows you to do the Alexa Show camera tracking thing without having to move the actual device… And this may hint at the aforementioned “FacePod” product I want. Essentially, this iPad Pro can be a version of that.

This is where the paths of the new iPads Pro diverged, as expected. Much to my chagrin, the 11-inch model will have a nice screen, but the 12.9-inch model will have a great one. A true “Pro” one, as Apple puts it, equating it to the Pro Display XDR, and great for photographers and video professionals on the go. 10,000 mini LEDs versus the 72 LEDs in older iPads Pro (and presumably the smaller, new iPad Pro too, for shame). I love the 11-inch Pro. Might the 12.9-inch entice me with this screen? I don’t know, I thought the original large iPad Pro was way too large. I know the situation has improved, but I’m still worried it will be too big.

Whatever I do, I’m getting the Magic Keyboard in white.

And I’m sort of glad that I apparently won’t need to buy a new Apple Pencil? Looks like those rumors were totally off… One more thing I won’t have to buy? An iPad mini. No upgrade this time around. Sad!

¹ Perhaps because the intention is for this to be more creator-centric and less Apple-centric? That is, users sign up for subscriptions to their favorite creators’ shows, which Apple facilitates (and takes a cut, of course). Still, I suspect we’ll see a bundle of sorts sooner or later, and that may tie in to the whole Apple One bundle (maybe the Podcasts+ offer allows you to subscribe to a set number of shows for one fee, or something like that). Still, if this is indeed Apple’s first creator-first model, that is interesting!

² Update: Sure enough, new iPhone cases and Watch bands for Spring…

³ One other interesting tidbit: most products were stated to be shipping the “second half of May” — Apple sometimes does these more vague timetables, but this is a weird mixture of both being only a few weeks away and being imprecise. Perhaps it’s because of the chip/shipping issues around the world?

The Apple Show was originally published in 500ish on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Give us the Tom Clancy Cinematic Universe, you cowards

Without Remorse, Amazon Studio’s take on the Tom Clancy novel of the same name, is fine. “Fine” as in whatever, not fine as in wine. And that’s the remorse, because it could and should be so much more.

I tend to write about Tom Clancy-related works quite often around these parts. Part of the reason is that I grew up in a home where my father’s bookshelf was stocked with the novels of Clancy. Part of it is that I’m a huge fan of the Jack Ryan film series. Well, the first three, at least. And the last of those three, Clear and Present Danger, in particular.

Anyway, I celebrate the entire catalog. Even when it’s ‘meh’ as it has been in recent memory. Though part of the reason why I had higher hopes of Without Remorse is that I actually quite like Amazon’s reboot of the Ryan character as a show, starring John Krasinski in the title role. I wouldn’t say it’s perfect, but it’s utterly watchable, two seasons in.

Without Remorse could have been that for the John Kelly character in the Clancy universe. Instead, it’s just an entirely forgettable movie. Yes, something much larger is teased at the end, but I’m honestly not sure how many people are even going to make it far enough to care. The talents of Michael B. Jordan and Taylor Sheridan feel wasted.

This too should have been a show. And it should have been a show that eventually ties into the Jack Ryan show. That property would have been the Iron Man, while Without Remorse would have launched it into a Tom Clancy Cinematic Universe.

And I thought they were going to do that for a second. We get Lieutenant Commander Karen Greer — niece of Jim Greer, played by Wendell Pierce in the Jack Ryan show (and, of course, James Earl Jones in the earlier Ryan films). And then we get a young Robert Ritter (the CIA Deputy Director in Clear and Present Danger played so brilliantly by Henry Czerny). Both of these characters could easily cross over into the world of Jack Ryan.

And perhaps that was the intention. But because Without Remorse is so mediocre, it’s not clear that they’ll get the chance.

It’s all right there. A John Kelly/Clark show, which turns into a Rainbow Six show in season two, which runs in parallel with the Jack Ryan show, until they intersect in a couple of years. Perhaps teaming up just as Ryan and Clark do in Clear and Present Danger (as portrayed by Harrison Ford and Willem Dafoe).

Alternatively, why not just stick to the plot of the actual Without Remorse book, which seems like a better story anyway? Make it based in the 1970s, completely with Lt. Emmet Ryan — father of a young Jack Ryan. Have the Jack Ryan show take place in the 1980s, where the two eventually overlap and continue on into the 1990s.

With Remorse was originally published in 500ish on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The masks come off, but the vaccine battle rages on…

It’s not quite ‘VV Day’ (Victory over Virus), but this is probably the closest it has felt yet, at least in America. With the news that the CDC is basically removing mask-wearing guidance for fully vaccinated people, “normal” life feels well within reach once again.¹

It’s great. It’s a happy day. And it’s important to celebrate happy days — especially after a year-plus of trying ones. But…

And I should just note that I’m obviously not a doctor nor an expert in this world, just an observer who likes to jot down thoughts and perhaps be proven correct in the end.

My guess is that this morning’s announcement is just as much about optics and incentives as anything else. That is to say, I view it largely as a carrot, aimed mostly at the people who are not yet vaccinated.

As everyone is undoubtedly well aware by now, we’ve turned the corner from vaccine scarcity to abundance in the U.S. Basically, everyone over a certain age (as of today, 12) who wants a vaccine can get one and often immediately in many parts of the country. The problem now is the group — which is sizable, perhaps 25-30 percent of the country — which does not want to get a vaccine or flat-out refuses, for whatever reason.

And yet, to fully beat this thing — to declare ‘VV Day’ — we need at least some, and ideally most of those people to get the vaccine too. Most war analogies are inappropriate and out of place. Not here. The nation as a whole needs to step up to beat this thing. The cliche about ‘weakest links’ applies.

And yet, we live in a country that is deeply divided. The most recent election showcased that in many disturbing visceral and literal ways. And the vaccine charts seem to echo it, unsurprisingly. The vaccine has been weaponized. It should have been against the virus, but it has been against ourselves.

And while it’s a nice thought, we’re not going to beat that with a sense of national purpose, sadly. It’s going to take some incentives.

That’s why the move Ohio, my home state, made to create a million-dollar lottery is hardly surprising. Again, it’s sad that we have to resort to this, but it is what it is. And we need more ideas that are outside-the-box like that. Free beer works too. Free produce. Free anything.² Just get shots in arms.

Back to today, this chart is amazing. Both because it includes a very specific call out to being able to sing in an indoor choir, but also because it’s all-green, all the way down. Again, if you have the vaccine, you are now (or soon, depending on the states/counties) free to do most things without a mask. After a year-plus of lockdown, this is a huge incentive! Obviously!

Left unsaid is how on Earth we’re going to police this. The vaccine cards are laughably simple, and thus, simple to copy. But I think even before we get there, we’re going to go with an honor system, which is okay if the medical professionals feel comfortable that people who are vaccinated are very, very, very unlikely to contract COVID even if around those who are unvaccinated. And those that do get it are very, very, very unlikely to get sick enough to require hospitalization (if they get sick at all). And most importantly, the vaccinated are very, very, very unlikely to spread it. That last point is what I think is the real key to this announcement.³

It’s more complicated than that, of course — in particular if you have young kids, as I do. But for these purposes, they’re still unvaccinated people and thus, should still wear a mask in the situations outlined, obviously. Mainly to protect them against those who are unvaccinated, including other kids!⁴

Anyway, back to the incentives. The free beer will move some needles. Literally! The million dollar lotteries will move others. And the mask-free promise will move more still. But my guess is that it still won’t be enough to get us to where we want to be. Again, ‘VV Day’.

That will require some sticks.

The most obvious one is the vaccine passports. Unfortunately, and unsurprisingly, that has already been politicized as well, before it has even been figured out. But make no mistake, some sort of documentation, digital or otherwise, will be needed at some point to do certain things. Does that mean going to a restaurant? For some, probably! A bar? Again, for some, undoubtedly! A sporting event? Perhaps! Work? In many cases, yep. And the big stick: traveling. In particular, on an airplane. This may be a huge stick the government works with the airlines behind-the-scenes to wield. And it will probably work!

The reality is that it’s probably going to take all of those sticks and more to get us to ‘VV Day’. Today we got a nice, juicy carrot and we should enjoy it. And hopefully those who are unvaccinated eat their vegetables. But it’s probably too much to hope that it moves the needles it needs to move enough.⁵ Again, this whole thing is highly politicized. People are dug in. It’s going to take some sticks.

¹ Of course, it will be up to states and local governments to follow this guidance or not… We’ll see how long it takes San Francisco to remove the stink eye from the equation, even if/when the new rules are enacted.

² Even this! Whatever this is!

³ Especially from the CDC, which has a mixed record in this pandemic, to put it nicely!

⁴ Again, kids down to 12 years old were just given the greenlight. Hopefully it will be kids down to 2 in the next few months. 🤞

⁵ Of course money-as-a-stick is another option…

Carrots Before Sticks was originally published in 500ish on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

HBOh…

Jason Kilar pays the iron price as money wins…

You have to feel for Jason Kilar. The guy keeps getting brought in to do a job. He keeps putting the pieces in place to do that job. Then he keeps getting pushed out before those pieces can be fully set in motion, let alone brought to culmination. Today is just the latest and most high profile example to date. With the announced merger of WarnerMedia with Discovery, Kilar is said to be working on his exit from the company he leads but does not control.

And who can blame him? Some writing was pretty clearly placed on the wall when not only did he not give a comment in the press release about the deal, but wasn’t even mentioned! And the reporting by Brooks Barnes for The New York Times confirms the knife in back:

Mr. Kilar was kept in the dark about the deal until recent days, the people said, speaking on the condition of anonymity to discuss private conversations.

And:

The new company will be run by David Zaslav, 60, a media veteran and the longtime chief executive of Discovery. Mr. Zaslav and AT&T’s chief executive, John Stankey, had met over the last few months “secretly from my brownstone in Greenwich Village,” Mr. Zaslav said on a call with reporters on Monday.

Basically, Stankey and Zaslav were operating behind Kilar’s back for months. Months! As he executed extremely complicated and delicate deals. And agreed to do big profiles about his role that would run just days before all of this. Ouch. This is some Red Wedding-level treachery.

If this is surprising to you, it shouldn’t be. Two things can be true. First, that this is a very raw deal for Kilar. Second, that this is a savvy deal by AT&T all things considered.

Of course, it’s mainly a savvy move in that it saves some face in a deal that basically everyone thought was fraught from the get-go. AT&T buying Time Warner made very little sense to anyone who has opinions on such things. I mean, everyone got what they were trying to do on paper. But history is littered with such paper. These deals always fail. They all fail in new and exciting ways. But they all fail.

This time the failure had to do with a quickly evolving media landscape — not to mention telecom landscape — with streaming in particular changing equations. Those equations mainly equated to costs. Billions of dollars needed to fuel fresh content. As Stankey dreamed of Netflix, the reality is that AT&T shareholders were unlikely to foot the bill. Especially under a Mt. Everest of debt thanks in part to content needs, but more so to spectrum needs, and yes, bad deals. Bad deals spearheaded by… we’ll get to that.

So now there will be new shareholders (who are mainly old shareholders — since AT&T shareholders will still be the majority shareholders in the new entity) who will be asked very specifically to cover the cost of competition. The cost of content. The parts summed together should be worth more than the whole, so again, it makes sense.

That doesn’t mean it will work, of course. For one thing, it’s about more than money. And anyone who has followed Stankey’s tenure (first as CEO of WarnerMedia himself, then as the overall AT&T CEO) has reason to worry. From day one, he has meddled. Richard Plepler was the highest profile casualty of Stankey’s HBO shakeup, but he was hardly the only one.

Did I mention that Stankey was also the key architect of the deals that put AT&T in this spot? Here’s Edmund Lee and John Koblin for The New York Times earlier today:

Before he took over as chief executive last year, he was the company’s chief mergers strategist. But his track record has been spotty. In addition to planning AT&T’s purchase of Time Warner, he was behind the company’s $48 billion acquisition of the satellite operator DirecTV in 2015. The service has been bleeding customers for years; in February, AT&T sold part of the business to the private equity firm TPG for about $16 billion, a third of what it originally paid.

This is executive level business!

Still, with Kilar in charge, there was some hope that HBO Max could pull off the impossible: quality — or at least something interesting — at scale. Maybe not historic HBO quality, but still, some good work. Now, under Zaslav, we’re likely to get pure content at scale. Endless hours of ambient television mixed with a smorgasbord of other stuff Warner has in the library. There is likely to be some good in there, and Zaslav seems to have a pretty good reputation when it comes to talent. But it will certainly not be HBO or anything close.

If the HBO brand was being diluted before, now it’s about to be drowned.

To be clear, there is still great content on HBO right now — including the show that every media reporter clearly wanted to use here for obvious reasons: Succession — but most of that is residual from the Plepler era. Others constantly point at Casey Bloys as the continued key to the kingdom for HBO. Does he stay through another major shakeup? We’ll see!

Regardless, I think it’s safe to say that HBO is now officially over. But it’s perhaps less sad than it may otherwise have been because it sure feels like Apple is doing a pretty good job picking up the quality mantle with Apple TV+ (including Plepler himself!). Instead, we’re going to get an HBO Max (or whatever they decide to call the eventual bundled offering — HBO Max Plus? HBO Max Plus Discovery?) that is straightforward quantity.

And that’s sad because again, Kilar was trying some interesting things. ‘The Snyder Cut’ of Justice League wasn’t great but it was an interesting idea and could have perhaps worked with a few more tweaks. The push to put Warner movies on HBO was nothing if not bold. And HBO Max needed bold. As did a world devoid of movie theaters due to COVID. But the move also clearly pissed off all the wrong people. Which is why you get interviews like this today. They literally can’t shove Dune back into the film canister quickly enough. Oh well.

HBOh was originally published in 500ish on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Back on the road, which is wild

It’s a special kind of misery sitting in traffic after a year of not sitting in traffic. On one hand, you sort of welcome the pain because it means the world is, in fact, healing. On the other, it allows your mind to wander into fresh perspectives, perhaps uncharted since you were a child. Here’s one: driving a car is sort of insane.

That’s where my head was at this weekend sitting in traffic. Again, my first real traffic jam since the pandemic began. I’m just looking around at the hundreds of other people in hundreds of other cars all around me, and we’re all just sitting there, taking up space, taking up time.

To say that self-driving cars have failed to live up to the hype thus far seems to be an understatement. But only because the timescale for such hype was laughably off from the get-go. Even now, in 2021, it seems like we’re at least ten years, and maybe twenty from it being reality? Actual day-to-day reality.

At the same time, again, it seems obvious that it will be reality at some point. It just has to be. Both because it’s a problem we can solve with enough computing power, technology, and data, and also because we need to solve this problem. A human being driving a car seems almost barbaric.

It’s one of those things we’re going to look back upon as we do smoking on airplanes. We did WHAT? In a sealed metal tube? In the air?!

I know, I know. This is where all the car enthusiasts will jump all over this and write various gear-head soliloquies about the beauty of cars. And others with a certain mindset will likely give a full William Wallace “FREEEEEDOM” scream. Sure, I get it. I’m not saying no one is ever going to drive again. Nor am I saying that no one should. It’s just so obviously going to be the case that at some point in the future — again, maybe it’s twenty years away — the vast majority of people are not manually driving themselves around.

It’s insanely inefficient. Both in terms of physical resources and also more esoteric ones like time. There are also second-order effects which leads to all sorts of weird things, like parking garages taking up massive amounts of space in cities and inhibiting needed things from being built.

And yet we have all the roads built. The infrastructure is there and isn’t going away anytime soon.¹ So we should figure out how best to utilize it, and that’s clearly with various flavors of self-driving vehicles. Some that are perhaps owned, but more that are probably running on various ride sharing networks.

Again, this is all obvious. But again, we’ve been misled for so long about the timescale for all of this that I think people are now skeptical of this future. If you’re in a city like San Francisco, you’ve been looking out your car window for years now seeing various test cars doing the data-gathering thing all around you. But it never seems to lead anywhere, despite constant promises of the future being right around the corner.

But again, just look around when you’re in your next traffic jam and recognize how crazy it truly is to be driving a massive vehicle on the road with so many other people doing the same thing. A waste of time, space, resources, money — not to mention how insanely, insanely dangerous it is, of course.

Steven Spielberg’s film Minority Report is almost 20 years old.² Based on the Philip K. Dick story, it envisioned a world where we eliminate violent crime by being able to predict it. But the tangential technology which Spielberg gathered a team of visionaries and experts to dream up for a realistic 2054 America is perhaps the real star of the show. That includes both the self-driving cars and the cars you can engage to drive yourself on, say, country roads. We’re now 33 years away from that world. It does still feel pretty accurate, if far away…

¹ Though in some cities, it is! I always look at the pictures of San Francisco when the Embacadero was a freeway and think: wow, now this is an improvement. Of course, it took an earthquake to bring about this change… Still, Market Street, the main artery of San Francisco is now pretty much car-free. Times change, things change.

² Next year! Which is itself insane!

Driven Insane was originally published in 500ish on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The Remote Strikes Back

Thoughts on the new Apple TV 4K — well, mainly the new remote

The box for the new Apple TV 4K is funny. It’s literal. Meaning, it’s a picture of what you’ll see when you open the box. It’s like if the outside container were clear. But it’s not. It’s a picture. A picture of what is literally inside the box.

This is almost true of some other Apple products. Namely, the iPhone and iPad boxes showcase the devices you’re about to unbox, but it’s different as it shows what they look like with the screen on. Except without apps or anything else on the screen besides a wallpaper. The Apple Watch boxes vary but often show a random watch face. Again, not what you’ll literally see when you open the box. The Apple TV 4K box does that. Which isn’t that interesting other than what it highlights beyond the Apple TV hardware itself: the remote.

If it’s not exactly the star of the show, it certainly upstages the device which actually does all the computing. And that’s because it’s not just better than the remote that came before it, it’s roughly a hundred million trillion billion million times better. Actually, that’s incorrect. Because the last Apple TV remote was a zero. And zero times anything is zero. So instead let’s say that this new Apple TV remote is wonderful and the last one was total shit.

And that’s putting it nicely.

Anyway, it seems clear that Apple is well aware of both how bad and how hated the last Apple TV remote was. This doesn’t explain why they kept it in place for six years.¹ But it does explain why they put it on the goddamn box. And why they updated iOS to include the iconography of the new remote before anyone even had one in their hands. It may have taken six years too long, but Apple was ready to move on. So say we all.

I won’t go into all the ways the last Apple TV remote was bad, but mainly so I don’t trigger PTSD. If you’ve used it, you know. The order may vary in terms of what you hate the most versus my own list, but we all have the same list. And new users, well, may you never know such pain.

And you won’t because I’m happy to report that the new Apple TV remote is not just good, it’s very good. I’m not sure it replaces my old TiVo “peanut” remote as my most favorite remote of all time, but it may eventually with usage. Certainly in terms of clean design it tops that remote. And pretty much any other remote I can think of. Except for maybe the first and second Apple TV remotes, both of which had fewer buttons. Most remotes are comically complex and look like they were designed by children. Not this one.

But my friends, as we learned the hard way, design is not just how something looks. So how does this one work?

The new buttons on the Apple TV remote are key to functionality. They include a power button — imagine that! Yes, power control is something which you could get the old abominable Apple TV remote to do, but it required a secret learned combination of long-presses and swipes. And a mute button, something which I specifically was hoping they would add as it was a core reason why I kept my old, actual LG TV remote alongside the Apple TV remote all the time. Now the only reason I could think of to need that other remote is to change inputs. And I’ll be doing that less now that the Apple TV has a good remote. So yeah, it’s a much better remote.

It’s also clever. Apple was able to take one core thing from the last Voldemort remote and translate it here: a swipeable area. But instead of it being the entire top of the remote and the main way to navigate and frustrate, it’s an almost hidden option unlocked by discovery. Simply glide your thumb over the top of the directional pad and voilà! You’re swiping. If you don’t wish to swipe, you don’t have to. You can click away to your heart’s content.² But actually swiping is a very useful method of input for much of the Apple TV’s core navigation. It just was absolutely awful for other bits. This remote gives you the best of both worlds.

The new remote also features a back button, something which is, dare I say, Android-like. I’m still getting a bit used to it, but it certainly makes a lot more sense than the old ‘Menu’ button it replaces. As such a button never actually brought up a menu. It was always a back button, and now it’s simply called a back button. Funny that.

Also new: shoving Siri to the side, quite literally. If you wish to invoke her now, her button is now a jagged little pill on the right hand side of the remote. I do use Siri to search quite often on the Apple TV. And yes, I’m quite often frustrated with the results, especially since Netflix content doesn’t show up. But it’s still much easier than clicking and pecking (or swiping and pecking) to type the name of a show and/or movie. I’m glad the button is still here, but I’m also glad that it has been moved out of the way a bit.

Then there’s the TV button. I still don’t fully understand this button. I know what it does: takes you to the Apple TV area of Apple TV which mainly highlights Apple TV+ content. (Yes, this is laughably confusing from a branding perspective.) But I wish you could program it. Say that you watch mainly Netflix content, it would make sense to have the TV button take you there. Or even better, YouTube TV since it’s actual TV content.³ I’m very happy we don’t have branded buttons on the Apple TV remote, but I would love some level of programmable granularity here.

[Update: As Eat Sleep Cook School! points out in the comments, you can actually reprogram this button in the settings of the Apple TV, but only to go to the Apple TV home screen, rather than the “Up Next” area of the Apple TV app. Nice, but it’s also something you can already quickly do by holding down the ‘back’ button.]

Otherwise, the remote is a dream come true. To use the overused Apple-ism, it just works. It feels good in the hand. It’s heavy in a solid way. It’s natural to use. It’s just good in all the ways the last remote was terrible.⁴

Of course, you can buy the remote separately without the need to buy the new Apple TV 4K alongside it. And if you have an old Apple TV 4K, you should probably do that. Because it’s hard to tell what else this new machine gives you. I know it has a faster processor, but in regular usage, it’s pretty hard to tell if it’s much faster than the last version.⁵ Perhaps if you play a lot of games on the device this speed increase becomes clear. But I do not play a lot of games on the device because Apple refuses, oddly, to focus on that element.⁶

I will say that the set up of a new Apple TV remains sort of a pain. It’s weird, Apple has made the very initial part a breeze — you just hold your iPhone close to the device and it copies over your main details like WiFi and iTunes login. But for each app you’ll have to re-auth in. And again, this sucks using a remote (as it does with any remote). It’s better using the software remote built into iOS, but it still sucks that you have to do this at all. And it especially sucks because it’s not just entering logins and passwords, but often using a phone or computer to visit URLs and entering codes to auth. Amazon is actually by far the best at this, as they give you a QR code to scan with your phone’s camera and you’re done. Everyone: copy this approach.

I also continue to be perplexed as to why Apple is offering two varieties of the Apple TV 4K — 32GB or 64GB of storage — but they’re only $20 apart in price. I would make the 32GB one at least $50 less. Why does Apple feel the need to sell a $179 version? That’s already insanely expensive for this category of device. Oh, they do this because not only is the under-powered Apple TV “HD” still for sale — with an A8 chip, yikes — but it’s $149.⁷ Come on Apple. Make this version with a chip that is six and a half years old $99.

But I digress. The only thing that matters here is the upgraded remote. It’s great. It’s not my dreamed-up remote, but in many ways it’s better. It’s certainly more practical. The new Apple TV 4K is nice, but so was the last one. The difference is what’s in the literal box when you buy one.⁸

¹ Only “upgrading” it to add a white circle — ? — to try to help users navigate the remote when the first Apple TV 4K rolled out.

² You have to wonder if there are other clever ways to use this tech, swipe-enabled physical keys. On a MacBook keyboard? An iPad keyboard accessory?

³ I can’t tell you how many visitors (well, back in a world when we still had visitors) I’ve had to walk through how to “watch TV” meaning “watch cable TV” meaning “watch YouTube TV” which is our “cable TV”. If I could just tell them to “hit this button” that would be amazing.

⁴ The one complaint you’ll here over and over again: it doesn’t include built-in “Find My” support. This is weird given that Apple just launched this as a platform alongside the AirTags. But it’s also true that you’re less likely to lose this remote than the last one. And if you do, yes, it’s probably in between the cushions, I’m not sure you need an app to tell you that. You just needed a remote that wasn’t an absolute slippery magnet to said cushion crevices.

⁵ And no, it’s not an M1 chip. Instead, it’s the A12 chip, the best chip before the M1 came out.

⁶ Yes, you can use an Xbox or Playstation controller with the device now, but they also removed the ability to use the remote that comes with the device as a gamepad — there, I found the one benefit of the last remote (which I admittedly never used). Given how big of a platform iOS is for gaming. And given how Apple has their own gaming service, they should probably focus a bit more on it with the Apple TV. Alas, there are a lot of things they could, and probably should do with the hardware that they just do not.

⁷ At least it also now has the new remote in the box!

⁸ One more oddity of the box: what’s on the back. That is, a picture of the HomePod. Not the HomePod mini, the HomePod big boy. You know, the one which Apple just discontinued. This is a brand new product touting a just-cancelled one. Weird, yes. But we all understand how lead times work. Still, this clearly indicates that Apple wasn’t thinking about cancelling the large HomePod all that long ago. Or if they were, no one at Apple TV got the memo. Or they were busy, building a working remote.

Apple TV 4K2: Revenge of the Remote was originally published in 500ish on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Talking through that new Warner Bros. Discovery logo…

When I first caught a glimpse of this logo on Twitter, I was sure it was a parody of whatever the company actually announced. Nope. Real deal. A few days later, it’s no less amazing.

It’s sort of Superman: The Movie meets the old school WB logo. And perhaps that’s exactly what they were going for given that Superman was also a Warner movie. Unfortunately, while the ‘WB’ mark has nostalgic charm, this truly does look like it was made by someone playing around with a cheap piece of design software for the first time.¹ Is ‘Discovery’ even centered? It’s hard to tell because of the strange curve of the whole thing…

Also, the ‘Warner Bros.’ abbreviation of ‘Warner Brothers’ has always been a bit awkward. But again, we dealt with it previously because of history. Now, to call it out so explicitly here, it lands like a joke with no punchline. Warner Bros Icing Bros, perhaps?

And the ‘Bros’ maintains the period, presumably to let us all know this isn’t about a bunch of young bucks at Warner, but a bunch of brothers — none of whom most people will remember besides perhaps Jack Warner. And also Warner wasn’t their real last name.

The glowing/halo around the whole thing is the real cherry on top. It makes it look as if this logo is dead — as it should be, as soon as possible — and is returning to Earth in angelic form. But also in pure tacky gold form, in a way that only Donald Trump could love post-1980s.

Perhaps they could have taken some of the thick from those gold bricks to give a little more weight to the slogan? Or maybe the clouds could have been arranged a bit better so as not to make the phrase less legible? Presumably that’s already why the cloudy blue sky is so dark? Did Zack Snyder direct this? (All of that is the least of the slogan’s issues though, more on that in a bit…)

I realize that in these types of deals that everyone wants to get and maintain credit, which is why random words and names are often crammed together.² They’ll say it’s to maintain the recognition and loyalty each brand has built over the years, but honestly, does any consumer think about ‘Discovery’? They may think of ‘The Food Network’ or maybe even ‘Discovery Channel’ or some of the other individual brands, but ‘Discovery’ is just a word, and an extremely generic one at that.

But actually, ‘Discovery’ is far better branding than ‘Warner Bros.’ for the reasons mentioned above.³ It’s cleaner. It gives a sense of wonder. But it’s fucking awful tacked on to the end of another word. It makes the other brand look lost, aimless. It should have just been ‘Discovery’ —especially since that company’s CEO is the one running the whole thing now anyway. And ‘Warner Bros.’ could have just been the name of the movie studio under Discovery, maintaining that continuity and history. Especially since Warner Bros. had already morphed into ‘WarnerMedia’ under AT&T.

On the other hand, I guess we should be glad they didn’t call this whole thing ‘HBO Max Plus’, to further leverage and cheapen that once great brand. But don’t be shocked if the actual streaming service eventually bundled by Warner Bros. Discovery — again, a fucking period in the middle of the company name — is something exactly like that. HBO Max plus Discovery+ equals…

Hey, could be even worse yet. Could be ‘WarBroDisco’. Actually, that’s really catchy. That’s a great band name. Ship it.

“The stuff dreams are made of” is a great quote from a great movie.⁴ It is not a great slogan as “stuff” cheapens anything being put out by said brand. It’s better than “junk” but only slightly. It’s also just a stand-alone phrase here and looks decidedly naked without an ellipsis... Or even better: borrow the fucking period from the Bros!

Also, is it more likely that people will remember the quote from a film that is 80 years old, or a popular song that is a mere 34 years old? Did Carly Simon sign off on this? What about Shakespeare?!⁵

Also, if we want to be pedantic, which we do here, the actual quote as uttered by Humphrey Bogart is: “The, uh, stuff that dreams are made of.”

I love it. ‘Warner Bros. Discovery: The, uh, stuff that dreams are made of.’

To which Sergeant Tom Polhaus would reply: “Huh?”

Exactly.

¹ For other great logo branding critiques, might I suggest… Burger King v. GM. Or: Amazon’s mustache problem (since fixed).

² Lest we forget TimeWarner or AOL TimeWarner — under which ‘Warner Bros. Pictures’ operated — redundant Warners! This could have been AOL TimeWarner Bros. Media Discovery in true Microsoft fashion!

³ Also, Discovery’s slogan: “Explore your world” is actually a good one. It’s memorable! I remember it!

⁴ It is unique to the movie, and not in the book on which the movie is based.

⁵ Perhaps people will better remember the origins from a play which is some 400 years old…

The, Uh, Stuff Designs Are Made Of was originally published in 500ish on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A jam-packed, if mildly muted, WWDC 2021

I sat on it for a day. I still think the biggest change announced yesterday at WWDC was buried in the Safari section of the macOS Monterey update — weird, seeing as it had nothing to do with macOS. It was the change to the way tabs are handled on the iPhone. Which is to say, at the bottom of the window. You know, the area of the screen which human beings can actually reach. I just think this shift alone may outpace pretty much everything else announced yesterday at WWDC. And there was a lot of stuff.

A Lot of Craig

Having attendees dream up WWDC killer openings was a fun idea. Fake Tim and Fake Craig were actually pretty funny gags. In particular as arena rock dudes. But my main thought here was one that kept being reinforced throughout the show — is Craig Federighi the actual heir-apparent at Apple? We all know that Jeff Williams has the role and title to make him the next Tim Cook but I have this sneaking feeling that Federighi is in the running too. It’s possible he’s just the new Phil Schiller — the Apple exec who gets a ton of stage time and plays up the gags for laughs — but again, Federighi appears to be more than that. He more or less ran yesterday’s show.

iOS 15

And it was he who kicked off with Apple’s most important software: iOS. We’re up to 15 now and you have to wonder how high we’re going to let these numbers go. Are we going to have iOS 35 in 20 years? Given how much fun Apple has with macOS (dating back to the “big cat” nicknames, of course), you’d think they’d do something similar with their most popular OS.

Of course, I’m not sure I know anyone who doesn’t work at Apple that can remember which version of macOS is which. So that doesn’t really speak to the power of the naming schemes. It’s far easier to remember that iOS 13 was two years ago versus the macOS update two years ago which was… High Sierra, I think? That is an honest guess. I didn’t look it up. I might be right, but I’m not sure I am!

The software itself looks good. This is clearly a “tick” year versus a big change “tock” one. And I’m fine with that. Most of the focus was on core apps like FaceTime and Messages, both of which seem to be getting even better — and more in line with core competition. The software which shall not be named, namely Zoom and all the messaging products made by Facebook.

I think the updates to FaceTime in particular would have resonated a lot more loudly say, a year ago. You know, when the world discovered Zoom because FaceTime was underpowered. Now it works on the web! But still not my Apple TV. Baby steps.

SharePlay looks to be executed very well. I’m less interested in watching movies or listening to music with friends, but I’m also old. Also very clearly no Netflix and chill here because there’s no Netflix. I do think browsing the web together could be legitimately useful in a number of situations.

Sharing articles and other content over Messages is interesting, but seems awfully tied to Apple News? Remembering who sent you what is clever though, so you can respond to them later when you read it.

The ‘Focus’ functions are a good idea. I used to manually do something similar, by hiding certain app pages on the weekends. But it was too cumbersome to remember to switch back every week. This automates that. I just hope the automation is good as it’s based on ML!

Status messages are back! But not exactly AIM-style. Again, baby steps.

LiveText looks pretty magical. I know others can do this, but the default iPhone camera is my main camera, so it’s great to have this built in. I wish they would build in a lot of other things too!

Wallet will soon have ID cards! And the TSA will use them! Let’s see how long this takes to roll out. I’m hopeful but also not holding my breath. California has to be one of the early states to allow for this, right? RIGHT?!

The new Weather app looks lovely. I’d hope so, Dark Sky. This makes me feel slightly better about Weather Line. Slightly.

Oh My God they turned Apple Maps into a new version of SimCity! And it sort of looks beautiful? Honestly, it’s impressive looking. But the devil will be in the data. As in, will the maps direct me off a cliff? I feel like those fears have subsided, but I’m still a little wary. Still, my god they look good.

AirPods

I will use the hell out of announcing all notifications, and I’m sure I will quickly turn this off. Great accessibility feature though. Also, AirPods can now alert you if you’ve left them behind, which should save my household several hundred dollars a year (hint: not me).

Spatial Audio on tvOS FINALLY. This was always such a weird omission, but presumably it had to do with a lack of gyroscope and accelerometer. Except that as far as I’m aware, the stationary device did not magically grow those things. Still, awesome!

iPadOS 15

Little Brother all grown up, now at least matching the height of big brother iOS. Widgets on the homescreen — “this is a huge deal” says Federighi seemingly in all seriousness. I mean, it’s great. I think widgets will actually be more useful on iPadOS than they have been on iOS — but they would have and should have been last year.

All I kept thinking as they showed more shots of iPadOS 15 was that the apps are still spaced too far apart. Bring that shit in, Apple. App Library in the dock is already 10x more useful than App Library as the last page you swipe to (as you do on iOS).

Multitasking was clearly the star of this portion of the show and… we’ll see? It looks interesting but also conceptually challenging. There are a lot of layers to remember. Not to mention shelves. So many shelves. Again, I hope this all works much more naturally than it looks. Still, it has to beat the current status quo, because anything would. Also, new keyboard shortcuts!

Notes got some nice updates but the main one is Quick Notes. It seems like this only works with Apple Pencil, but they later mentioned as an aside that you can make them on macOS too. But not iOS (where you can just access/edit them). This will likely be annoying/confusing. Still, it looks like a great feature. Maybe not my system-wide highlight, but closer…

You can now build iPad apps on the iPad. They played it as a big moment but it feels bigger than that. I know this isn’t full Xcode on the iPad. But it also feels like an important first step.

Privacy

This matters to Apple, have you heard?

But seriously, some pretty big changes which we may not fully know the ramifications of for a while? Like, what does this mean for newsletters, as you can no longer see open rates, etc? Safari now has a VPN, etc.

Siri

600 million monthly active devices now. Actually, no, I refuse to relay any information about Siri until she’s actually reliable. It has been far too long and all the jokes have been made. Just make her better Apple. And not just a little bit, but a lot bit. Still so many silly errors. It’s embarrassing. Impressive number of devices, which just means it’s embarrassing at scale!

iCloud+

Which is iCloud, but with a “+”. I mean, they did add features, some of which seem great — HIDE MY EMAIL — but the prices/tiers are the same.

Health

All interesting, important stuff on its own. But also felt a bit long in a keynote.

watchOS 8

Did I mention that it may be time to move on from the numbers naming scheme? Does anyone know/care which version of watchOS they use? How many people must be confused that while iOS and iPadOS are at 15, watchOS is 7 laps back?

The Mindfulness app seems nice. Everything else, just small tweaks, which is all that’s needed when you’re this far ahead in the space.

Also, GIFs from Giphy!

Home

“Siri, turn on Apple TV”

“Okay, turning on the app LeTV”

And now you can have this magic on third party devices. Joy. But hey, the more data the better to improve things, I guess?

The HomePod mini now works with Apple TV, which is nice since the HomePod proper did this and now it no longer exists. Which is really weird. There’s a mini version of a product but no non-mini version. I guess that’s what you get when you launch with the wrong strategy.

macOS Monterey

A lot of talk of feature parity with iOS and then boom: Continuity. One of those demos that seems like pure magic. Control the iPad screen with a MacBook keyboard. And control a Mac too. Or vice versa. Drag and drop between them. Again, amazing how well this demo worked.

Shortcuts on Mac will undoubtedly be more powerful than on iOS thanks to the Automator legacy.

Safari tabs on top! Safari tabs on top! Per my opening, these changes to Safari strike me as key as I just use it so much. The changes on the Mac look great. Tab Groups! Also, extensions on mobile! Extensions are still far behind on Safari versus Chrome, but this may legitimately change that equation.

A flash on the screen of “Low Power Mode” coming to macOS — which sounds great but might it also be a precursor to Macs with 5G?!

Someone go get Hans!

Developer Tech

By now, we’re over 90 minutes in. The struggle is real. But developers were rewarded for their patience with a few new tools/announcements. APIs, Swift, App Store. Xcode in the Cloud. Honestly, they probably should have saved macOS for the end just to help with cadence here.

Back to Tim

There was a lot here, but overall the announcements felt more evolutionary rather than revolutionary. And that’s fine! Not every year has to knock the socks off. There were some nice things here, no doubt. But I continue to believe that the really big changes will be some smaller tweaks that alter our day-to-day. Like tabs at the bottom of Safari on mobile. And at the top of Safari on desktop.

No hardware, and no real surprise there. You have to give the M1 devices some room to breathe before we move on to the ‘M1X’ or whatever. Also, you probably need to let the supply chain take a breather for a few. And Craig Federighi too after yet another dad joke virtuoso performance!

Previous Years’ WWDC Thoughts:

• Blurred Lines
• Apple’s Pro Day
• A Glass of Ice Water in the Desert
• “These Go To 11”
• Siri In Chains

Keeping Tabs was originally published in 500ish on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Something Delta this way comes…

Last night I went to a bar. Like, the inside of one. And sat there, unmasked. Watched some sports. Enjoyed a drink. It was amazing. Amazing in how normal it was. It was almost as if the past 16 months had not happened. Like they were a bad dream from which we had just awoken.

Sadly, this is not true, of course. We all just lived through a total fucking nightmare. Awake. Real. And, by the way, still going.

Yes, the United States is doing relatively well right now with regard to COVID-19. And the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live, even better. The reason why isn’t rocket science. But it is science. The vaccines.

Somehow — well, not somehow, more like someone — this is a divisive issue. Which is fucking insane. The vaccines are an absolute miracle. We’re going to look back upon this time and consider it divine that we could come up the the solution to one of the greatest problems the world has ever encountered in mere days. It’s the most under-reported and under-hyped story in the past decade. Perhaps ever. It’s not hyperbole, it’s fucking amazing. I keep swearing because… Jesus Fucking Christ, it’s a real miracle.

And yet. Not everyone will take advantage of this miracle. Because again, reasons. Reasons which are less complex than they are wrong. But you can’t say that out loud because… I don’t know. Because there’s a line between political correctness and the exact opposite of it and this issue touches it all. It’s an issue that somehow manages to conform to whatever stance you wish to take. Whatever point you want to make. Again, it’s insane.

Anyway, I’m not a doctor, nor an expert. But I do play one on the internet, namely in that I enjoy jotting down thoughts that are proven to be correct later on. But this is also more important than that. Far more.

The Delta variant of COVID is starting to sweep through the world. It started in India and it is currently washing over the UK. It’s here in the US already and soon it will be everywhere. If you’re fully vaccinated, it seems to be mostly fine.¹ But not everyone is vaccinated. Not nearly. Like my daughter, who is two years old, for example. That day will come, hopefully soon. But the real concern are the people who can and simply will not get vaccinated. We’ve lost steam as we gained back Anchor Steam.

But the way that this all plays out should be obvious. The Delta variant is going to hit the US hard in the next several weeks. And it’s going to do so in areas and within groups that are hesitant to get vaccinated. It doesn’t care what your rationale is, it just cares that you’re a great, vulnerable host. And while it’s true that many people not vaccinated are young and as such, are less likely to get very sick, and as such, less likely to die, that is almost beside the point now.

The point is returning to normal. Which we are. But there’s a risk that this too is a mirage unless we stop Delta and its inevitable variants.

Let’s say it like it is: the vast majority of people not getting the vaccine are one of two things, they’re either stupid or selfish. There are different and troubling reasons for each.² But that doesn’t really matter. It is what it is.

We need to think about this like a war effort. We are all at war with a common enemy. We know how to defeat it. We have the goddamn weapon! We pulled it from the sky, a gift of pure genius! But we won’t defeat it because again, a large percentage of people are stupid. Or misinformed. Or both. It’s an uncomfortable truth, but it’s still a truth.

The time of pussyfooting around this should be over. We need to switch from carrots to sticks. We need everyone who can to get vaccinated.³ It’s not about how sick or not you’ll get. It’s about how many chances you’re creating for more variants to form. And for one to come about that truly breaks through the vaccines and resets the doomsday clock. It’s insane that this still needs to be spelled out.

We could end this. Right now. We choose not to because we’re drunk on the illusion that it’s already over. The sobering stats are building in the UK.⁴ They’re starting to peek through in Israel as well. This is not going to be over until we stop allowing pockets of Petri dishes to exist in which variants form. That means vaccinating the whole world. But it starts where we can — and again, we can, but are choosing not to…

So whether stupid or selfish, it doesn’t matter. Do something in your own self interest.⁵ If you want this to be over, you need to get vaccinated. You may or may not get sick if you catch COVID but you’re prolonging this shitshow and hindering a true return to normal. Pay no attention to the current situation in the US. It’s fleeting. Delta is here and it’s going to rip through the un-vaccinated like a fire through kindling. Variants will form. Whispers of lockdowns will return. Then shouts. Get vaccinated. You fools.

¹ But also maybe not?

² In a way, it’s better if you’re not getting the vaccine because you’re afraid of microchips or whatever bullshit in which your brain is bathing. Versus if you’re just ignorant. Or worse, a contrarian.

³ Yes, obviously there are some people who cannot or should not get vaccinated for medical reasons. It’s a very small number, relatively speaking. We can do this without those people, but we need everyone else.

⁴ Something I’ve been watching on a daily, if not hourly, basis as we’re trying to take a trip over there later this summer. It’s not trending well, of course. But it’s also clearly different from other surges. Largely amongst younger people, it would seem, which does appear to be keeping both hospitalizations lower and deaths down, thankfully. At the same time, the UK’s early decision to delay second shots (not to mention delaying getting shots to younger people) is working against them, since Delta can more easily break through that barrier. They’re racing to get more shots in arms, but even now, there are millions upon millions that are not vaccinated that could be. And, no surprise, variants of the Delta variant are forming…

⁵ This is what it’s ultimately going to boil down to, I would guess. Another reality of the vaccine hesitancy is that many people simply don’t like to be told what to do. And this is compounded by those who don’t like to trust anything told to them by some centralized authority. What this means is that many people are simply not going to get vaccinated until they start to feel cornered, or it starts to impact their world directly. It’s the Jon Rahm situation. (He got vaccinated only after he came in contact with and ultimately contracted COVID and his livelihood was at stake — as if that would have worked. But it did apparently lead a bunch of other PGA tour players to get vaccinated, which they could have done weeks if not months prior, to avoid getting “Rahm’d”.) As Delta starts to sweep in, we’re naturally going to see a rush of people getting vaccinated for the first time. But those people could be doing so right now to help avoid this!

A Call to Shots in Arms was originally published in 500ish on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

I honestly love the new browsers for iOS 15 and macOS Monterey

John Gruber isn’t a big fan of the changes Apple has made to Safari with iOS 15. And he hates the changes made in macOS Monterey. I disagree.

With the huge caveat that both of the new OSes are still in beta form, and early beta form at that, and as such quite likely to change in at least some ways, at a high level, I really like what both are going for. That is, putting the pixels of the web front and center more so than ever before by making the chrome of the web browser disappear as much as possible.¹

I get the critiques. Largely boiling down to the notion that “design isn’t just how something looks, it’s how it works”. And I think it’s fair in a few aspects. But largely I read this critique (which itself is kicked off by linking to another critique, which itself is kicked off linking to more critiques still) as one that is just as much about not liking change at all as it is about the new changes.

Yes, it’s extremely jarring to use the new versions of Safari at first if you’ve used the previous versions. This is most pronounced on iOS because people are more likely to use Safari on iOS than on desktop and because even if they do use Safari on desktop, most people undoubtedly use Safari on iOS more than they do on desktop because of the time spent on our phones. Also the URL bar has been shifted from the top to the bottom of the screen. It’s not just a change, it’s the opposite of what it once was.

At first I thought it looked wrong. But that’s because I was so used to the other way. A few weeks into using it, I now like it a lot more at the bottom. Because it’s far more accessible (here, design is indeed how it works beyond how it looks). Switching tabs by swiping is also far easier to do. Gruber questions how often people will want to swipe between tabs but actually I think the other big feature, Tab Groups, makes this functionality make far more sense. I’m the kind of user who tends to have a handful of the same tabs open at all times. New tabs would bury these, but now Tab Groups allows me to sequester them. And to swipe between them in their area as I desire.

One critique I do agree with is the burying of the ‘Share’ button. Shoving it in the ‘…’ drawer makes it a click further away and I use it all the time. Undoubtedly Apple has the data to suggest what should be in the ‘…’ drawer, but it doesn’t feel right in this case.² If they don’t wish to add another glyph to the URL bar, I would swap ‘Share’ with the ‘Show All Tabs’ button which is currently there. Not because it’s not useful, it is, but because you can also trigger the feature by swiping up on the URL bar. Yes, yes, it’s a hidden ‘pro’ hack. But it’s also a fairly obvious one given the swipe-up gesture common to iOS for years now.³

It’s also strange at first to see a web page “naked” at the top of the iPhone with no chrome around it, but again, I’ve grown to love it. Also, the swipe-down-to-refresh makes a lot of sense in the historical iOS context.

Safari on iPadOS is a different beast in that it’s far more like Safari on macOS — URL bar still at the top, tabs in line, etc. So let’s go there.

It is also jarring using the new Safari in macOS Monterey (but also available with the Safari Technology Preview) at first. The chrome is less changed than on iOS but it has been reduced in a way that may not seem all that meaningful on paper (as Gruber puts it, “saving about 30 points [60 @ 2× pixels] of vertical screen space”) but actually feels quite different in practice. Again, it feels as if the chrome of the browser is fading into the background for the web itself to be truly front and center.

This includes making the color of the chrome that remains match the design of whatever webpage is in focus. This is by far the most jarring change because on some especially garish pages, you get really red or perplexing purple chrome! I actually quite like it, it’s fun. But I understand why some people hate it. (But you can also disable it in settings.)

But the thing people really seem to dislike about the new Safari for macOS is the way tabs are handled. Goodbye tab bar, hello in-line tabs. I honestly love this change. In the previous versions of Safari for Mac, I would often think about how nice it looks chrome-wise to have just one page open in Safari without any other tabs because then there is no tab bar and as such, there’s more room for the web to shine through. This new version of Safari solves for that by moving the tabs up. Again, I get why people don’t like this — it’s a huge change. Both visually and with regard to muscle memory. The most jarring element is how the place where you type, the URL bar itself, shifts depending on which tab is in focus.

I think it’s something that tab power users will hate, but regular people may appreciate. Also, most true “power tab” users use Chrome because until very recently, Safari tabs have been pretty awful. I wonder if part of this isn’t conceding that race to Google in an effort to think about browsing the web a bit differently. Again, it takes some getting used to, but I quite like it. Especially when mixed with the aforementioned Tab Groups.

I do really worry the folks at Apple are going to take a look at the negative feedback from Gruber and the other power users and revert some of what they’ve done with Safari. I think it would be a mistake for the broader market. In an era where all the popular browsers add more and more cruft as features creep, this stripped back Safari is a glass of ice water in the hell created by web browser PMs. Tweak a few things, but stay the course.⁴

Published on July 3, 2021 📆

Written from Carmel Valley, CA 🗺

Written on a 2020 13-inch Quad-Core i5 MacBook Pro 💻

Enjoying an Iced Latte ☕️🧊

¹ The chrome, lowercase ‘c’, of the browser not to be confused with the uppercase ‘C’ Chrome web browser, which is of course the most popular in the world and as such, the standard for most web browsing.

² Gruber doesn’t like triggering ‘Reader’ mode on Safari by long-pressing the ‘…’ button now as doing so via the ‘Text Size’ button/area made more sense. But who the hell was using the font-switching capabilities enough for this to warrant its own top-level button? I like the option, but to set/change it every once in a while; it certainly deserves to be in the ‘…’ area. ‘Bookmarks’ is a harder call. I don’t use it all that often (and I suspect Apple’s data suggests I’m not alone there) and I believe the new-ish “Start Page” (the area shown when you open a new tab/window) serves the functionality for most people.

³ Though yes, it is somewhat confusing and potentially annoying that swiping up in the area just below the URL bar will return you to the iPhone home screen. Just as how if you swipe too low on the URL bar you will switch iOS apps, not tabs within Safari.

⁴ One last thing: mainly I wonder where Safari extensions are going to go once they’re fully enabled in Safari for iOS/iPadOS. Presumably in the ‘…’ area as well, but I honestly hope you can set at least one to be shown as a glyph in the Safari chrome itself.

In Defense of the New Safari was originally published in 500ish on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.