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.

Jeff Bezos exits with Amazon frameworks in his wake…

Today was the first day for the rest of Amazon’s life. The first day without Jeff Bezos as CEO. Seemed like a good day to pull out a few Bezos quotes I had saved after a sit down he did a few years back with David Rubenstein, co-founder of The Carlyle Group and President of the Economic Club, as relayed at the time by Mike Allen of Axios:

Jeff Bezos gave a master class on life and business onstage in Washington last night, with this keeper advice: “All of my best decisions in business and in life have been made with heart, intuition, guts, … not analysis.”

“If you can make a decision with analysis, you should do so. But it turns out in life that your most important decisions are always made with instinct and intuition.”

Everyone knows the famous story of Bezos leaving D.E. Shaw after doing the… analysis to understand the opportunity in selling goods on the internet. But that’s obviously — obviously — a much cleaner story and picture in hindsight. It took heart, intuition, and guts to do what he did, when he did it.

It also strikes me that most people equate Bezos with a mastermind who had it all figured out from the get-go thanks to the aforementioned analysis. But if you talk to any number of people more familiar with the earlier days of Amazon (or read any of the books), and in particular with the way he ran the ship, a pretty different picture emerges. And it’s not one of the polished genius who has everything figured and plotted out. It’s more a story of getting the correct frameworks in place to make the best decisions possible.

Most people probably know the two pizza thing, or the six-page memo thing. But it’s interesting to think how many of those are predicated around rather mundane parts of life:

Turning to business best practices, Bezos said he sets his first meeting at 10 a.m.:

“I go to bed early and I get up early. I like to putter in the morning. So I like to read the newspaper. I like to have coffee. I like have breakfast with my kids before they go to school.”

“I do my high-IQ meetings before lunch. Like anything that’s going to be really mentally challenging, that’s a 10 o’clock meeting. And by 5 p.m., I’m like, ‘I can’t think about that today. Let’s try this again tomorrow at 10 a.m.’”

Tim Cook/Bob Iger doing work at 4am, this is not. Not that there’s anything wrong with either, it’s just a great illumination of this not being a one-size-fits-all thing. And that’s exactly why I enjoy reading about such habits and jotting things down: to get ideas to try or to discard.¹ It’s obviously going to be a mix-and-match in terms of what does or what does not work for you.²

Bezos said he gets eight hours of sleep:

“I prioritize it. … I think better. I have more energy. My mood is better.”

“As a senior executive, you get paid to make a small number of high-quality decisions. Your job is not to make thousands of decisions every day.”

“Is that really worth it if the quality of those decisions might be lower because you’re tired or grouchy?”

In an era of hustle porn, that is… refreshingly straightforward and honest.

“All of our senior executives operate the same way I do. They work in the future, they live in the future.”

“Right now, I’m working on a quarter that’s going to reveal itself in 2021 sometime.”

“If I make, like, three good decisions a day, that’s enough.”

“Warren Buffett says he’s good if he makes three good decisions a year.”[Laughter].

Again, a framework. Though the 2021 call out is funny now — one has to wonder if he was actually thinking about his exit already back then!

Of course, none of the genius founder stories are pristine, from Steve Jobs on down. Though it does feel like Bezos had at least the high level of a multi-step plan as much as any of them, perhaps save Elon Musk.³ The best businesses in the world, those with true staying power, not only need that one ingenious thing, they need that second and third thing. Again, Bezos seemed to know that from day one — pun intended — and the eventual frameworks he adopted for the company made that vision a reality. One hell of a run.

Published on July 5, 2021 📆

Written from Carmel Valley, CA 🗺

Written on a 2021 11-inch M1 iPad Pro ⌨️

Enjoying an Other Brother Beer Pale Blue Wheat 🍻

¹ In the vein of the Buffett quip above, I view time as the most important element any of us have. I’m very far from perfect at utilizing it, let alone protecting it, but I recognize the shortcomings I need to. Along the Bezos lines, I realize my “peak” hours for thought and processing are basically 10am — 2pm. Then again at about 7pm — 11pm. I would wager a lot of money that most of the best work I’ve done in my life has happened in one of those two four-hour chunks.

² And, to be clear, 4am would not work for me. After years of experience, I’ve also found that I’m generally useless before 9am. My brain just has not kicked in yet. And that’s even though I wake up around 6am (something which a two-year-old ensures). Before the little one, I was much more of a night owl. I still am, to some degree, staying up until about midnight and getting about 6 to 7 hours of sleep. That’s what seems to work for me. Your mileage will vary!

³ Whatever type of game he may be playing…

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

0-to-60 in new startup world rarely, if ever, works…

Six years ago, I wrote a post with a sort of counterintuitive bit of advice: most new startups should avoid being featured by the App Store. The core insight, which I had seen play out time and again, was that the massive influx of users was actually detrimental to a startup so early in their lifespan. At best, the surge of usage uncovered a ton of bugs and immediately showed the flaws of a service at scale. At worst, the vast majority of the users who downloaded and tried the app would churn almost immediately and were unlikely to ever come back. It feels like we’re seeing something similar play out these days, in different ways.

This time, it’s not about the App Store. While the store itself is more robust and the user base far larger, the number of users relying on it solely to find new apps to try has seemingly dissipated.¹ This was only natural. We all have the apps we know and use on a daily basis. For a new one to break in, it not only has to be better, it has to be so much better that it replaces another app you were using. This is about time. And for social apps, this is not only true for you, it has to be true for all your friends as well. This is why the new social apps that pop up tend to be in younger generations, the ones that either don’t have their core apps yet or actively don’t want to use the core apps of their older sibling’s generation (or worse, their parent’s).

Don’t get me wrong, featuring in the App Store still leads to a sizable bump in users, but it just doesn’t seem like the mad rush it once was. And it also seems like less of a strategy for both Apple and for startups to be featured there on day one, which again, is a good thing!

These days, there are other mechanisms you see startups use to come out of the gates on fire. Recently, that has seemingly been leveraging TikTok. A startup will work with influencers on that network to create this groundswell of hype around an app/service ahead of its wider release. Then when it goes live: boom!

Except the same exact thing seems to be true as it was in the App Store featuring heyday: new users come in, find bugs, don’t find real utility, and churn. The initial hype can disguise this a bit. The surge to the top of our old friend, the App Store, charts (which still do seem to matter) leads to even more buzz and articles about the new red hot startup. But again, all of this is likely still fleeting. If the app isn’t ready for prime time, those users are not going to stick around. And again, even worse, this may have been your one shot to get them to try you — the old “fool me once” scenario.

We all understand that avoiding this strategy is something which is easy to say but nearly impossible to do. You’ve spent months building something. Who doesn’t want to make a big splash as you put it out there into the world?

Patience is a virtue for a reason. You’ve spent all this time building, you shouldn’t expect or want to be an overnight success. This isn’t the days of Instagram. Again, there are too many apps now and too little time. These days, the path to true success is both harder and far less sexy: the long road.

What you want to set your company up for success is a slowly growing but super passionate user base. Growth is still key, of course, but slow growth allows you the time to figure out what your product actually is, and how people are using it. You will need to tweak many things and outright change many others. Doing this over months as you’re growing will pay dividends in the end. Your loyal users will not only stay but will ideally get more obsessed as you’re working with them to build the product around them. They will evangelize for you. It won’t always work, of course. Or even often. But if it does, this slow and steady approach will at some point flip to fait accompli.

Competitors won’t be able to copy such passion. And realistically they probably won’t even know about you until it’s too late because you haven’t surged to the top of the App Store overnight. The term “flying under the radar” seems particularly apt here.

Given enough time, there will undoubtedly be hiccups to such a plan, as something will probably lead to a spike in users as the product gets better and people become more ardent fans. That’s fine, just be realistic about what it is and use such spikes to gather as much data as you can to help with the continued march.

Fast forward a bit. You’ve gone from not ranking at all, to inside the top 1,000, to inside the top 500, to inside the top 100... This might take years. And yes, it will be harder to find VCs willing to back that vision. But again, the key is to focus on the slow and steady growth. Not the unsustainable and unnatural growth.

Here’s where I shouldn’t even have to talk about using marketing dollars to fuel growth at this stage, and yet I undoubtedly do. Yeah, everything I said above, take that and multiply it by a thousand. Trying to spend to bring in users is obviously a far worse issue than using more “natural” viral mechanics in these early days. Yes, it sort of worked for the aforementioned TikTok, but you are not TikTok. You don’t have years of research driving content algorithms on tangential services to plug into your network. Nor did you likely acquire another service, Musical.ly, which put in a lot of the foundational work for years ahead of time. Nor do you have hundreds of millions of dollars to spend on marketing to siphon off Facebook users to bring them over to your pre-well-oiled machine. That “overnight success” was the product of far more nights than it may at first appear.

Again, this goes back to the simple high-level notion that unless your app is ready for a mass influx of users, it’s not worth it to try to bring in that rush. And the likelihood that your app is ready on day one is almost zero. To repeat, you are not TikTok. And it’s not 2010, so you are not Instagram.

To paraphrase the great fictionalized version of Aaron Burr, you have to be willing to wait for it.

Published on July 7, 2021 📆

Written from San Francisco, CA 🗺

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

Enjoying a Blue Bottle Iced Latte ☕️🧊

¹ The various changes to the App Store curation and layout over the years has also likely played a role here.

Be Willing to Wait For It was originally published in 500ish on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

The reviews were good. There’s huge pent-up demand. And it’s Marvel. So no surprise that Black Widow performed well both at the Box Office and at home this weekend. The fact that Disney is touting the latter with an actual number — which they have not done previously — says a lot. In Crocodile Dundee fashion: “That’s not a streaming service. That’s a streaming service.”

It is hard to imagine any of the other streaming services pulling an additional $60M out of customers’ pockets, on top of the money you’re already paying Disney for Disney+. But that’s the power of their IP and the narrative universe they’ve woven around it. The $158M ($80M domestic, $78M overseas — notably, without China) at the Box Office is just the cherry on top. Albeit a huge fucking vaccinated cherry in a world still grappling with a pandemic.

Anyway, this is less about the future of cinema — I’ve talked about that enough here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here — and more about this very specific way Disney has set up their hybrid theatrical/streaming model. Because the most impressive thing is actually the $60M despite a few massive hoops which some users, including myself, had to jump through in order to collectively pay that.

Like clearly many people, I went to sign up for Disney’s “Premier Access” layer on Thursday night ahead of the Black Widow release. Except I couldn’t seem to do that on my Apple TV Disney+ app. Because of course I couldn’t, what was I thinking?! There’s no way Disney is going to give Apple a 30% cut on all those sales, so you can’t do it in-app like every other digital good. And because you can’t do it in app, Disney can’t even talk about where you can do it. These are the first two rules of Fight Club, if memory serves.¹

So instead, like millions of other Americans, I had to Google where to actually pay for this on the web. And then that required signing in to my Disney+ account from the web, which meant busting out my password manager. Then busting out my credit card, because I originally bought my subscription elsewhere. And then once I paid to unlock my access, I was set! Except it took a while to propagate back to my Disney+ Apple TV app. What a great movie-going experience. It almost made me long for an AMC — almost.

But yeah, that’s the general path many of us had to follow to be able to watch Black Widow this weekend. Click-to-buy, this was not. At best, it was like 40-clicks-to-buy. And still, Disney made $60M from this! It’s really pretty incredible.

Again, it’s a testament to Disney, to Marvel, to the luxury of watching a premium movie at home. $30 feels like a lot of money because it is a lot of money for a single movie, but it’s also roughly the cost of two tickets to see said movie in a theater in some major cities, such as San Francisco.

The difference is that Disney gets to keep a lot more of that money when they don’t have to give half of it to a movie theater. But only if they also don’t have to pay 30% to Apple. Which is why the silly hoops.

And it’s fine. But what’s not is the fact that it’s just really a pretty shitty experience as a consumer to buy this content. Disney and Apple, as two consumer and product-centric companies should be ashamed of it. And honestly, Apple especially for the bullshit nonsense that you can’t even tell the customer where to go to get the content. What a joke.

They should win by offering the best payment experience and getting Disney to use it through amazing conversion and/or customer love. Not by complete and utter obfuscation.

Anyway, good movie.

Published on July 12, 2021 📆

Written from San Francisco, CA 🗺

Written on a 2021 11-inch M1 iPad Pro ⌨️

Update 7/14/21: A bunch of people reached out to note that they were able to purchase Premier Access through the Apple TV app while others had the same issue I did. It would seem to boil down to how you pay for Disney+ (via iTunes, via Disney, or via some other promotion for the service). This is yet another layer of complexity to “it just works”.

¹ Interestingly enough, once you do have a credit card tied to your Disney+ account, you seemingly can purchase through the Apple TV app — at least for Cruella, another “Premier Access” title which I later tried. Even more interesting, there’s a tiny, fine-print way to use Apple’s in-app system once your credit card is enabled on your Disney+ account, it would seem. But it’s only on the iPhone, as best I can tell.

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

It’s pretty clearly here to stay, are we?

Folks, I think it’s time to call it. COVID-19 is going to be here with us for a long, long time. Maybe forever. Which sounds terrifying, except that it’s perhaps the opposite. Because it means we’re going to learn to live with it. That’s what we do. So… what if we just start doing that now?

This isn’t some anti-vaxx, anti-mask lunatic saying this. I’ve pretty clearly been the opposite throughout all of this. But I also think it’s important to be open-minded and honest about where we are and where we’re going.

As expected, the Delta variant is now washing over the world. But the good news would seem to be that those who are vaccinated shouldn’t have much to worry about. Yes, there are and will be breakthrough cases, this was always expected. But those cases seem to be significantly easier to deal with than they are for the unvaccinated. In many cases, there are no symptoms. In others, there are symptoms akin to a common cold. It varies, of course.¹ The key is that the deaths are down. Way down. The vaccines are working.

And yet.

Many people still will not get the vaccine, for whatever reason. Nearly all of these reasons fall on the spectrum of stupid to misguided, but it really doesn’t matter at this point. At some point we have to recognize that we’re not going to convince these people. Carrots did not work at scale (again, as expected). And while other countries are switching to sticks — and guess what? It’s working! — we’re unlikely to do that because freedom or whatever the fuck.

So it’s time to get on with it. Or, I guess it’s almost time. Ideally, we would “get on with it” when vaccines are truly available to everyone, including young children. That will be a few months still, it seems.² At that point I’m guessing will already be beyond this current surge and on to the next one.

That’s the thing, it’s pretty clear we’re going to keep getting surges and lulls. Like the tide coming in. Yes, it’s largely thanks to the unvaccinated, but again, it’s unclear what else we can do to convince them at this point. As with Donald Trump, they’re going to learn the hard way (and let’s be clear, there is a huge overlap). Or not, because they won’t actually learn anything, as was also the case with Trump. It doesn’t really matter. We’ve spent enough time and money trying to convince them. They can go with God, and as morbid as it sounds, perhaps quite literally.

Meanwhile, as the COVID tide continues to come in and out, we need to move on with actually living. Sure, we can keep putting on and taking off masks every few months. But at some point we have to be honest with ourselves: this is Sisyphean. And really, it’s increasingly a maneuver to try to protect the people that won’t protect themselves.³ Worse, the mandates are all over the place and often contradictory. It’s confusing. It’s confounding. That’s America in one gnarly nutshell.

So what if we just get back to life? To do that, it’s really a mind-shift that’s needed as much as anything. People will get COVID because people catch all kinds of sicknesses. Maybe they have to be out for a few days or maybe not at all depending on the situation. Maybe it spreads around an office as a flu or cold would. Yes, it will undoubtedly spread faster and more fiercely, but over time the antibodies should mute this impact. Ideally the sick people would know to stay home but again, we have to be honest how this plays out. This is going to slowly morph over time into a sickness thought of, if not treated like those more common ones.

The difference, of course, is that for the immediate future, there’s a chance that if the person with COVID infects someone who is not vaccinated, they could get really sick. But again, we’ve spent as much time as we possibly can convincing these people to get vaccinated. You could literally walk down the street anywhere in the U.S. right now and get a shot. This is not true in most other places in the world, which is really quite sad and pathetic on our part. We have the power to end this here and we just don’t give enough of a shit collectively to do that.

So we move on. We keep living and some people, sadly, keep dying. But it’s hard to see a legitimate alternative at this point. We won’t force vaccinations. And the rules and recommendations about masks and everything else can only cause so much whiplash. We have grown collectively, if not comfortably numb. COVID is never going to end, the best we can hope is that it morphs over time into a truly benign disease. And we live with it just as we do with so many others.

This is just so obviously how all of this is going to play out. Because while we have the way to end this, we don’t have the will. And, to be fair, and to further showcase our selfishness, many other countries don’t have the way. So around and around we go. COVID is here to stay.

Published on July 16, 2021 📆

Written from San Francisco, CA 🗺

Written on a 2020 13-inch M1 MacBook Air 💻

Drinking a taaallll glass of red wine 🍷

¹ Yes, Long COVID remains the major concern here. But early data suggests the vaccines are all-but eliminating that risk as well (as you’d hope). And we’re coming up with new treatments seemingly daily. We will figure this out.

² Though yes, it seems like COVID rarely, if ever, truly affects young children. But many of us would truly rather be safe than sorry, of course.

³ Though I would still argue that it makes sense to do anything to try to stop the creation/spread of new variants, one of which may well fully breakthrough the vaccines…

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

A perhaps less fleeting idea for Twitter…

Now that Fleets are out of the way (or soon enough), I’ve been thinking about the forthcoming ‘Super Follows’ functionality of Twitter. Obviously, I haven’t seen it yet (beyond what they’ve shared) as it seems like basically no one has. But I applied for it like many others because, why not?

Of course, I have no idea how I would actually use such a feature.¹ I don’t really need or want to monetize my audience. But I’m intrigued by the general concept because I could see it working for some people. And the reason why is why paid newsletters work for some people. It’s all about information. That doesn’t just mean news, it can mean commentary, humor, or any number of things that people derive value from. There’s nothing inherently different about Twitter than any other written medium, save for the forced brevity.

That said, I suspect Super Follows will pretty quickly hit a saturation point just as newsletters and streaming services do, because while you may have a will and desire to pay for all these bits of content, you don’t have enough time to get value from all of them; no one does. So I suspect we’ll get a bundle eventually. But I wonder if some aspiring Twitter users couldn’t bundle ahead of time, and if Twitter shouldn’t grease the product to make this happen.

I imagine a world where a group of Twitter users band together and offer up their tweets and banter back-and-forth as a paid offering. In a way, it’s sort of like a magazine or newspaper. But perhaps even more so, it’s sort of like your favorite podcasts with their regular hosts and guests.

Paying for one Twitter user requires you really love them or get a lot of value out of what they’re tweeting. But paying for a group of them changes this dynamic. Call it ‘Super Fellows’.

Now, could the economics of this work? Well, it depends, of course. But say your fellowship was charging $10/month. And say you got 5,000 people to pay. That’s $600,000 a year. If there were 4 people in your fellowship, that would be $150,000 a year per person (before Twitter’s cut, of course). Not bad for a year of tweeting.

Given the simple rails and nature of Twitter, there’s basically no overhead if you just stick to text tweets. If you start to incorporate video and other media, obviously that can change. But again, just a imagine a group of people getting paid six figures a year to tweet. It’s pretty easy if you try.

These fellowships could offer up real-time commentary around events. Or news. Yes there are Slack and Discord groups which offer up such things, but Twitter is even more natural for this type of thing. People could share “unlocked” tweets with the general tweeting public to bring in new subscribers. Etc. There are so many things you could do here.

If you were starting a new publication in 2021, would you really do so as a blog? Well, perhaps not. Instead, it might be a newsletter. But what if it could just be a Twitter ‘Super Fellow’ group? Natively mobile, it’s like information and commentary flow on steroids.

I think there’s something to this.

Published on July 19, 2021 📆

Written from San Francisco, CA 🗺

Written on a 2021 11-inch M1 iPad Pro ⌨️

Listening to The Head and the Heart 🧠♥️

¹ Though I’m intrigued by the idea of unvarnished commentary…

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

Jeff Bezos goes to space, people go berserk

In the year 2000, Jeff Bezos was interviewed by Charlie Rose:

Charlie Rose: If you weren’t CEO of Amazon.com, what would you like to do or be?

Jeff Bezos: Well, so, if I could do anything — and it turns out that this is a very hard technical problem, so I don’t actually hold out great hopes — but if I could do anything, I would like to go help explore space.

Rose: Tell me more. I mean what would you do? How would you go about it if you weren’t doing this?

Bezos: Well, you know, the picture I have is that I would get in a rocket ship, go up into space, and like, you know, go check out a few things. [Laughs] Now this is why I mention at the beginning that this is a very hard technical problem. 

Rose: It is. [Laughs] But if you put your mind to it, you could probably figure out a way that you could do this.

Bezos: Well, it’s very hard. [Laughs]

Rose: Your board of directors and your stockholders might not be happy. [Laughs]

Bezos: It’s very hard. It’s really — I mean so who knows, what 20 years from now there’s some significant changes in the technology maybe such things will get easier. But we haven’t made significant improvements in space transportation systems really since the Apollo program. 

That was 21 years ago.

The people shitting on Jeff Bezos for going into space today are something else. Was it a publicity stunt? Sure, in a way — in so far that more or less anything done in public is a publicity stunt to some degree. Was it vain? I mean obviously on some level, then again much of history is built on vanity. But come on. Some cynicism is always healthy, too much of it is absolutely suffocating.

It’s not just that we want to dice up billionaires and feed them to the masses — billionaires will be fine, they don’t need anyone defending them, they pay people for that — it’s that we seemingly want to kill aspiration. No one would say that, of course. But that’s the end result of all this clutching of pearls.

I mean, a person built a massive business in order to build another business which would take us into space. And this wasn’t one person, there are three people who actually did this simultaneously, in three very different ways. This will be viewed as the Federer/Nadal/Djokovic era of civilian space travel, but to hear it talked about today it’s like we just witness a puppy slaughtering festival.

If you’re not into it, don’t watch it? Don’t cover it? Just keep on living. But also maybe don’t shit on others who derive some level of inspiration and again, aspiration for what they’re doing. They’re fucking going into space on machines they built on Earth! I don’t care who you are, this is cool.

Wait, but we did that 60 years ago. Yes, we did. And then we stopped doing that because of a whole host of reasons, but one of which is that the public lost interest because we became cynical bastards that lost sight of the stars. Like a teenager looking at The Great Pyramid with utter boredom because it’s just a bunch of sand.

Wait, but they didn’t even go into space, technically. Or something. As it turns out, the definition of space is a bit like that of pornography. You know it when you see it: This. Is. Space.

Anyway, let’s just stop bitching for a moment to appreciate that a group of people strapped themselves to a massive rocket and shot themselves into outer-space this morning.¹ And just a week after another group did the same, via an entirely different means. The risk of death was high every step along the way. But it will inspire a new group of young people to push the envelope further and farther. That’s what life is all about. Not one life, the collective life of all of us. My god, get over yourselves, this is fucking amazing:

 — @shaanvp

Published on July 20, 2021 📆

Written from San Francisco, CA 🗺

Written on a 2021 11-inch M1 iPad Pro ⌨️

¹ Here’s where I’ll admit two things: 1) It did not help that there has never been anything so phallic outside of an actual phallus. 2) Related: this is pretty hilarious.

Hold Out Those Great Hopes was originally published in 500ish on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Could it be coming in the form of a new iPad mini?…

Of all the Apple products I own — and yes, I own nearly all of them — I’m honestly not sure anything gets me as excited as the prospects of a new iPad mini.¹ Perhaps it’s because it’s a product that once seemed on the verge of death. Or perhaps it’s because even though it’s been resurrected, it’s seemingly sporadic when it comes to hardware updates. It’s certainly not an every year thing anymore.² And so I often find myself with a device I love but which is mildly slow (compared to other state of the art iOS products) and with a quickly depleting battery.

So yeah, I’m excited about the prospects of a new iPad mini coming this fall. Rumors point to a redesign akin to the current iPad Pro models with a larger screen, smaller bezels, squarer sides, and no home button. But instead of FaceID like the Pro, it will apparently have a TouchID sensor in the power button, just like the iPad Air. All sounds great.

But what really intrigues me is one detail in the report this week by Chance Miller of 9to5Mac about the new device:

Finally, the redesigned iPad mini will also feature magnetic Smart Connector similar to the iPad Air and iPad Pro, our sources say. This could mean that Apple has plans to release Smart Connector-capable accessories for the new iPad mini.

This is, of course, also a feature of the larger iPads. It largely serves to connect the device to the ‘smart’ keyboard accessories. In fact, I’m not sure it does anything else? And that would imply… a keyboard accessory for the iPad mini!

As someone who has tried many keyboard accessories with various iPads over the years (including with the previous iPad minis), this greatly excites me. I love the prospects of a tiny killer writing machine. That’s how I envision this, if I allow rumors to let my mind wander.

Yes, yes, such a keyboard would be significantly more cramped than with the larger iPad keyboards. Sign me up. And if it has a tiny trackpad… Take my money!

That latter hope may be a bridge too far given the size of the iPad mini. Perhaps it would just have a ‘Smart Keyboard’ accessory and not a ‘Magic Keyboard’ one (the one which includes the trackpad for the iPad Pro).

Still, a guy can dream. Such a device would effectively be Apple’s long-lost “netbook”. Fun.³ But I’ll settle for the killer portable 21st century typewriter.

Published on July 22, 2021 📆

Written from San Francisco, CA 🗺

Written on a 2020 13-inch M1 MacBook Air 💻

Drinking a Fort Point Export 🍻

¹ A device I’ve loved since day one.

² Though, oddly, it did start this way. The first iPad mini in 2012, was followed by the iPad mini 2 in 2013, the iPad mini 3 in 2014, and the iPad mini 4 in 2015. Then the line broke, with a mildly upgraded iPad mini 5 coming in 2016, and then nothing until the most recent one (now just called the ‘5th generation’) in 2019.

³ Perhaps enough to make me forget about my beloved 12-inch MacBook.

Apple’s Long Lost ‘Netbook’ was originally published in 500ish on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A few thoughts on the ‘Cleveland Guardians’

“I mean, I don’t hate it. But I also don’t really get it.” That was my first thought upon hearing the Cleveland Indians — my hometown baseball team — were changing their name starting with the 2022 season to the Cleveland Guardians. It’s a weird name. It’s non-obvious. It’s perhaps a little too closely associated these days with a certain Marvel franchise.

But… it’s growing on me.

I spent the first 18 years of my life in Cleveland and even I was only tangentially aware of the Guardians statues on the Hope Memorial Bridge. I honestly didn’t even know they were actually called the ‘Guardians of Traffic’ — yes, they’re really named that — until this week when rumors started to circulate that this would be the chosen name. I just knew them as the cool-looking statues on the bridge near the ballpark. They have a sort of Gates of Argonath-vibe.¹ I dig it. But I also didn’t expect our baseball team to be named after them.

As I argued last year, I was a fan of going with the Cleveland Blues for a host of reasons. But I acknowledge that the proximity to the St. Louis Blues, while a different sport, is problematic (the nickname of the Chelsea football club in the UK, perhaps less so). I would have guessed they’d go with the Cleveland Spiders, largely for historical and potentially cool logo reasons. And I’m very happy they did not go with the Cleveland Rocks, which is at least two orders of magnitude too cheesy.

I think Corey Barnes made a good case for ‘Guardians’ a year ago, so kudos to him. But I also think we often overthink these things. The Guardians is a good name because it’s actually quite similar to the Indians in both look and alliteration. In 1997, the Miami Redskins (another Ohio team, the college in Southern Ohio, not Will Smith’s Miami) changed their name to the RedHawks for similar reasons and with a similar idea.² The Guardians is a much more subtle and elegant callback.

The new logo also looks pretty good. It’s not quite Seattle Kraken-good. But it’s weird and different. And distinct. The new ‘C’ mark, less so. It would seem to be a mix of the current ‘C’ mark mixed with the new Guardians type, but they don’t fully align (and ‘Cleveland’ spelled out in this font almost looks more like ‘England’ which is weird). I think I still prefer the current ‘C’ mark.

And yes, the Tom Hanks-narrated video backed by The Black Keys is fantastic. Fittingly, alliteration-heavy with lyrical rythms dropped in:

“We are a city of fire and water. Of trees and towers. Built through generations of blue collars and the brightest scholars. And all of those who have worked harder.”

Is only emotionally topped by³:

“We remember those moments as we move forward with change. You see, it’s always been ‘Cleveland’ that’s the best part of our name.”

Pure poetry. Anyway, speaking of marks, I’m mildly concerned that Disney/Marvel will try some funny business on Guardians, but hopefully the lawyers did the law stuff ahead of time. (And it seems like they did.) One thing is certain: the Twitter handle isn’t going to be as seamless. Though perhaps a trade is in order…

At least now I’ll finally have a reason to learn to spell ‘Guardians’ correctly without autocorrect kicking in each time I reverse the ‘a’ and the ‘u’.

Overall, well executed, Cleveland. ⚾️

 — @indians

Published on July 23, 2021 📆

Written from San Francisco, CA 🗺

Written on my old trusty Intel Core i7 iMac 🖥

¹ Or perhaps the Gates have a Guardians of Traffic-vibe, since the Lord of the Rings films, where everyone gets their visualization of the gates from, didn’t come out until 2001, of course.

² Nearly 25 years later, the Washington Football Team still has not executed a name change despite dropping their ‘Redskins’ moniker over a year ago. Apparently, they will early next year.

³ Sidenote: if they specifically called out “fire and water” to allude to the infamous and embarrassing Cuyahoga River Fire, extra kudos. Own it.

You See, It’s Always Been ‘Cleveland’ was originally published in 500ish on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

An idea to keep the format but double the output…

I had to double check the date. It was merely 10 months ago that I first wrote about Ted Lasso. It feels closer to 10 years ago. Certainly, it seems like it was at least multiple years ago. But I guess that’s what a pandemic does to your brain with regard to time. Anyway, I was wrong about Ted Lasso back then only in that my praise wasn’t ebullient enough. I thought it was good. It was great.¹

And now it’s great that it’s back. Having just watched the first episode of season two, I can confidently say that what had the chance of being a weird emotional fluke of a hit during the pandemic will endure. I mean, we not only got a reference to the Gin Blossoms,² we got two callbacks to Magnolia.³ This show knows what it’s doing.⁴

Anyway, I do think my initial thesis holds. It’s too long to wait a week in between 30 minute episodes. I would try to figure out some other format that works. I mean, to be clear, obviously this is working for Apple. It’s their most popular and most awarded show. But it feels like it perhaps got a pass on the timing card with regard to season one because people were finding it on a rolling scale. Now that everyone is watching from week one here, it will be annoying to only have 30 minutes every week. Perhaps especially because it has “graduated” to “appointment viewing”.

Again, I actually love the 30-minute format itself. It’s a glass of ice water in the era of one-hour-plus drama cocktails. But Ted Lasso suffers here on a weekly basis because it’s too good and we all not only leave wanting more (what you’d always want, of course), but that it just feels comically short.

I think it could be forgiven if the seasons were 20-episodes long, like the old days of television. 10 episodes of 30-minutes also feels laughably short. Anyway, the point simply remains that it’s a great show and we want more of it. 20 episodes. 30-minutes each. 2 each week. 10 weeks. Love it. Ship it.

Published on July 25, 2021 📆

Written from San Francisco, CA 🗺

Written on a 2021 11-inch M1 iPad Pro ⌨️

Drinking a Fort Point Cool IPA 🍻

¹ To be fair, I did note in the footnote — fittingly — that it was only mid-season and it could still very well turn out to be great. And it did.

² I mean, laugh if you want to, but I truly believe the Gin Blossoms had one of the best bursts of music for a moment there in the early 1990s. Their 1992 album New Miserable Experience featured 12 songs, and tracks 2 to 9 included “Hey Jealousy”, “Until I Fall Away”, “Found Out About You”, and “Allison Road” — name a better four-songs-in-eight-tracks run. When it’s the early 90s and you have cassette tapes, this hit rate matters a lot. Bonus points for lead singer Robin Wilson looking like an exact cross between Scoot McNairy and Mickey Rourke.

³ This remains the only movie I recall seeing in theaters were a significant number of people walked out — and I’ve seen a lot of crazy movies in theaters — during one particular scene. I love Magnolia.

⁴ And presumably one of those all-knowing moves has something to do with the number 1,236 — used not once, but twice in the episode (Roy’s swearing tab and the paper game tally). The internet doesn’t seem to know the answer to this yet which is maybe the first time I recall seeing that since the internet began…

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

At this point, when compared to the CDC, it feels as if Facebook is Mozart, cranking out beautiful compositions for the world to hear in response to crisis. It’s all relative.

The CDC is issuing a new mask guidance today in response to the spread of the Delta variant. In a vacuum, this seems like a fine, prudent thing to do. But we don’t live in a vacuum and we haven’t for a year and a half at this point. And the CDC has a major crisis of confidence on their hands given all the conflicting statements and guidance over the course of the pandemic.

Worse, they’re also, seemingly as always, far too slow to make their often confounding decisions.

To be clear, I’m planning to wear a mask indoors much of the time in public again, as the virus is surging. In fact, I have been. I’m exhausted, but I’m also not a lunatic that doesn’t believe in science. I would choose to do this CDC or not. The reality is that the main reason we need to do this again is because our country is filled with lunatics who refuse to get vaccinated. And rather than do the hard thing, like mandating vaccines, we’re doing the easier thing, mandating masks again.

It’s obviously more nuanced than that. We can’t mandate vaccines until they are fully approved by the FDA, something which we keep hearing promises about, but hasn’t happened yet. We’ve given nearly 350 million doses at this point — 350 million! — we have the data and it says “yes!” Or wait, sorry, it apparently says “wait”. What it really says is “trust us, don’t trust us yet”.

We also, of course, need to get vaccines at least emergency approved for children. I know this is also a tricky situation — believe me, I have a young child — but this is an emergency. We need to stop prolonging this emergency.

And to do that, as has been clear for a while now, we need sticks, not just carrots. Some states and cities and even private enterprises are mandating their own vaccine requirements, which is great. It will help a bit. But we need to full-on mandate if we’re truly going to end this. And it’s still unclear if we’re going to get that, even after full vaccine clearance, because again, we have easier outs, like mask mandates.

Look, it was clear a month ago how this was going to play out. And it’s now playing out that way. This was obvious to seemingly everyone but the CDC, which is now saying the situation has changed so they have to change their rules. The situation actually has not changed. Again, it was clear where we were headed. Look at the UK, look at Israel. We could have and should have known. A lot of people did — from a month ago:

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.

Where we go from here also seems fairly obvious.

Any new mask mandates are most likely only going to be followed by the people least at risk. And it will almost for sure be rejected by those most at risk. It’s perhaps not quite pointless in theory, but it will be damn close in practice. Thanks, in part, to the CDC who cried “mask!” It’s a crisis in confidence caused by a crisis in communication.

I don’t like this, but it’s the reality of the situation regardless. And the CDC only has themselves to blame.

The Delta variant surge will continue and lots of people who are not vaccinated will be hospitalized and some, sadly, will die. There will be some breakthrough cases amongst the vaccinated, but those people will largely be fine. The surge will peak in a few weeks then subside. The CDC will reverse their masking policy yet again. And round and round we go.

It just feels like we’re pussyfooting around reality here. COVID is not going away. We need to figure out how to live with it. And that means literally, which means getting as many vaccinated as possible. That, in turn, means mandates, first local but if/when we get tired enough of this all (probably with one-to-two more surges), federal. COVID, blunted by vaccines and immunity, will become another illness that comes around at times. We’ll need to figure out Long COVID, but we will.

I’m not a doctor, far from an expert, but if I could suggest something, just based on the rules of common sense and communication, it would probably be this: stop with all the conflicting statements and guidance. Take a step back, realize how this is all likely to play out, and come up with an actual long-term plan.

Here’s one idea, undoubtedly not perfect, but better than what we’ve had to date: instead of whiplash-inducing, infuriating policies, come up with a granular guidance system more akin to the terrorism alert system all travelers are familiar with. This would be tailored for specific areas of the country as the virus starts to spread. So, for example, if Florida is surging, for the areas where it is, raise the COVID alert to “red” and suggest masking indoors. If it goes to “purple”, make masking required. Etc. A constant, consistent set of rules people can follow.

Yes, some people won’t follow rules because they are fools. Then hit them with the vaccine mandates. Get on board or don’t go outside, basically. And without the current state of whiplash, hopefully enough of society will recognize that these rules are in place to keep us all, as a whole, safe. Just like with flying. It’s a pain in the ass, but it works.

The key is to start all of this stuff now. To go on the offensive against the virus and stop playing defense. Worse, slow-to-react defense. We already know much of what we need to in terms of how this plays out and how to ease the cycle. And that’s important because we need to recognize that we’re not going to break the cycle. Again, COVID is not going away. Even with vaccine mandates. But we’re going to blunt it to effective death, to prevent ours. That’s the win here. As I concluded — again me, no expert — a month ago:

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.

Published on July 27, 2021 📆

Written from San Francisco, CA 🗺

Written on my hot-as-hell 2020 13-inch Quad-Core i5 MacBook Pro 💻

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

Is gaming their step to Prime or their next Qwikster?

The news that Netflix is going to try to break into gaming cuts two ways.

On one hand, it makes sense because it’s something that is a growing play in the subscription world (Apple Arcade, Xbox Game Pass, Stadia, etc). Netflix, perhaps more so than any other company, is synonymous with the subscription model. And this synonymity is a result of saturation, which is also why this makes sense. Since everyone who wants Netflix, at least in the US, now seemingly has Netflix (hence the declining subscriber numbers here), Netflix needs something else to entice people both to stick around and to continually pay up more money for their subs.

Another way to put this is that Netflix Games would seem to be analogous to Amazon Prime Video. That is, where as Prime Video is a cherry-on-top of Prime itself, Netflix Games would be the same for Netflix. And I think the Amazon parallel runs deeper in that Netflix has stated that their intent is to mine their own IP to create at least some of their games. This is both hoping to differentiate with content no one else can make but also perhaps giving creatives more of an incentive to work with them. Amazon is very clearly running this playbook by cutting Prime Video deals which include the ability to leverage things like Alexa (see the Michael B. Jordan Super Bowl ad) and even the crown jewel: shopping.

The war for talent is in full swing and while Netflix has won in recent years with both money and reach, the money equation changed when Amazon and Apple entered the arena. And the reach equation is changing with Disney and all the rest. Netflix needs to keep adding perks for both subscribers and for talent. Again, I suspect gaming is the first foray here.

As for that other hand…

I also think gaming may be a mistake for Netflix. At least in the way that they’re saying they’re going to go about it. I think simply trying to leverage their IP won’t work. The entire history of gaming is riddled with the carcasses of some of the best IP in the world cut down by mediocre-to-poor games. From the infamous Atari ET game on down. It’s not enough to have great IP.

And frankly, it’s not entirely clear that Netflix actually has truly great IP, but rather perhaps the best vessel ever created to serve up any IP, in the form of streaming video. We actually have already had Stranger Things mobile games for some time. Are they huge hits? I might be wrong, but I don’t think so. House of Cards? Good luck making a compelling game there, Kevin Spacey situation or not. Bridgerton? I mean, maybe? An erotica game? Any number of the movies they make that get watched a ton but I honestly can’t even remember the names of as they’re entirely forgettable? Good luck.

Now, to their credit, it does sound like Netflix may have hired a great executive to lead this charge. But my suspicion would be that he quickly realizes their IP leveraging path isn’t going to work and instead takes them down the path of original games. Of course, that is much easier said than done — just ask… Amazon. But if they are able to do that, then they should leverage Netflix, the streaming service, to create cinematic content based off of those games. In other words, the opposite of the current gameplan. See also: The Witcher. Netflix should already know this!

I also suspect that if Netflix wants to continue down this path, they end up buying successful gaming studios. Creating games is hard. Creating hit games is harder. And creating hit games over and over again, as you would need to for a subscription service is boss level hard. You’re not going to build that overnight. And presumably Netflix wants this offering humming soon.

So, we’ll see. Again, I wouldn’t be surprised if this is a bit of a quagmire for Netflix. Perhaps not a Qwikster, but still perhaps one that ends up just as deadster. Instead, to me, it would make a lot more sense to break into other obvious streaming subscription plays — ones more directly compatible and easier to execute. Perhaps podcasts or audiobooks.¹ Again, go after Amazon! I mean, they’re sort of doing it with apparel (and teaming up with Shopify, no less).

These are less sexy and more importantly from Netflix’s perspective, eat up less time than, say, gaming.² So we get why they’re going down that path. I still think they end up heading over to the sports arena eventually, but they’re going to need to break their mindset around on-demand to make that happen. I think this happens, but it will take years, once other streamers offer live sports as exclusive parts of their bundle.³

One more thing: the Netflix name strikes me as slightly problematic for building this streaming kingdom. I mean, Facebook has kind of made it work (albeit, mostly through acquisitions — and I still think the ‘Facebook’ name should be reserved for the ‘Blue App’ and everything else should be under a different, Alphabet-like umbrella). And others like Apple made it work by dropping “Computer” from their name. It will be harder for Netflix to drop the ‘flix’ of course. And, damnit, I already made my Qwikster joke.

It is worth considering just how smart Amazon was to go with such a generic name instead of ‘Bookster’ or whatnot. For the first 20+ years of their life, Netflix proved to be the perfect name. They were taking on a world where people would have to take time to drive to a video store, make a selection, drive home, watch the movie, drive back and return the movie. Netflix made this significantly easier and less time-intensive at first by utilizing the internet and the good old U.S. Postal Service. Then, they were able to double down on the “net” when internet speeds got fast enough for streaming. And now we have a $200B+ company. But it’s not clear what the next evolution of the core service is here, or that there is one. Hence, the branching out. But again, the branding isn’t really set up for that. I think it’s fine, but they didn’t nail this as Amazon did. It’s the old ‘iTunes’ problem, but as an entire company.

Published on July 28, 2021 📆

Written from San Francisco, CA 🗺

Written on my hot-as-hell 2020 13-inch Quad-Core i5 MacBook Pro 💻

¹ I have to believe they won’t do music as it remains a money sinkhole, but it’s also sort of table stakes now for Apple, Amazon, Spotify, etc…

² If sleep really is the competition, maybe they buy Calm or the like? That certainly eats up a lot of hours!

³ One other thought: just as Spotify is trying to becoming synonymous with audio, what if Netflix does the same for video? What if, say, they bought Masterclass?

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

Sometimes, the plots write themselves.

It’s not crazy that Scarlett Johansson would be upset that Disney went for a same-day Disney+ release for Black Widow. I mean, obviously. She’s one of the biggest movie stars in the world. This is a move directly threatening, or at the very least, changing, that world. Yes, the world has also changed thanks — no thanks! — to COVID. But it seems highly unlikely that the movie genie goes fully back in the theatrical bottle. This matters for a lot of people. But it mainly matters for two groups right now: movie theaters and movie stars.

The latter group is interesting because they have been morphing to this new world. People used to wonder if Leonardo DiCaprio or Tom Cruise would be the last of the capital ‘M’ movie stars, holding out against streaming. The answer is now clearly Cruise as DiCaprio’s next two projects are for Netflix and Apple. They’ll undoubtedly play in theaters too, but Tom Cruise is the last man standing in the theater. Down up front, Cruise!

‘Man’ is a keyword there since Johansson is definitely a part of this discussion too. (Though she herself has already done a Netflix movie.) She’s clearly saying here, by way of her lawyers, that she was sold a different bill of goods for Black Widow. And she undoubtedly was, since it’s a Marvel movie.

Per this story by Brooks Barnes and Nicole Sperling in The New York Times:

Making “Black Widow” available on Disney+ could cost Ms. Johansson more than $50 million, according to two people briefed on her contract, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to discuss the private agreement. That is how much Ms. Johansson would have made if “Black Widow” had approached $1 billion in global ticket sales; “Captain Marvel” and “Black Panther” both exceeded that threshold in prepandemic release.

Black Widow currently stands at $327M. It’s not hitting a billion at the box office, obviously. But it also shouldn’t matter. Again, the world has changed! What’s surprising here is that Disney didn’t get ahead of this and make sure Johansson was happy as they charted their new path forward. Perhaps they tried. And perhaps no deal was reached. Still, this comment to the public is sort of crazy town!

Disney’s statement called the lawsuit “especially sad and distressing in its callous disregard for the horrific and prolonged global effects of the Covid-19 pandemic.” The company added, “Disney has fully complied with Ms. Johansson’s contract and furthermore, the release of ‘Black Widow’ on Disney+ with Premier Access has significantly enhanced her ability to earn additional compensation on top of the $20 million she has received to date.”

They specifically call out her front-end salary. But also accuse her of profiteering on the pandemic! That is wild. If they’re not quite calling her an opportunistic scarlet witch, they’re one step away. One of the biggest stars in the world! One of their biggest stars! What the Feige?!

I mean, my god, get your mouse house in order, Disney. I don’t care how big of a star Johansson is, you’re fighting down here. And you’re doing this in the middle of a pandemic that is disrupting the movie industry, no less. And Warner, as a result of the Jason Kilar bold bet, already went through this. You didn’t need to be Dr. Strange to see this coming!

Is this a Bob Chapek issue? Mr. Business? You just can’t give the comment you made. What’s the upside? To swing public approval to your side that this Avenger is overpaid? Versus a $300B company? My god. Grow up.

Published on July 29, 2021 📆

Written from San Francisco, CA 🗺

Written on a 2021 11-inch M1 iPad Pro ⌨️

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