…and tries to eliminate the negative

In another life, perhaps Bing Crosby was an Apple PR lead. Sing it with me:

🎶 You’ve got to accentuate the positive… Eliminate the negative…🎶

That was clearly — clearly — the marching orders from Apple’s actual PR team in announcing the settlement with app developers in which Apple gave up some major… er, wait, no — in which Apple gave up basically nothing. But that wasn’t how the initial group of stories around the matter read. And even I too was thrown at first. And now it’s clear why.

To be clear, it’s obviously the goal of every PR person around every single announcement to accentuate the positive as much as possible. No one can fault Apple for that, of course. But if this bit of reporting by Jack Nicas of The New York Times is to be believed — and I believe it is to be believed given my own experiences in such matters — Apple’s positioning and tactics were decidedly more slippery than just your standard PR spin.

The core bit is a ways down the story:

There was a lot of confusion after the settlement was announced in part because of how Apple announced it. The company told reporters about an evening press briefing two hours before it was set to start and then posted a muddied news release just as the briefing was beginning.

That meant that as an Apple executive described the settlement as a win for developers, reporters were already rushing to tweet and file first drafts of articles. The incentives of digital news today reward those who are first, not those who are more nuanced or accurate. (An Apple public-relations official required reporters to not name or quote the executive in order to hear the briefing.)

As a result, news headlines initially framed the change as a major avenue for companies to avoid Apple’s commission. This was good for Apple, as any perception that it was making substantive changes to its App Store rules could help appease developers, the courts, regulators and lawmakers.

In reality, it appears that Apple has paid a small price to get rid of a potentially big legal headache.

Some people find the sausage-making details of how a story is put out there into the world boring. And most of the time, it is. But here, it actually is intriguing because Apple nearly successfully turned a lump of coal into a diamond. By giving reporters a two-hour heads up that something was coming and posting their decidedly disingenuous press release just as that call was starting; while at the same time, not allowing anyone to actually quote the executive giving the details, let alone name them, Apple was essentially trying to tie reporters’ hands behind their backs and weights around their ankles while asking them to swim laps in their Olympic-sized pool.

You can almost hear the press conference:

Unnamed Apple Fellow: Today, we’re announcing a substantial set of changes to our App Store policies designed to ensure our developer community can take even further advantage of the unprecedented capabilities which Apple has bestowed upon them with the App Store.

*Insert a fifteen minute filibuster of bluster about the App Store.*

Reporter: Thanks for that. Can I just ask, are these actually substantial changes, it would seem that…

Apple PR Person On The Line: [cuts in] …well, thanks for your time, we have to run now. The release is live on the site. If you have any further questions, we’ll find some time for you and he-who-shall-not-be-named later. 

Reporter: Just one…

Apple PR: Have a nice night!

Remember, this was at 6pm PT/9pm ET on a Thursday night. Not exactly standard press release time. In fact, Apple had already put out a tangential release earlier in the day around the in-app cut for publishers who agree to put their content on Apple News.

That leads to the question of why this was all so hastily put together. Was it an attempt to bury the news? To more fully guide the narrative? Was there some legal reason for the timing? That’s not entirely clear. But what is clear is that Apple’s tactics when they did decide on the timing were fully set to push this in the press as a huge win for developers and also a magnanimous concession by Apple. It was neither.

At best, these were slight wins for developers. But they were all actually huge wins for Apple because it means that they don’t really have to change anything meaningful to the App Store right now. Remember, the biggest change was actually about “clarifying” a position, not actually changing one. And the hope, of course, is that this will settle the broader battles going on. It will not, obviously. But good effort?

Anyway, again, this is in many ways the job of Apple PR. And so kudos on the spin. But as both sides who have been around this long enough know, it’s not tenable to do these types of maneuvers. At the end of the day, the job should really be for both sides to do their jobs — and, critically, to be given the time to do their jobs — to the best of their ability. To lay out a perspective and to acknowledge there are other perspectives. Not to ram home a perspective at the end of a day and call it a day.

Published on August 29, 2021 📆

Written from San Francisco, California 🇺🇸

Written on a 2021 11-inch M1 iPad Pro ⌨

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

The way Apple is making App Store changes is wild, but the changes themselves are not…

By my count, we’re about a dozen lawsuits and/or threats of legislation away from the App Store being great again.

I’m being facetious, but I’m also not. This is actually happening. For the second week in a row, Apple is making App Store policy changes (or “clarifications”) by way of a settlement press release. It’s wild.

I’ll admit that at first I was once again thrown tonight. When the news was hitting the Bloomberg Terminals that Apple was about to reverse a major App Store policy and allow developers to link to websites (imagine that!) from their apps, survivor bias kicked in. Obviously, this was in response to the backlash Apple was facing due to their nothing burger announcement last week, right? Wrong. Well, at least not directly.

By way of another press release under the cover of night — this one far more excusable, as it’s the morning in Japan — Apple announced they were settling a matter with Japan’s Fair Trade Commission, bringing their App Store investigation to a close:

Apple today announced an update coming to the App Store that closes an investigation by the Japan Fair Trade Commission (JFTC). The update will allow developers of “reader” apps to include an in-app link to their website for users to set up or manage an account. While the agreement was made with the JFTC, Apple will apply this change globally to all reader apps on the store. Reader apps provide previously purchased content or content subscriptions for digital magazines, newspapers, books, audio, music, and video.

The key sentences are the second and third ones. With the latter, Apple clearly notes this is a new worldwide policy shift. And it is entirely possible, perhaps even probable, that Apple at least somewhat felt the need to do this given the recent backlash. Certainly the “techlash” overall played a role? But between this and the recent South Korea ruling about in-app payment processors, Apple was also running the risk of being forced to put a bunch of fingers in a leaky dam. Running the App Store with so many different rules — almost all of them entirely arbitrary to begin with — in different markets around the world obviously isn’t tenable.

At the same time, that second sentence is still a bit of a nut kick. The definition of “reader” apps has long been another kind of arbitrary joke within the App Store. As they point out, “reader” apps include apps you listen to and watch. It’s a definition Apple made up to suit their own business needs rather than to actually make sense. And they’re sticking to it, for now, at least. As I immediately quipped, perhaps we just need another country to sue for the non-“reader” apps and presto!

This whole thing is just strange. John Gruber and I discussed the situation leading up to this most recent change on his Talk Show podcast this week. And if anything, this just reinforces several things we discussed. Namely, Apple should be getting ahead of these changes they’re being backed into. How much more powerful would it be to see the company leading with a Steve Jobs-esque “Thoughts on Flash” or “Thoughts on DRM” statement rather than these legal settlement statements?

Apple must see where the puck is going. Yes, it’s away from where they’d like it to, but if they get ahead of it, they could at least guide it a bit. Instead we have these reflexive moves of appeasement. Apple clearly hopes they’ll be enough to stem the tide, to plug the damn, but they won’t. At best, they’ll buy some time by spin, spin, spinning the narrative as much as possible. But for what? One extra quarter of better services revenue? How inspiring.

That said, I do think this is perhaps a savvy/cynical move from Apple’s perspective in that they already gave up on much of the App Store profits in this regard. That is, services like Netflix and Spotify (you know, “reader” apps, obviously) had already pulled the ability to sign up via in-app, so… this just ends a battle Apple already lost. And it perhaps alleviates some pressure on the battles they haven’t yet fully lost, namely with games (though they have with Epic, hence, the lawsuit everyone is now watching with greater interest by the day!).

But this also is history repeating itself so…

One thing Gruber and I discussed was the idea that perhaps they could reach a middle-ground with developers and let them offer vetted third-party payment solutions, using the App Store review policies to enforce this in a way to ensure their trust and safety requirements were being adhered to. Same with linking to external sites for payments, as I discussed last week. Today, Apple basically stated that they’re going to do this for these external links:

Before the change goes into effect in early 2022, Apple will update its guidelines and review process to make sure users of reader apps continue to have a safe experience on the App Store. While in-app purchases through the App Store commerce system remain the safest and most trusted payment methods for users, Apple will also help developers of reader apps protect users when they link them to an external website to make purchases.

“Help” is a funny way to put it, but we get it. Thank you, Apple Nanny!

“Trust on the App Store is everything to us. The focus of the App Store is always to create a safe and secure experience for users, while helping them find and use great apps on the devices they love,” said Phil Schiller, Apple Fellow who oversees the App Store.

I think there are some countries in the world that may beg to differ with the Apple Fellow here, but okay. This is a good first step, provided it is in fact just a first step. The release goes on to almost imply that it is (or, perhaps, the last in a series of steps dating to the ones mentioned last week).

Again, this is all fairly obvious. Apple was always going to have to change these things one way or another. And there are other things — the 30% cut, the in-app payments stack — that will undoubtedly change as well with time. We all just wish Apple would be more proactive about these changes. None of these are set in stone. They were handed down from Steve Jobs. He is not God, all evidence within Apple’s policy team to the contrary.

Published on September 1, 2021 📆

Written from San Francisco, California 🇺🇸

Written on a 2020 13-inch M1 MacBook Air 💻

Drinking a Boekenoogen 2018 Pinot Noir 🍷

Apple is Being Sued into App Store Submission was originally published in 500ish on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Apple v. Epic indeed…

It depends on what your definition of a link is. Or really, in some ways, what your definition of the internet is. If it’s all really just a series of tubes, it’s not entirely clear that a link you click to take you somewhere else actually takes you somewhere else versus a link that allows you to pay for something on a page as that’s also essentially taking you somewhere else. It’s confusing, yes. But this is probably what it’s all going to boil down to in the next battle of Apple v. Epic.

Apple says they won. Epic says they lost. That should be cut and dried, no? But maybe, just maybe, both sides are saying what they think they need to say for appearances sake. Perhaps there’s actually quite a bit of nuance and gamesmanship here — surprise!

My read is that Apple did win — exactly what everyone always knew they would win. But in winning that battle, they actually lost something far more important. There is no way around it: the judge’s order to stop App Store anti-steering is a big one. And seemingly one Apple did see coming given the Japanese settlement a few weeks back. But this is still a major blow because it both continues and accelerates the boulder rolling down the hill of real reforms to the App Store.

Apple may think that they’re doing enough in a piecemeal fashion to stave off major change, but they’re not. If anything, they need to make a major change to stanch the bleeding. But they won’t do that. They’re both too proud and too arrogant. They’re so sure that they’re in the right here that they don’t see that it actually doesn’t matter.

Epic, I think, sees that. They’re coy about it, but my suspicion is that they’re a lot smarter about all of this than they’re letting on. And that we’ll only find that out well after the fact. After the App Store has been majorly reformed by Epic’s “losses” here.

As I’ve said before, this is some Sun Tzu shit.

And I’m really not sure Apple sees this. They’re failing to read the room and more importantly, the courtroom. They’re going to interpret this court order in the way that best serves Apple, obviously. But others are going to challenge that, obviously. Regardless of who wins, it just continues the bad vibes yielding bad blood within Apple’s own developer community. And it’s going to keep the pressure on them, politically.

I mean, someone inside Apple must see all of this. It’s obvious. But hubris is blinding those in the position to do something about it, clearly. Apple should just take a look around, see which way the wind is blowing, and make some major changes to appease the courts and to please their developers. End this.

They should open things up to win these arguments on the product side of the equation — something which they’re uniquely situated to do thanks to about two dozen aspects of the iPhone. They should compete on the playing field in which they already have home field advantage.

And that’s the craziest part of all of this. They would undoubtedly still win far more often than not. Both because of those inherent iPhone advantages, but also because their product offerings on the in-app and Apple Pay side are very good! Let them stand on their merits! That, in turn would also likely help Apple in a number of ways!

But they don’t see it that way. And the bigger fear is that they don’t see it at all. Instead, we’re about to battle about what the definition of a link is. And if that doesn’t work, we’ll get into the weeds of MFNs. Appeal after appeal. Delay after delay. Buy time for other revenue to fill in the inevitable gaps. Meanwhile, all of this will just continue the appearance that a $2.5T company is nickle and diming their developers to death. Not a great look.

Published on September 10, 2021 📆

Written from San Francisco, California 🇺🇸

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

Apple Won a Battle to Lose the War was originally published in 500ish on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Some thoughts on the iPhones 13 event…

No one loves California more than Apple does. Maybe John Muir? But probably not. Maybe Gavin Newsom after yesterday? But still, probably not. That’s my main takeaway from yesterday’s Apple event. For once, the invites meant something. Apple fucking loves California.

Why? Unclear. Yes, the company was born here and is based here. But I dunno, it was a weird vibe, to be honest. Like they wanted to say more but didn’t. Instead, we got an intro video with some California soul. We got a “I really love the incredible energy of that opening” from Tim Cook, which felt less forced than rote. Then we got a lot of interstitials of California nature love throughout the show. But what was the point? To showcase how much they love the state on this weird recall election date? To showcase how much they love it in the face of the exodus narrative? In the face of the Texas anti-abortion decision? I honestly don’t get it. Is it pandering to California to protect them from the federal pressures? Just to try to give us a sense of place as we approach year two of work-from-home? To be more like Snap? Something else? Dunno! Moving on…

Apple TV

Hey, Apple TV has a lot of Emmy nominations! Ted Lasso! Fun. Don’t forget The Morning Show is back this week! I’m fairly excited about that, but the only thing I was truly interested in here was a few brief glimpses at Foundation. Please be good, please be good, please be good.

iPad

Some great growth during the pandemic, which makes sense. I’m both surprised that this “standard” iPad is the most popular one, but also not. It’s a great product, at a great price. But I am sort of surprised how much Apple kept reiterating it was the most successful iPad. It’s almost like they were apologizing for the stage time. Which I sort of get because everything announced was just features previously announced for other iPad SKUs. It was trickle down upgrades. Hard to get too excited here.

But again, this is about a battle with Chromebooks and Android tablets. Better front facing cameras. Center Stage! True Tone! You still can only use the first iteration of the Apple Pencil and we still have some very big bezels. But hey, eventually trickle down product development will upgrade those as well.

iPad mini

Yeah, this thing looks and sounds fantastic. It’s both the most “just a big iPhone” product yet, and yet, also the product I want the most. It’s just such a great size, and now with a larger screen (8.3") thanks to the reduction in bezels and the movement of the TouchID sensor to the power button, like the iPad Air.¹ Also, new colors! Though a bit too pastel-y? What does one have to do for a nice blue? Also, the first of many ‘Starlight’ colors announced today.

I bought one immediately. I had hoped there would be a Smart Keyboard too, but that was clearly a bridge too far. Instead, I should use my old, trusted Logitech keyboard here, I guess. I’m okay with that, it’s a great size!

5G 5G 5G 5G 5G 5G 5G 5G 5G 5G. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz. Wake me up when Hans is back on stage to announce this.

USB-C and second generation Apple Pencil support, two “finallys”.

And yet, as far as I recall, no talk of the actual chip inside here. Perhaps that was to save it for the iPhone unveil (Tim Cook later mentioned it in his summary of the day — it’s the A15 Bionic, huge!).

Apple Watch

Jeff Williams takes the stage — sorry, the field on a cliff — to talk about biking. And to showcase rocks hitting the Apple Watch, which gave me PTSD, thinking back to this.

The Apple Watch Series 7 has a larger display and thinner borders. The UI has been redone in subtle ways to take advantage of this, which basically means bigger buttons. Also there’s now a digital keyboard. Somewhere, Steve Jobs is whittling down his fingers to toothpicks.

The Apple Watch is now dust resistant, just in time for the Burning Man which is not happening. It also now charges faster — thank god — thanks to USB-C, it would seem. And we have five new colors for the aluminum variety: ‘Midnight’, ‘Starlight’, ‘Green’, ‘Blue’, and ‘Project Red’. They look nice, if not as entirely new as Apple is touting. There are still steel and titanium finishes as well. Most importantly, the old bands still work. Kudos to Apple for making this happen for a second enlargement cycle.

And the opposite of kudos for keeping the Series 3 around for sale. It’s so comically old in basically every measurement, including literal screen size measurements. It was silly to keep it around last year, now it’s just sort of insulting. At least make the Series 4 the “new” Series 3 this year? Or, if you must keep the 3 around for manufacturing reasons, don’t keep it at $199, make it $99. A sub-$100 Apple Watch, even the Series 3, would be a huge deal. A $199 four year old Apple Watch is less of a big deal. It honestly may even be a bad deal. Get the SE for $80 more?

There was also no talk of what chip was inside the new Series 7, but perhaps that’s just because it’s not entirely clear when this thing is shipping. It’s just “later this Fall” which wasn’t entirely unexpected, but is still fairly surprising. Perhaps that’s why Apple also unveiled the new iPads today?

The Fitness+ updates seem solid. Pilates. Guided Meditation. Group workouts for up to 32 people, though they only showed what it looked like for two — perhaps because it’s another feature coming later this year. The ad for the service is clever and feels right, especially in our age of COVID: there is no door to this club. Something else that feels right: grouping these updates with the Apple Watch updates. Apple knows this audience now.

iPhone 13

Also as expected, but in some superstitious ways surprising, we now have the iPhone 13. It has diagonal lenses and yes, comes in ‘Starlight’ (as well as ‘Pink’, ‘Blue’, ‘Midnight’, and ‘Project Red’). And yes, the mini is still here too. One last hurrah, sadly?

There’s a six-core A15 Bionic chip, because no matter what, we can’t lose the all-important “Bionic” moniker. And there’s a smaller camera notch area. But a bigger battery! 1.5 hours longer for the 13 mini (versus the 12 mini) and 2.5 hours longer for the 13 (versus the 12). Assuming those are accurate, that would be pretty amazing.

Beyond the bigger battery, Apple implies they’re getting better battery thanks to software, which sounds a lot like judiciously shutting off 5G when it’s not needed. Which is quite often, in my experience. Still there was a whole section devoted to how impressed we should be with the utterly unimpressive 5G service. At least Cameo got a shout out.

‘Cinematic Mode’ looks legitimately cool. One of those things that “just works” that everyone will rush to try to copy. I suspect it won’t be so easy…

Less cool is releasing a MagSafe Wallet with Find My support right after I bought the last MagSafe Wallet without Find My support. Also, they were able to bake Find My support into the MagSafe wallet but not the new Apple TV remote?!

Lastly, farewell to the 64GB iPhone models, you shall not be missed.

iPhone 13 Pro

I’ll give Apple credit, rather than try to shy away from how massive the camera bump is getting on the back of the iPhones Pro, they’re leaning in. The intro tease video makes the cameras look like goddamn skyscrapers.

The new blue, ‘Sierra Blue’ looks beautiful. For some reason, there’s no ‘Starlight’ here and instead we have the similar-looking but comparatively bland sounding ‘Silver’. ‘Gold’ is back and ‘Graphite’ is black.

Again, while the camera bump is bigger, the True Depth ‘chin’ is smaller. Or, at least narrower. More Jay Leno-like. And the battery is bigger here too. 1.5 more hours for the 13 Pro (versus the 12 Pro), 2.5 more hours for the 13 Pro Max (versus the 12 Pro Max). As someone who “downgraded” to a non-Max the last time around, this massive battery in the Pro Max is going to bring me back this time. Apple claims it’s the longest battery life for an iPhone ever, and I’m here for it. Bathe me in battery.

The iPhones Pro also seem to come with one more GPU core. And yes, you can get a 1TB option for the first time ever. No word on RAM — I know the larger capacity iPads Pro have more RAM, for example. If that’s the case here, I’d likely get the 1TB model, even though I don’t need that much space. [Update: from everything I can tell and read, all the iPhone 13 Pro models feature 6GB of RAM — same as the iPhone 12 Pro models — so it would seem that there’s no boost in RAM for the larger storage option.]

A ‘ProMotion’ display sounds great, curious how it will feel in practice. Apple is obviously a bit late to the 120Hz game…

Apple is calling this year’s models the biggest camera advancements ever. Though I’m fairly certain they also said that in 2020, 2019, 2018, 2017, 2016, 2015, 2014, 2013, 2012, 2011, 2010, 2009, and 2008. They’re not wrong, they’re just repetitive!

3x optical zoom? Yes. Better low light? Yes. Macro photography? Yes, yes!

If Katheryn Bigelow and Greig Fraser tell me this iPhone has the potential to “change the language of cinema, in a very positive way” I guess I’m inclined to believe them? But I mean, I feel like you could also undersell this and aim to overdeliver. Again, these updates sound awesome. Let them speak for themselves. Not sure how hyperbolic we really need to be here.

Sir, this is an Apple Event.

‘ProRes’ is another “later this year” thing. It’s fascinating how many of these types of later-on features Apple now does regularly…

While the Watches are stuck in limbo, the iPhones are ready to roll at once and on time this year. Pre-order on Friday, get them a week later. All models. The 12 remains. The 11 remains. The SE remains. I’m honestly not sure who buys an 11 versus a 12, but again, I don’t want to downplay the $100. It’s nice that Apple is offering such granular price points here.

For me, the only real question and debate this year is if the 1TB model comes with more RAM, as mentioned. If so, I’ll get it, despite not needing that much storage. If not, I think it will be an iPhone 13 Pro Max with 512GB of storage. [Update: see the update above — it looks like all the iPhones 13 Pro have 6GB of RAM.] Sierra Blue. Goodbye $1,400 to $1,600. But really, goodbye $58 to $66 a month. Expensive, yes. But also the device I use by far the most.

N+1

Speaking of, there was a very real sense that this was perhaps the most ‘S’ year upgrades to the iPhone yet. And yet, this did not get an ‘S’ name. To me, that indicates that this era is over. From here on out, it’s ‘N+1’ iPhones.

The event itself was one hour and seventeen minutes, which felt okay, but Apple easily could have condensed this into an hour. Again, it sort of felt like they pulled forward the iPads here from October since the Apple Watch wasn’t quite ready to go yet. And yet, everyone was expecting a new Apple Watch since that’s been the usual cadence alongside new iPhones.

It does make you wonder what else Apple might showcase if and when they do an October event as well this year. New MacBook Pros seem likely. Perhaps the new AirPods, which were also MIA today. But if there really is going to be another event, they’ll probably want something more. Notably, there was no talk about what the new hardware can do with regard to AR today… Or maybe we’ll get a whole event devoted to a new deal for the App Store? That rather gigantic and relevant elephant in the room which was also not addressed here… (Fat chance.)

Who knows, maybe we’ll just get one event and a series of press releases this year.

Anyway, yesterday’s event felt a bit more muted and also a bit longer than it should have been. I mean, don’t get me wrong, I’m clearly buying an iPad mini and the new iPhone. But I’m a lunatic. Your own mileage may vary.

How do you not end this event with “California Love” given the opening? Apple sure is acting like they forgot about Dre…

Published on September 15, 2021 📆

Written from San Francisco, California 🇺🇸

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

¹ I still want this on the iPhone, by the way. But seems like we’re going to wait to get TouchID moved behind the screen there…

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

Some Kremlinology of Tim Sweeney’s statements…

There’s a scene in the 2002 film version of Tom Clancy’s The Sum of All Fears in which Jack Ryan (Ben Affleck) makes a passioned case that Alexander Nemerov (Ciarán Hinds), the new President of the Russian Federation, would not have ordered an artillery strike against Chechnya. He makes this case to the President of the United States (James Cromwell) and the entire Joint Chiefs of Staff, no less. The stakes are high. The stakes are war.

Ryan exits the room and immediately finds himself in front of a TV where Nemerov is giving a statement taking responsibility for the strike Ryan just said he did not do. “Nice going, Ace,” a woman who was in the room for Ryan’s plea says, patting him on the shoulder. This immediately cuts to a shot of Nemerov getting into an elevator with his own advisor and asking, “Who did it?”

The point, of course, is that Nemerov was taking credit for something he did not do, and was doing so publicly to send a message. Not to the United States, but to his own people. “Better to appear guilty than impotent,” Nemerov says as he exits the elevator.

I found myself randomly thinking of these scenes today when reading the statements made by Tim Sweeney with regard to Apple refusing to reinstate Epic’s Fortnite developer account.¹ And my read of this — admittedly, like Ryan, perhaps a bit of a stretch — is that this isn’t as straightforward as it may appear, and as many others think it to be.

I’ve long wondered if Sweeney and Epic weren’t playing a different kind of game than the one Apple is playing, and the moves today don’t dissuade me from that thinking. Yes, it’s entirely possible that Sweeney just wants this to be over with and wants Fortnite back in the App Store following the loss on most fronts with regard to their lawsuit. But actually, that doesn’t seem like the right read to me. Because if they wanted that, Sweeney obviously — obviously — would not have included a few very clear lines in his email (since shared publicly — more on that in a second) to Apple’s Phil Schiller.

I’ll share the whole email below for context, with the key part bolded:

From: Tim Sweeney
Date: Thu, Sep 16, 2021 at 5:01 PM
Subject: Fortnite and the App Store
To: Phil Schiller

Hi Phil,

I’m writing to provide clarity on where we stand.

Epic has appealed the court’s decision in our suit over Apple’s policies on In-App Purchase and competing stores. Though we can’t update the Fortnite version that users still have on their iOS devices, we’ve disabled Epic payments server-side, and have paid Apple $6,000,000 as ordered by the court.

Epic has asked Apple to reactivate our Fortnite development account. Epic promises that it will adhere to Apple’s guidelines whenever and wherever we release products on Apple platforms. If we get the account back, we’ll bring Fortnite back to Mac as soon as possible, and we’ll reincorporate Fortnite for iOS in our Unreal Engine development and testing process, which will benefit all of our mutual developers.

Whether Epic chooses to bring Fortnite back to iOS consumers depends on whether and where Apple updates its guidelines to provide for a level playing field between Apple In-App Purchase and other methods of payment.

Epic will resubmit Fortnite to the App Store if you adhere to the plain language of the court order and allow apps to include buttons and external links that direct customers to other purchasing mechanisms without onerous terms or impediments to a good user experience. In that case, our remaining dispute will be about competing stores, and I genuinely believe we could find common ground on the topic if Apple’s position were based solely on user security and privacy rather than commercial interests.

As a provider of developer tools, Epic continues to support Apple platforms and our mutual developers wholeheartedly.

If you have any questions or thoughts, I’m happy to talk.

Tim Sweeney
Epic Games

To me, this entire email is just about that one part. It’s an attempt to drill home the aspect of the lawsuit which Apple “lost”. I believe it’s the only part that really mattered in the entire suit because it’s the only part where there was an opportunity to hit Apple. Because I believe this entire lawsuit hasn’t really been about the legality of the App Store under current laws — those are pretty clear — it’s about showcasing the fact that Epic believes (as do many others) that we need to change those laws.

The lawsuit was a success for Epic in that it revealed just how arbitrary the creation of the App Store rules were. And as such, how ridiculous many of them are. And it did all this on one of the biggest stages possible. The move to strike down anti-steering was the perfect cherry on top of the publicity sundae for Epic. And now they want to make sure they can eat that cherry.

The wording the judge used in terms of what Apple must now allow developers to do in “linking” outside their apps is vague at best. Apple will have one interpretation, but many developers, including Epic, will have another. Epic knows this and makes that very clear here with the plea to “adhere to the plain language of the court order”.

It’s basically saying to Apple: read the intent (and perhaps the room!) of what the judge was going for, don’t try to litigate the language down to the lowest common denominator.

Sweeney is more or less daring Apple to interpret the judge’s order as they read it. If Epic really, truly wanted back into the App Store, Sweeney would not have used that language. Or even brought up that point. It’s so obviously poking the bear. And it’s doing so in a way that I believe was clearly meant to be made public at some point. Undoubtedly because Epic knew it would not compel Schiller and/or Apple. And instead would piss them off. See: the lawyer’s letter in response.

Sweeney’s note at first may read as a “hey, our bad, let’s make up…” but at best it’s “hey, here’s a deal we’re okay making…”. This isn’t an apology, it’s not even an “I’m sorry you’re upset”-type apology. This is a “it’s too bad we’re fighting, here’s how you can make it stop...” It’s really quite something! Given that it’s a deal Epic knows Apple won’t make or take, it’s more like a “hey, we dare you to say ‘fuck you’ to us in public” — it’s goading — to which Apple happily obliged!

While Epic is appealing the case, they’re also shifting the battle here back from a legal one to a PR one. And that makes sense, because that’s the one Epic can actually win.

Now, you could argue that they’re losing that as well. Or that perhaps both sides are. And sure, fine. It’s big company fighting mammoth company, boo hoo. But it is possible that Sweeney truly believes this is a battle which is more important than Epic, and as such, they’re “taking one for the team” to ensure that this both gets elevated and stays elevated. Because the only reason the PR matters — beyond the fact that Apple institutionally hates bad PR — is that it keeps the pressure on Congress to keep the pressure on Apple. They may as well have been CC’d here.

“Wait a minute, that $2.5T company won’t let the game developer back in the App Store even after they lost the lawsuit, paid the fine, and agreed to their demands?!” Apple will take issue with the latter point, but it doesn’t matter. That’s too in the weeds. The headlines are already saying exactly what Epic might want them to say, if you believe Epic is playing the game I believe Epic may be playing.

Again, it’s entirely possible — perhaps even probable — that I’m reading too much into this. The Kremlinology, as it were. But if I were in Epic’s position, trying to affect real change in the App Store, I think I would do exactly what they’ve done so far. They lost a battle for a chance to win a war. And today’s gamesmanship may be just that, in the continued build up to that war. To make statements that would seem to be aimed at one audience, but are actually meant for a different one.

Because it’s better to appear guilty than impotent.²

¹ The film, admittedly, is not great. It’s not as bad as the Chris Pine Jack Ryan movie. But it’s nowhere near the Harrison Ford variety. Nor even the John Krasinski Amazon show. And of course, it’s no Hunt for Red October. I just happened to be watching it recently, and so it popped into my head.

² One more thing: I do expect we’ll see Fortnite in the App Store again. Perhaps not anytime soon given this back-and-forth, but one could easily imagine a “hell freezing over” moment on stage with Sweeney presenting the return of Fortnite at some future WWDC or iPhone keynote. Probably not a 2022 thing, but never is a long time… Remember what this guy used to say about Apple?!

Epic’s Sum of Apple’s Fears was originally published in 500ish on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

A decade ago, I was in London. It was my first ever trip to the city. But I couldn’t really enjoy it as my life was in utter chaos. TechCrunch, where I stilled worked at the time, was on fire — in a bad way. I was actually in the middle of negotiating my exit to become a venture capitalist when that news leaked in the middle of my 10-hour flight overseas. When I got off the plane, I was officially shoved out of the reporter nest and into the VC skies. I was a month away from turning 30.

The next evening in London, I went to the Apple Store in Covent Garden to remotely watch the launch of the iPhone 4S — the first phone with Siri. The next morning, I had a private briefing with Apple to go over the device an pick one up to test. A few hours later, Steve Jobs passed away.

There was a lot going on.

Now here I sit a decade later and it feels like a hundred years ago. For one thing, I not only subsequently lived in London for a year, I got married there as well. I’ve now been a VC for far longer than I was ever a reporter — I crossed that line years ago. TechCrunch survived — albeit under a number of subsequent owners. I’m holding a new iPhone 13 Pro in my hands and Apple has added two trillion dollars to its market cap. That is not a typo. I’m about a month away from turning 40. And I have a daughter. Today is her third birthday.

I thought I was going to write this post about a decade of being a VC, but honestly, I’m not sure anyone needs to read that and I’m not sure I want to write that. I was just peering back in time at my calendar from a decade ago and looking at some old posts around that time and could not believe how chaotic it all was. Everything feels much more stable now.

Well, as stable as it can be as we approach year two of a pandemic. It’s all relative. As is time.

Published on October 4, 2021 📆

Written from San Francisco, CA 🗺

Written on a 2021 11-inch M1 iPad Pro ⌨️

Enjoying a Sierra Nevada Oktoberfest 🍻

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

Ten years after the passing of Steve Jobs, the iPhone endures…

Ten years ago today, the world lost Steve Jobs. In many ways, it feels like an entirely different world. But in one very key and fundamental way it feels the same. There was and remains a single piece of technology which is the most important device that a large percentage of the world uses on a daily basis: the iPhone.

You could certainly make the case that the Mac, as the device which started it all and the one which later saved Apple, was more important for Jobs. And both the iPad and iPod make strong cases for their own importance. But without question, the iPhone has reached a scale which is unparalleled not just for Apple, but for basically any company and product. And it has transformed Apple from a powerful tech company to a $2.5T company. The most valuable company in the world.

Ten years ago, Jobs passed away the day after Apple unveiled the iPhone 4S. And so I thought it was only fitting to jot down some thoughts about its great, great, great, great, great, great, great, great — and I do mean great — grandchild, the iPhone 13.¹

Specifically, I mean the iPhone 13 Pro, the model I chose to get this time around. And that in and of itself is notable for me because I previously had the iPhone 12 Pro. And I believe this is the first time in a while where I’ve gotten the exact same variety of iPhone two years in a row. In the past, I’ve opted to switch things up by getting a ‘Max’ variant (boy, has that word been ruined…) or Apple switched things up enough that the form factor was significantly different. This time, the device both looks and feels almost the same to me. Yes, it’s slightly heavier and baby — sorry, “Sierra” — bluer. But just looking at it head on, it looks the same and it feels largely the same in hand.

And so it has been interesting using it this past week and a half in that regard. In many ways, it doesn’t seem different from using the iPhone 12 Pro. But there are two key day-to-day differences which I do think matter.

The first is the 120Hz “ProMotion” screen. It’s one of those things that is perhaps non-obvious at first. Oddly, it’s even a little hard to discern side-by-side with a non-ProMotion display — for example, the iPhone 12 Pro. But in day-to-day usage, if you’ve used an iPhone long enough, which we all have, you notice it. It’s smoother. Across the board. It’s sort of a weird thing to describe. The best I can do is that it almost feels like the old “Pan & Scan” effect they used to do when converting movies to VHS (so as to avoid the “letterboxes”, for shame). With that context, it sounds like a diss. But it’s not! It’s cool! Very smooooooooth. Like “Retina” screens before it, once you’re used to it, it’s hard to go back.²

The second very noticeable change is the camera system. Simply put: “Macro Mode” is fucking amazing. “Cinematic Mode” is fucking awesome. While I generally try to avoid reading iPhone reviews before I jot down my own thoughts, I have seen on the internets that the latter has gotten some dings for being a bit wonky while the former has gotten some dings for being a little too automatic. I think both are fair critiques to point out, but both will undoubtedly be fixed with time. When they work, they work incredibly well.

And I’ve gotten both to work with minimal effort. I think “Macro Mode” is so cool that it’s one of those things that people will buy this phone for alone. Because even if you don’t really need a super zoomed in picture of a flower to the point of being almost — almost — sexual (I don’t name the parts of a flower, people), you’re gonna want to see it to believe it.

Meanwhile, “Cinematic Mode” is just so lovely, particularly for family videos. I shot one at my little girl’s birthday party over the weekend and when we watched it on our 70" TV via AirPlay it looked almost realer than real. Because, newsflash: your eyes also focus on certain subjects while blurring other things in the background.

I actually thought after the reveal of the iPhone 13 models that I’d find these to be the most “tick” (as opposed to “tock”) devices yet. But those two features changed my mind. While the devices themselves may look the same up front, the camera system in particular is probably worth the upgrade if you care about such things. Which you probably do.

That also comes at a slight cost, of course, beyond the literal one. The camera bump is massive this year. It has been getting larger and larger over time, of course. But this is the biggest bump and jump yet. So much so that I’m not sure it’s even fair to call it a “bump” anymore. It’s more like a plateau. Apple, to their credit, seems to be leaning into it, to own it. But my god, even the official cases need a goddamn bump this year! That means you can no longer lay the thing flat on its back with a case. Which is weird. But hey, for that, beyond the above, you get 3x zoom. I’ll take it, but I wonder where this ends. Fuck it, five blades?³

Let’s see, what else? Massive camera bump aside, the box for the iPhone 13 Pro is amazing. It’s so svelte. I remember when these boxes were full-on bricks. Now they’re half-bricks. It’s impressive.⁴

Because of the massive camera bump, I’ve been slightly more terrified than normal to go case-free thus far, but the ‘Sierra Blue’ is quite nice. I definitely like it more than last year’s ‘Pacific Blue’. But again, I mainly notice it through the window cut out in my case for the camera bump — albeit a large one. (Have I made it clear how big the camera bump is yet? Take what I’m saying and multiply it by 3x.) The large lenses almost look like they’re floating in a shallow sea of blue. It’s a cool effect.

Another key touted element this year is battery life improvements. It’s a big reason why I was okay staying with the ‘Pro’ versus the ‘Pro Max’ — I found the iPhone 12 Pro’s battery lacking a bit, but if I was really going to get another 1.5 hours in the iPhone 13 Pro… The result? Pretty good. It’s definitely lasting longer in day-to-day usage but it’s hard to tell how much of that was the 12’s battery wearing down with usage versus this brand-new 13 battery. On the flip side, I was undoubtedly using the 13 more to test it out in these early days (and, as we all know, there’s a lot going on behind the scenes when you first set up a new iPhone to back things up, optimize, etc). So I feel good about the battery, but it’s not blow-you-out-of-the-water (like, say, the M1 MacBook Air battery upgrade). At least not yet.⁵

The forward-facing “chin” which houses the camera/Face ID elements is indeed smaller this year, but it’s also one of those things you don’t really notice day-to-day.

So, does the thing feel faster overall with the new A15 ‘Bionic’ chip? No. I haven’t noticed any difference, to be honest. I’m sure that’s in part because no app has been designed to take advantage of the new chip yet. But it’s also undoubtedly because I’m not sure any app really ever pushed last year’s chip either. Apple is so far ahead here that they’re just really racing against themselves. I’m sure someone will throw some specs at me about the Samsung Whatever X38382, but come on. Day to day the iPhone is so fast that it has outrun itself. BUT, I do think it’s a good point and worth pointing out that most people are not like me and don’t upgrade from the iPhone 12 Pro to the iPhone 13 Pro. Most people are upgrading from the iPhone XS or X or perhaps earlier. And for them, the speed jump this year will undoubtedly be massive. Almost as massive as that camera bump.

I think it’s also worth pointing out just how easy it is now to do a yearly upgrade to the latest and greatest iPhone just by way of trading in an old one. Whereas in the past I’ve been on the iPhone Upgrade Program, I got off it last year mainly because I found it slightly clunky and thought using the Apple Card’s 0% APR and 3% cash back was more seamless and arguably a better deal — especially with that trade-in value.

This year, for the iPhone 12 Pro, you can get $640 off your new iPhone (or $790 if you have the 12 Pro Max). So, depending on your memory configuration, that brings the iPhone 13 Pro cost down to a few hundred dollars. And next year, when you do the same (assuming, of course, that you don’t destroy the device), it will mean roughly the same.

Look, it’s still a lot of money. But again, it’s also undoubtedly your most-used device so it might be worth it — certainly depending on which model of iPhone you currently have.

I’ll close by hearkening back to Jobs’ original iPhone unveil. “An iPod. A phone. And an internet communicator.” Fourteen years later, the iPhone is still all of those things, but there are arguably far more important elements of the device now. A camera. A wallet. A reader. A video conferencing center. A security card. A bus pass. A television screen. Yes, just like the iPhone 4S, a virtual assistant, when she works. A way not just to access your music, but all the music. The list goes on and on and on. That’s quite the legacy for Steve Jobs.

¹ I didn’t do the math, there could be a few more “greats” in there.

² And yes, it has been on the iPads Pro for a bit.

³ In all seriousness, I worry about the lenses more than ever now. Are we going to need lens caps eventually?!

⁴ One upside of no power bricks, I suppose?

⁵ And that matters to me because while I have a battery pack, the one I bought (a Mophie MagSafe one, before Apple’s own version came out) actually no longer fits on the back of the iPhone due to the 13’s massive camera bump!

Some Thoughts on the iPhone 13 Pro was originally published in 500ish on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Some thoughts on GV’s investment in Matter

The internet is a big place. It grows larger everyday. And a good percentage of that growth is content. And while a lot of that content is crap, a massive amount is also quite good. Stuff you’d want to consume. But because of said growth in content and a complete lack of growth in time, this is a real challenge. It’s something I’ve long struggled with. With articles in particular, there’s just so much I want to or should read, but just can’t organize it in a way that makes it feasible.

This is, of course, nothing new. In fact, it’s why both Pocket (then called Read It Later) and Instapaper launched back in 2007 and 2008 respectively. They were simple ways to save content to return to later. And they were both brilliant. Two of my most-used services over the past decade-plus. But that latter point is key: it has been well over a decade since those services were created. And while they still exist and are lovingly maintained by new owners, a lot has changed on the internet in the intervening years.

That’s where Matter comes in. As someone who was not just a power user of the last generation of “read it later” services, but perhaps the power user of them, I’ve long been on the look out for anyone coming at the space with fresh eyes and a new product. And so when I met Ben Springwater and Rob Mackenzie, two former employees at Nextdoor, I loved what I heard. They saw the same issues which were getting increasingly worse as the internet expanded with different content types and ways of consuming.

To me, hearing that alignment in vision coming out of YC was enough to make an early bet on this duo going after that problem. But seeing would be believing. And watching Ben and Rob execute and iterate fast and furiously over the first several months of Matter’s life with feature after feature after feature rolling out like a steady beat from a drum machine — just scroll backwards through this list — I was sold. It was time to grow the team and go after this more fully.

And so I’m happy to announce that GV also stepped forward to lead Matter’s Series A round of funding.

Back when I was a reporter (a profession I coincidentally left 10 years ago, this week, by the way), I believe one thing that resonated with my audience was that I was clearly an actual user of many of the products I wrote about. And so today I would also highlight the coverage of Matter by both David Pierce for Protocol in an overview of the current state of the space a few weeks back, and the post today by Sarah Perez at TechCrunch, ostensibly about the funding, but really about the product itself. They’re clearly both users of Matter and that is conveyed well in both pieces.

• Spotify for readers: How tech is inventing better ways to read the internet
• Matter raises $7 million Series A to build a better reading app

As for the Matter product itself, I love it. It’s by no means feature-complete — and yes, notably, it’s still iOS-only (iPhone and iPad — it works on M1 Macs as well!) for now, but web and Android are in the works — but it’s very, very solid. It has of course become my go-to read-it-later app, but also one of my most-used apps, period. They just nail so many little things, with new little things to make it better still coming at that regular cadence.

A couple examples I would highlight (beyond highlights) include the text-to-speech function, which regular readers will know is something I’ve thought about and hacked-together solutions for over the years. And their recent “shuffle” option, which I’ve found solves another issue I’ve long had where we all heavily over-index on reading and sharing what’s “new” when that not only often doesn’t matter with many articles, but causes us to miss so much great writing and content. From day one, Matter set out to solve for this, and often surfaces older posts which are fantastic.

Newsletter integration. Playing nice with paywalls. Tweet threads. Etc. Etc. Etc. Each of these concepts may not be new, but they’re so well executed here in one wonderful package. Again, one built from the ground-up for the 2020s-era internet. And there is a lot more coming.

Oh, and I’ve come this far and haven’t even mentioned just how shitty of an experience it is to read on the web these days. Pop-ups on top of pop-ups. Content squeezed into tiny corners. Slooooowwww loading times. Matter is that glass of ice water in reading on the web hell.

Also fun, you can follow along with what anyone is reading on their profile pages both in-app and on the web (here’s mine, for example). There is, of course, the notion of an explicit share within Matter (and you can do “text shots”, another topic near and dear to me, to share more broadly), but this lightweight way to follow what someone is reading (by way of what they’re highlighting — if they choose to make any of the highlights public) is a cool concept.

And on my Matter page, you may also notice my own articles that I’ve written interspersed. That’s because Matter was built from day one with the concept of being writer-centric, rather than publication-centric. To me, that makes a lot of sense for the 2020s internet of content. Some publications still matter, sure, but more often, I have writers that I follow and want to know when they publish something. (Twitter has served this purpose to an extent, but there’s also a lot of other noise there, to say the least.)

I could go on. They’re calling this roll out a public beta since again, we’re still missing some core things such as the web and Android, but if you have an iOS device, it’s solid even now. I would also just add that there will be a premium plan eventually, and I think it’s important to be straightforward about that, as this is a business. But it will be up to the team and product to prove the value of Matter before we ask people to pay for that value.

So try it!

Matter

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

Facebook is screwed. At this point, it doesn’t matter what you think about the social network, the fact of the matter is that they’re not coming back from this latest round of body blows against the company. They’re both not dying, but they’re dead. And yes, you may have thought that about the Cambridge Analytica scandal too, but it all plays into this — they were never coming back from that either, stock price aside.

People seem confused because Facebook is still an incredible business that continues to grow. And Facebook cites studies about how vital Facebook is to their core (read: non-tech-press) user base. True! It is a vital service for various forms of communications and connection around the world. And they may or may not take Facebook offline for a few hours to prove the point. But none of that matters.

Facebook is not dying as a business, but they’ve died as a brand. The company needs to move on to ‘what’s next’ as quickly as possible to distance themselves from the social network. This is nothing new, of course — I wrote this over six years ago. They’ve more or less been trying to do this for years. But even in creating an umbrella company, they called it ‘Facebook’, which was dumb. It was the exact opposite of what they should have done. Because, again, Facebook, the brand, is over.

It seems pretty clear that Mark Zuckerberg both realizes this and doesn’t want to realize this. But the latter is his mistake. It’s too late and the longer he and they take to realize this, the worse off the company will be as a result. They might think that all of this will blow over, as it always does, or that all of this is “illogical”, which it also is to some extent. But again, that doesn’t matter. There’s the rationalist world and then there’s the reality of the situation. The powers that be have chosen Facebook as the poster child. The tech elites are tired of Facebook. And the younger generation has no desire to use Facebook. So…

Everyone on to the Instagram lifeboat! But even that brand (and product) is getting tarnished, quickly. And Facebook obviously can’t buy whatever is next at this point, so… it’s a real problem!

The company needs to pivot from the brand from which they’re making all the profits. They can’t just rip off the band-aid and shut down Facebook itself — obviously, OBVIOUSLY — because they need said profits to pull off whatever is next. But they need to do a better job on the branding side to distance the newer projects. It seems like that is starting to happen. It needs to happen more fully.

Again, Zuckerberg is no dummy. He has to know all of this. But as his recent statements have made clear, he’s also clearly a rationalist. The problem is that this is not a rational argument. It’s basically anything but.

Facebook is over because they won. Because they have two billion-plus users. Because they created a service which mirrors humanity. And humanity, as it turns out, is not great. I mean, yeah, sure, there are pockets of great. But there are also pockets of awful. And the awful will always overwhelm the great. And Facebook has created the perfect tool to enable this. At scale.

This both should be obvious and isn’t. The problem with Facebook isn’t actually Facebook. It’s us. It’s human beings. The problem is that Facebook created the greatest tool ever to connect those human beings. And it has led to a world in which the local lunatic is now the global lunatic.

Facebook and Zuckerberg didn’t realize this was the end state because it wasn’t what they envisioned with the original mission. It has blinded them. Connecting people is good! Right? But, as it turns out, it’s not. It sounds good. We all want it to be good. But it’s a fucking disaster. Because humanity is a disaster.

That’s too harsh but you get my point. It’s the one Facebook cannot escape and could never escape. Unlike many, I don’t view them as some nefarious organization — as a bunch of James Bond villains sitting around a table plotting the end of humanity. But their tool created to connect everyone even with the best intentions (we can argue about the “growth at all costs” side of this equation — obviously there weren’t only the best intentions) was long ago usurped. They miscalculated. And we’re all now living with the results of that. And it has painted Facebook into a corner.

Facebook is a brand in crisis to an extent not seen in tech since they heyday of Microsoft during their antitrust trial. And this is actually far worse than that because the real world ramifications extend far greater. The “Big Tobacco” analogy may be overused here, but it really does feel apt in many ways. The poison is digital, but it’s still poison. The original cigarette makers didn’t set out thinking they were creating addictive death sticks. That came later…

So what else can Zuckerberg do? Well, nothing. That sounds extreme but again, these problems are fundamental. They’re inherent to what Facebook, the social network, is. If anything, their PR strategy is just making this all so much worse. They have a quiver of wet noodles armed and ready. I would just shut the fuck up and realize that you can’t fix this because you can’t fix humanity. And I’d keep building whatever is next behind the scenes. And hope to milk those Facebook profits for as long as humanly possible.

Facebook is Too Big, Fail was originally published in 500ish on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Some thoughts on Apple’s “Unleashed” MacBook event

Apple has had this funny tendency in recent years. They “upgrade” devices by taking away features that a lot of users — and often professional users in particular — love and/or find useful. When questioned about it, the response is the equivalent of the “Deal with It” meme. Faster horses and all that. But then people complain loudly enough for long enough that Apple relents. And then… gets praise for relenting!

That’s basically the narrative right now about the new MacBook Pros announced today. Which is too bad in many ways because it completely downplays just how amazing the new M1 chips — two of them! The M1 ‘Pro’ and M1 ‘Max’ — would seem to be. If the M1 was an embarrassment to Intel, these two new chips are the pantsing and kick in the groin. Hopefully they’re more like a kick in the ass to Intel, but my god, it’s not pretty. Unless you’re Apple or in the market for a new premium laptop. Then it’s beautiful.

One more thing: while Apple is getting praise for bringing back MagSafe to the MacBooks as well as a number of ports, they also took something away which was the opposite of everything just described. That is, a feature which no one asked for and Apple shoved into our line of sight anyway: the TouchBar. I disliked it from day one, and I know I wasn’t alone. Despite trying to make the TouchBar happen over and over again, it was clearly a feature in search of a use case. It was the Dr. Ian Malcolm of product design. “Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, that they didn’t stop to think if they should.” As it turns out, they shouldn’t have. And while it has taken years to recognize, to their credit, Apple even called it out in the keynote today. Ding, dong, TouchBar is dead.

And thanks to the combination of elements mentioned above, Apple is ready to roll with perhaps their most compelling laptop option in years. There are maybe a few nits (more on that below), but they seem like a pretty great combination of what many people have been asking for for a long time. And I suspect sales numbers will highlight that as well. Funny thing: you can make a lot of users happy by simply listening to those users. Sometimes faster horses are called for!

An assortment of other thoughts about the event:

Apple has always been pretty good about having events start on time, but when they were in person, which feels like decades ago at this point, they were typically a few minutes behind as people were seated, presenters were made ready, etc. These days, with the video presentations, they tend to start exactly on time. No surprise with no audience and pre-recorded presenters!

The kick-off video highlighting the many now iconic and ubiquitous Apple device sounds was fun. And gave a chance to hint at a few things to come: notably, MagSafe.

Unlike the “California Love” iPhone event, this one “took place” back at Apple HQ, with Tim Cook out in the field this time. Does it feel like they’re running out of ideas where to put Tim? Maybe the cafeteria next? As he himself noted, this was the “second event in just over a month.” And it was clear from the get-go that this would be focused: Music and the Mac.

Music

For a second, I thought that this might be like the old Fall events, when the iPod reigned supreme and so music was often center stage, quite literally, with iTunes. That also feels like decades ago. Instead, this was really more about a seemingly minor update to Apple Music’s curated playlists, which was really just a way to highlight a new tier of Apple Music: the “Voice Plan”. Which sounds like something a telecom marketing department would dream up, and is almost as inspiring. A $4.99/month tier for Apple Music access in which you can only use Siri — hence, voice — to access.

This is super weird to me. First and foremost because Siri remains an inferior and still often frustrating way to use Apple Music — or really, anything. Apple will say it isn’t, that Siri is great, but she’s still far behind Alexa in day-to-day usage if my own household is to be believed. This feels like a weird hack to get to a lower-priced tier for Apple Music by creating barriers that make it harder to use, and as such, should mean lower royalty pay-outs for Apple. What a weird incentive structure and convoluted offering! Who is asking for this? Quite literally!

The new colors for the HomePod mini look good: yellow, orange, and blue. And they seemingly highlight the continued (correct) strategy to make these devices more ubiquitous in various rooms of the home (versus the old incorrect strategy with the original HomePod, which was put out of its misery).

The new AirPods look nice. It’s sort of strange that they look exactly like the AirPod Pros, but hey, you have to switch things up from time to time. I will miss the original AirPods design and they actually fit my ears nearly perfectly, even more so than the Pros. And the old iconic long white stems will fade with the white wires of yesteryear.

It’s nice that the entire (new) AirPods lineup now has Spatial Audio, which is legitimately cool. Also cool was the video featuring the new white earbuds which seemed to invoke the iPod commercials of old. Better battery life is great. A MagSafe charger is nice, though the old wireless charging case could just lay on a MagSafe charger too. Once again Apple did the thing where they’re so close to a huge moment: $99 AirPods! But just overshot it a bit — well, $129 AirPods! Because: Apple. (The 2nd generation AirPods remain in the line up at $129. Sigh. The new ones are $179.)

And that was music. Sort of less about music and more about sound and Siri. We didn’t even get a band performing remotely, like music-related Apple events of years past.

MacBooks Pro

Tim was back to note that Apple was now one year into a planned two year transition to their own silicon. But this would be a huge push forward as the entire MacBook Pro lineup was now going Intel-free.

John Ternus, who shows up a lot these days, was back on stage to show off the new MacBook Pros. And the first “Pro” chip designed for the Mac — which, in hindsight, perhaps should have been obvious: the M1 Pro.

From John to Johny (not to be confused with Jony) Srouji, we got some details about the new chip. Largely about memory management. Large memory bandwidth. More RAM options. Many transistors. Interestingly, no talk of clock speed — and old Intel favorite — but lots of talk of cores. 10 of them in the Pro (up from 8 in the “standard” M1). This was all to be expected — this is like the M1 on steroids. Or rather, unleashed, per the event invite. Allowed to do more with a larger envelope and larger fans, Apple could jack up the M1, pro-style.

But that wasn’t all. “Not one, but two new chips!”

The M1 Max takes the M1 Pro and basically doubles it. 57 billion transistors! Srouji then went through a sort of PowerPoint — er, Keynote — trying to outline how much more powerful not only these new M1 chips were versus the Intel variety, but also how much more powerful the built-in GPUs were versus the old integrated variety. (You can see the slides here.)And this built to how they performed versus even the discreet variety. Which is to say, much more efficiently, but interestingly, not more powerfully at the very high end of the market. But Apple’s stance would seem to be that such extremes are almost a reckless use of power. I suspect they’ll keep saying that until we get an M1 variety of the Mac Pro (the M1 Pro Max?! The first M2?). Regardless, the chips are obviously impressive.

And as with everything Apple, part of that is the software wedded to this hardware. Which is why Craig Federighi also made a brief appearance to talk about the ways that macOS Monterey was being tailored for the new chips. Obviously, the focus was on the pro suite of software, but also the way some developers are going to be able to take advantage of the new chips on top of Monterey. (Which, as always, is really just a marketing video of developers repeating the main messages Apple just put out there.)

But this was all build up to the main event: the design of the new MacBook Pros with these new chips. The intro video gets right into it. MagSafe is back. As are more ports than a shipyard — well, that’s not true, but it’s a return to the days of old at least, per above.

Speaking of… again, Apple didn’t shy away from the notion of returning to physical keys to replace the TouchBar — literally saying as much. They were apparently feeling so nostalgic that at one point they humorously even highlighted the headphone jack. Now even more jacked!

Also highlighted: the new camera area, which yes, means a notch, natch. Look, I know people want to be up in arms about this. Because we always need something to be up in arms about, even when Apple seemingly gives us everything we want. But this isn’t a big deal.

First and foremost, I’m staring at a massive notch on my current MacBook Pro right now. It just extends across the entire top of the screen in the form of a large bezel. Apple is shaving these down but needs somewhere to put the camera system (at least until we have cameras behind the screens?). And it’s a better camera system to boot. And, most importantly, unlike on iOS, where the notch is often not exactly natch, on macOS, the always-there menu bar makes the notch fairly seamless. I mean, I’ll have to see it when I actually see it, I suppose. But I just don’t view it as a big deal right now. The only weird thing to me: no FaceID! I suppose it would require an even larger notch. And/or Apple doesn’t want to go there on the Mac for whatever reason (yes, TouchID remains baked into the keyboard). Still. Sort of weird.

The new MacBook Pro displays look big, bright, and beautiful. ProMotion. A billion colors. A super thin lid. Which, sadly, just calls to mind no return of the iconic glowing Apple.

There’s a new audio system too, which Apple often touts but I never use on my laptop because I’m often using it around other people and I’m not a monster. But you have to wonder if those new, large feet that are clearly there but Apple clearly didn’t want to call out, are related to this. Or if they’re related to the fan/cooling system…

Then Apple took some more time to stomp on Intel. Calling out performance versus Intel’s top-of-the-line i9 chip — these two companies are still partners remember! And specifically highlighting battery life performance versus the Intel variety of MacBook Pros. Again, I’m using one of the MacBook Pros right now. It’s a year old. It is currently running so hot in my lap that I have a pillow underneath it. And that, in turn, is turning the battery life to shit. As someone who has had an M1 MacBook Air for almost a year now as my personal machine, I have no problem taking Apple at their word here. These new M1 MacBook Pros are going to destroy Intel in battery life. 21 hours for the 16-inch, they claim. I recall my first MacBook Pro running for about two hours, max. Wild.

The price points remain the same, which is great. The size and weight are slightly elevated versus the previous iterations, but we’ll live with the trade-offs there, I imagine. These ship next week. Beautiful.¹

Back to Tim who wraps things up at a super-svelte 50 minutes. I love this format and hope Apple doesn’t go back to exclusively in-person events. Obviously they will for WWDC. And presumably for the iPhone events too, since it’s the other “major” of the year. But I wouldn’t mind one of these for every new Apple product, even smaller ones. It’s a nice way to showcase what’s new. And yes, it’s basically free marketing.

Okay, not free, but Apple has probably already pre-sold enough of the new MacBook Pros to pay for any sort of production many times over. Ship dates are already in November and slipping fast. Faster than faster horses.

¹ For the record, I have not ordered one… yet. I would love to replace this hot-as-hell Intel MacBook Pro with an M1 Pro or Max MacBook Pro as my work machine, so I’ll probably be hounding IT about that… But, to be clear, what I still really want is an M1-powered MacBook. Not the Air, which is great, but the 12-inch, tiny variety of machine.

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

There’s something I find endearing about the iPad mini. Perhaps it’s the fact that Apple seemingly almost killed it at one point. Or that they’ve unquestionably neglected it at times over the years. And yet it remains. Getting brought up to speed, quite literally, with its iPad brethren every so often. And this is again one of those years, thankfully.

Honestly, I think I just like the form factor. People used to joke that the original iPad was “just a big iPhone” but the iPad mini has always been more of “just a small iPad”. But this year, with the new iPad Pro-meets-iPhone flat-sided design, it does actually feel sort of like a hybrid for the first time. Yes, it’s an iPad mini, but it sort of reminds me of a massive iPhone, at least in hand.

I actually didn’t love when the iPad Pro went with the flat sided design. I love that look and feel for the iPhone, as it’s nice to grip. But for the larger iPads, which you often hold with two hands, it felt a bit worse than the older curved side variety, in my opinion. I still believe that to be true with the big guy. But with this smaller version, the flat sides work well, I think. In part, again, because it’s pretty easy to hold the iPad mini with one hand.

And when you do, with your fingers gripping the sides of the device and not overlapping the bezels, this is really something to behold. Because again, it looks sort of like a giant iPhone, but with no notch. It’s just a single, consistent, beautiful screen. Goodnight, sweet Home Button prince.¹

The new iPad mini looks like what you’d think the Kindle would look like were it designed in 2021. Sure, it’s not e-ink. But it’s basically the perfect size for a book. Perhaps that’s what I love about the device so much. It’s basically the ideal reading machine. Be it a book, the web, Matter,² or even — shudder — email.

Could the bezels be thinner? Sure. But if they were, it would be harder to hold when you are putting your palm and thumb on the side of the screen. Are the volume buttons at the top of the device awkward? Yes. I often have to think about which is which when going volume-up or down. But it makes room for the Apple Pencil 2 which is basically the perfect size for this device as well.³

Because Apple doesn’t update the iPad mini each year, the gains in speed are also actually noticeable (unlike say, with year-to-year updates for the iPhone). As are the gains in battery life, since my last iPad mini has a two-plus year old battery now which has degraded with time.

In our era of COVID and face masks, I love having Touch ID instead of FaceID. But I also honestly keep forgetting to use it since it’s up top on the power button (something borrowed from the most recent iPad Air). It also feels like Apple clearly knew this would be an issue as they put a bit of UI in iPad OS to showcase where Touch ID is — unfortunately, this UI also covers up the battery life indicator when in portrait mode so you have to unlock the device to see if you need to charge it. It’s a little thing, but it irks me. Still, I’d take it on the iPhone too if I could get it.

Speaking of COVID and face masks, another thing I love about the iPad mini is that it fits perfectly into many a jacket pocket when going out and about. That hasn’t mattered for the past 18 months or so perhaps, but it’s starting to matter again. This is the perfect iPad for adventuring back out into the world.

Yes, yes, it has 5G too. I remain dramatically underwhelmed by the technology. If it’s any faster, I never notice it. USB-C you will!

There’s not much else to say, really. I’ve loved the iPad mini from day one. Apple nearly killed it, but mercifully keeps updating it at a seemingly random cadence, so I’m delighted whenever a new one graces us with its presence. Yes, the camera is better now too, and while holding up the iPad mini isn’t nearly as obnoxious as holding up an iPad regular in public, it’s still ill-advised. And yes, the better camera brings a camera bump to the mini for the first time, but we also now have a wrap-around case to protect it.

Speaking of, the one thing there is not, which had been (loosely) rumored: a keyboard case. I would have loved one, but yes, it would have been a tight fit. Apple showcases the Logitech Keys-to-Go, which I’ve long been a fan of as a super lightweight option. Time to bust it out again.

¹ That last generation of iPad mini was likely the last time I will have had a Home Button in regular usage.

² One of GV’s new investments, and an app already now my most-used reading service. But don’t just take my word for it!

³ One nit with the last model of iPad mini is that it only allowed for Apple Pencil 1 usage — that changes now. Another nit fixed from the last time: tap-to-wake the screen is now here as well on the iPad mini.

The Wonderful iPad Mini Once Again Pops Up Its Sporadic Head was originally published in 500ish on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.

Facebook attempts to change the conversation…

There’s a scene from Mad Men, season 3, episode 2: “Love Among the Ruins”. In it, ad man Don Draper is trying to talk Madison Square Garden VP Edgar Raffit off a ledge:

Don Draper: In the interest of time, you want to demolish Penn Station and New York hates it.

Edgar Raffit: Not all of New York. A vocal minority.

Don: Can they stop it?

Edgar: Well I think all the hubbub is making it unpleasant for…

Don: …But they can’t stop it, can they? 

Edgar: Why do you people insist on making us sound like villains?

Don: Your concern over public opinion shows a guilty conscience. What good is that serving you if what is to be done is already underway?

Edgar: So let’s say I don’t have a guilty conscience…

Don: Good! And let’s also say that change is neither good or bad. It simply is. It can be greeted with terror or joy. A tantrum that says ‘I want the way it was.’ Or a dance that says, ‘look, it’s something new!’

Edgar: Would you draw the line at 50%?

Don: I’m not drawing the line at all. PR people understand this, but they can never execute it. If you don’t like what is being said — change the conversation. 

I was thinking about this scene today when reading about Facebook’s name change.¹ Facebook is now ‘Meta’. And this is a conversation about that name change to Meta. How meta.

In an interview with Alex Heath (the reporter for The Verge who also broke the news a couple weeks ago that Facebook was contemplating such a change), CEO Mark Zuckerberg was asked the following question:

You said you started this formally about six months ago. Is it at all a reaction to the brand baggage and the brand tax you guys sometimes refer to internally that Facebook has, and just wanting to distance from that? Or is it really more just looking ahead? I have to imagine it’s a mix of both.

In other words, is this name change an attempt, at least in part, to change the conversation? To which Zuckerberg replied:

We started well before the current cycle [of bad news]. I think the current cycle clearly had nothing to bear on this. Even though I think some people might want to make that connection, I think that’s sort of a ridiculous thing. If anything, I think that this is not the environment that you would want to introduce a new brand in.

Two things can be true: this can both be complete bullshit and not entirely bullshit.

First and foremost, there is an approximately zero percent chance that the current cycle had “nothing to bear on this”. If that were true, several people inside of Facebook are being negligent. Second, making such a connection is not “a ridiculous thing”, obviously. OBVIOUSLY. Third, the spin that this is not the environment to change your name and brand is just utter nonsense. This is the exact time to do it. To — yes — change the narrative.

Or to attempt to.

Few think this will really work, of course. And yet, it did change the narrative for today. And the hope on Facebook’s part is that this will at least shift the narrative overall and going forward. So yes, all the stuff about wanting to change the branding so everything is not under the first social media application which made the company popular (not to mention money) can be true. But there’s also clearly a reason they didn’t do this when they last did a brand refresh two years ago (even though many of us at the time thought they should have done exactly what they did today). Facebook is Meta today, at least in part, to change the narrative of yesterday. Full stop.

I believe this because I predicted it, a few weeks back. As I wrote:

Facebook is not dying as a business, but they’ve died as a brand. The company needs to move on to ‘what’s next’ as quickly as possible to distance themselves from the social network. This is nothing new, of course — I wrote this over six years ago. They’ve more or less been trying to do this for years. But even in creating an umbrella company, they called it ‘Facebook’, which was dumb. It was the exact opposite of what they should have done. Because, again, Facebook, the brand, is over.

…

The company needs to pivot from the brand from which they’re making all the profits. They can’t just rip off the band-aid and shut down Facebook itself — obviously, OBVIOUSLY — because they need said profits to pull off whatever is next. But they need to do a better job on the branding side to distance the newer projects. It seems like that is starting to happen. It needs to happen more fully.

I don’t say that to portray myself as some sort of Nostradamus (though, some people are saying…). But rather to highlight the obviousness of how this would all play out. Facebook’s brand is in ruin. And they’ve been trying to pivot from the core app as the main hub of the company for a while. It’s okay to admit that! This can be both an offensive and defensive move. And it is.

The obvious comparison is to the Alphabet maneuver several years back. But in many ways, this is almost the opposite. Google was and remains a great brand.² That move seemed to be more about diversification. Facebook needs that too, of course. But they also already have that thanks to the acquisitions of Instagram, WhatsApp, and Oculus. Which, again, is why they should have done this years ago! It was a natural move. Doing it today is about the narrative. And to suggest otherwise and in such a disingenuous way suggests a company that won’t actually be able to change the narrative!

Nearly every story I read on the matter with some level of Facebook involvement today made it clear that Facebook went out of their way to try to convey that this was not a reactive move. “Your concern over public opinion shows a guilty conscience,” one might say. Again, who are they kidding? And the answer is no one, but the fact that they so clearly care about controlling this part of the narrative is just ridiculous.

Who gives a shit? I mean, clearly I do. And more people probably do today. But in a few days and weeks no one will care about the ‘why’. All that will matter is if it worked or not. And, to be clear, it probably won’t. But that doesn’t mean it was the wrong thing to do. It wasn’t! This is what Facebook should have done years ago — and what they should have done today for an entirely different reason. Both are legit. Own it.

Now you’re free to say, launch a smartwatch without it seeming absolutely ridiculous that the brand no one can trust is launching a wearable. Or to put cameras in our living rooms just weeks after perhaps the worst data management disaster in history. Or asking us to strap a screen to your face with nary a book in sight. Long live Meta, the maneuver absolutely totally completely six months in the making which changed the conversation. Because Facebook didn’t like what was being said.

Update 10/31/21: More thoughts on the Meta maneuver:

Facebook’s Second Quest

¹ After I got my memes and jokes out of the way, of course.

² Yes, I happen to be a partner at GV, which was formerly under Google and is now under that Alphabet umbrella. That said, I have no insight or information as to why such a decision was made. I was not consulted, Don Draper-style :)

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

Will the Metaverse work? Unclear. But something needs to. Eventually…

With the — forgive me — meta conversation now out of the way about Facebook’s name change, let’s zoom out to look at the why. Beyond the poisoned brand, the mobile platform risk, and the slipping credibility amongst the youths, why shake up a company which has been so handsomely rewarded by Wall Street at arguably peak power?

Nearly all truly great businesses that endure over a long period of time need a second act. There are a handful of companies like Coca-Cola (medicinal and/or cocaine history aside) or the oil companies (monopolistic breakups aside), which are still largely doing the same thing that they originally set out to do. But even just looking at the list of largest companies by market cap, they are all either newer tech companies or a holding company, Berkshire Hathaway (where their largest equity holding, and a significant amount of their value, happens to be a massive tech company, Apple).¹

The oldest tech company on the list is Microsoft, at 46 years old. As it happens, the company has just incredibly vaulted back to the number one overall position, with a value just under $2.5T, just ahead of Apple. And the reason why Microsoft is number one (and why Apple has long been number one in recent years) is simple: reinvention.

Microsoft, of course, does a lot of things these days. But at the core of the business, they were able to transform from a software licensing company to a cloud services company. There was a decade or so there where it wasn’t clear if Microsoft would be able to evolve — least of which because they were milking more profit than ever out of said software.² But as the Satya Nadella era has made clear (certainly with regard to the stock price), the company needed to think differently about what they actually are.³

Apple, which is almost exactly one year younger than Microsoft, has also had to reinvent themselves a handful of times over the past few decades. But unlike Microsoft, they were absolutely forced to at one point at the hands of near-death. While the iMac was about refocusing, the iPod was a reinvention, and paved a direct path to the iPhone. But even today, the company is also in the midst of a reinvention to be more services-oriented. I — and many others — worry this is less a reinvention and more a way to milk profits. Not exactly the Steve Ballmer-era of Microsoft but not exactly not that either. We’ll see. The products are still, for the most part, great. And there’s a world where the services tie all the current and future — Apple Glasses, iCar, etc — products together in a cohesive narrative. But there’s also this nonsense. It needs to change. And will one way or another.

Then there’s the OG tech company, IBM, founded 110 years ago. They’re still alive but whereas once (50+ years ago) they were the most valuable company in the world by far, now their market cap matches their age — they’ve long since been surpassed by not only the tech companies listed above, but by companies like Airbnb, Shopify, and Square, which were each founded just over 10 years ago. IBM is perhaps the ultimate example of reinvention over all that time, with multiple different eras and innovation, which is how they’re still alive. Unfortunately, in recent years, they’ve seemingly spent more on marketing things like Watson than on creating value from the technology. It’s probably time for a forth or fifth act…

I could go on. But the point is that even the first generation of technology companies have already had to reinvent themselves to remain relevant and on top of the world.⁴ Interestingly, nearly all of the “second wave” of tech companies failed to do so and are now no longer with us, or have merged — think: AOL, Yahoo, etc. Depending on which cohort you place them in, perhaps only Amazon emerged from this.⁵ And while they’re still clearly first and foremost an online retailer, they’ve obviously undergone some massive reinvention over time, culminating in the AWS business.

We’re now at the point where the third wave of tech companies are going to start to have to figure out what’s next in order to stay relevant. To be clear, many of them have been working on such initiatives for a while now. But this Facebook-to-Meta maneuver feels like one of those first true existential moments of change for this cohort.

Facebook undoubtedly would have thought that they were already working on their second act, and perhaps even pulled it off. Certainly, you could argue that moving the business from desktop to mobile was a pivotal move which the company bungled at first and it nearly cost them dearly. And, of course, the acquisitions of Instagram and WhatsApp were key moments as well. But all of that was about keeping the original core of the company, social networking, vital and thriving. And it worked. But the problem is that it worked so well that Facebook now finds themselves in the multitude of predicaments they’re in today. And thus, the need for the second act.

At first, Mark Zuckerberg clearly thought he could do more of a micro-pivot as it were, and keep social networking as the core of Facebook by moving towards more private networks and sharing. The work is still underway on many of these initiatives, but it’s clearly not going to be enough to foster the real change that the company needs.

Enter Oculus.

You have to give Facebook credit here. In the nearly eight years since Facebook acquired the VR company, they have not only not pulled back from the technology despite it basically not moving the bottom line for the company at all, they’ve doubled and then tripled down, pouring billions of dollars of resources into the field. And that has been even more important because nearly everyone else has retreated from the VR space when it became clear that the timing once again wasn’t quite right for VR to work on a number of fronts. Facebook has basically said, ‘screw that, we’re going to will this space from virtual to reality’.

And now they’re tripling, quadrupling, and so on, down here. This isn’t just betting the company on the space, this now is the company.⁶

It’s hard to think of another such change with this level of in-your-face boldness.⁷ This isn’t a “New Coke” slight flavor tweak — which, of course, bombed and had to be rolled back — this is a “we’re not this company anymore” move. Of course, that is easier to do when the old company and product continue to exist and print money to enable the new moves, but it’s still a bold branding gamble, if nothing else.

It’s needed for all the reasons already discussed. But there is still some level of kudos to Facebook/Meta warranted for doing so from a position of business strength, even if it’s in a time of brand weakness.

Yet part of me does worry that this ends up being a bit of a head fake. Not so much that the vision outlined by Zuckerberg is pure vaporware, just that the timing still may not be right for a long, long time. And so Meta remains Facebook in everything but name for a long, long time. I’m reminded a bit of self-driving cars. They’re right around the corner — a decade running.

Speaking of cars, the automobile companies are perhaps another sector where the behemoths have mostly stayed in power while doing largely the same thing. Of course, none of them are Tesla, even combined. So…

¹ This list leaves out the oil company Saudi Aramco due to its complicated national ownership and thus, valuation structure. It’s limited stock is currently valued just over $2T, behind Apple and just ahead of Alphabet.

² To Steve Ballmer’s credit, he did lay the groundwork for the new Microsoft in the form of Azure. He just got… um, distracted, by other shiny objects. One of which, by the way, was investing in Facebook! One of the all-time great investments — if only they had held longer…

³ Speaking of distractions, we won’t go into the embarrassing TikTok path that Nadella tried to and nearly did lead Microsoft down… Envy, you say?

⁴ I would put Adobe in this first wave as well, having been founded in 1982, and has certainly have an amazing resurgence after a move to the cloud in the past several years (current market cap: $300B).

⁵ I would probably say the “second wave” started with AOL which was born in 1985. And the “third wave” started with Google, founded in 1998.

⁶ Certainly there will be more to the company even under the Meta moniker, than just VR — Novi, their crypto play, also seems like a prescient move, albeit one also screwed by the Facebook brand!

⁷ Maybe, of course, the oft-compared big tobacco?

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

Some thoughts on turning 40…

My god, I’m 40. Technically, I hit the milestone a few days ago, but felt like I should have something more poignant to write, yet couldn’t find the words. Actually, I still can’t, and I think that’s a good thing. 40 doesn’t feel any different than 39 and 364 days. Or 363 days. And so on… Time is a funny thing. We measure years in circles around a star. It’s scientific, I suppose. But it also feels celestial. Almost astrological. If we were a tiny bit further from the Sun, the trip would be ever so slightly longer. A tiny bit closer, shorter. Point is, it’s rather arbitrary. As least as arbitrary as our literal place in the solar system and Universe can be.

But history makes it matter. So it’s more like a home run record than a mood ring type thing. The shared context and concept makes it matter. It’s something everyone, no matter their background, can relate to. So that’s nice.

The idea that 40 such trips around the star matters also seems a bit random. It is wild that not all that long ago, that number would indicate I’m likely closer to the end. In more recent times, it would seem to indicate that I’m clearly closer to the end than the beginning, therefore I’m officially old. But these days, it feels more like the middle. Maybe even less, fingers crossed.

Anyway, I don’t feel any different than last week. Nor did I expect to, of course. But it is interesting to think that if I had been asleep for, say, 20 years, and just woke up at 40, I clearly would feel different. It’s like the haircut thing. When you see a friend for the first time in a while and they’ve let their hair grow long, they look insanely different. But if you had seen them each day it was growing, you wouldn’t perceive anything. Same with yourself, of course. Because you see yourself each day. My 20 year-old self would look at my 40-year-old self and see that the sides of my beard are nearly completely grey, almost white. That would be wild. Sometimes at night before I go to bed and I’m tired, I’m jarred by this. I don’t hate it, honestly. I may even sort of like it. But it’s weird to see. This is age more so than any number.

The pandemic hasn’t helped any of this, of course. The past 18 months feel more or less pancaked together, creating a two year time compression that we’ll never get back. At the same time, there are always silver linings. And here, the lockdowns have meant that I’ve probably gotten to spend more time with my infant-now-toddler daughter than I would have in a “normal” world with office commutes, business travel, etc. I try to remind myself of this quite often because I think it’s important.

And the one element of turning 40 that I do acutely feel is just that, wanting to be more mindful about my time and how I spend it. This has long been the case for me, of course. But this temporal marker seems a good natural reminder to focus on it even more and to do something about it. Protect your time. Don’t spend it doing things you don’t want to do. Act now. Because time is of the essence — which is perhaps the first time anyone has ever gotten to write that phrase with an actual poignant meaning. So there you go.

• A November to Remember
• A Quiet Place
• A Different Kind of Ride…
• 36 Years In…
• A Farewell to 18–34
• Millennialism
• 33

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

On Taylor Swift’s “All Too Well”…

If you spent anytime on Twitter last week, you undoubtedly saw people tweeting non-stop about Taylor Swift. I find that this happens with good regularity regardless of whom you may follow. Any news around her tends to flood the social zones, and there’s often news about her. Much of it seems extremely smart on her part. And last week was no different as she lit Twitter aflame by releasing a re-recorded version of her 2012 album, Red.

Continuing her awesomely vindictive and extremely savvy plot to recreate all of the albums which she doesn’t fully own and have seen their rights traded like baseball cards amongst bidders who don’t care about baseball,¹ Red (Taylor’s Version) is clearly already a triumph. But one song on the album stands above both in terms of buzz and beauty. And it’s 10 minutes long.

Before diving into it, I should note that while I like Taylor Swift’s music in so far that any red-blooded consumer who hears it on the radio might,² I’m not like some diehard fan. I did very much like her album Folklore, which just seemed like perfect place, perfect time, perfect mood for the world wrapped in a pandemic. I never would have expected Taylor Swift and Bon Iver and The National to be a musical match, but I was wrong. Very wrong! Anyway, all of this is to say that I don’t think I had ever even heard the original version of “All Too Well”.³ If I have, it was in passing and I didn’t recall it. But as the internet blew up thanks to her performance of the again, 10 minute version on Saturday Night Live last week,⁴ I felt socially obligated to give it a listen.

And — shocker — it’s really good. But I like it in ways I didn’t fully expect.

First and foremost, you hear it (and watch the performance) and you think: wow, someone really broke this woman’s heart. But what’s unique about this song, at least as much as any other breakup song — of which Taylor Swift is the undisputed master, more on that in a bit — is that you can actually know the backstory here. If not the full thing in that you didn’t live it yourself, the high level of it since it played out in public. And while humorously neither party has full-on confirmed the background nature of the song, if it wasn’t obvious before, the 10-minute video Swift commissioned for the new version makes it even more clear. The bearded beanie guy that Dylan O’Brien is playing is his fellow actor Jake Gyllenhaal.⁵

Here’s where I’ll admit the sort of embarrassing rabbit hole I went down trying to figure out the backstory. Again, it’s not hard to figure out and there’s a lot of content on the topic, but the fact that I, as a 40-year-old man, was spending time on this is… not something I thought I would be doing as a 40-year-old man! But hey, the little one was down to sleep and my wife was out of town. Rabbit holes are dug for moments like this.

Anyway, as I read about the Swift/Gyllenhaal relationship, the first thing that struck me was how short it was. Seemingly just a few months. And that led to my initial reaction that this perhaps feels a bit unfair to Jake — especially since he’s now gotten dragged not once, but twice, through this mud. A decade apart! Most people move on, Taylor has not. Or, that’s not fair, perhaps she has, but for whatever reason — again, maybe it’s as simple as being savvy and knowing how well it would play, quite literally — she decided to also literally double down here, with twice the song.

But then I start thinking to myself: I obviously have no idea who these people are. I’m just a guy sitting here watching this performance and reading some blogs and trying to extrapolate meaning from this song. This is dangerous territory from which to draw any sort of conclusions.

Listening to the song a few more times, I’m again struck by how good it is. And regardless of my qualifications on the actual relationship in question, I think it conveys powerful aspects for more or less every relationship. Certainly those in the early days. And that’s why I think it resonates so well. Even as a ten minute song about a three month relationship re-released a decade later.

To put it more directly: I think this may be the single best encapsulation of the early stages of a love affair that I’ve ever heard. It’s only with hindsight that you can have the perspective that maybe this wasn’t the greatest thing in the world, or meant to be. But in the moment, and especially right after the moment, the world stops. And this song captures that halt.

In some ways, this may be the ultimate break-up song.⁶ Because most relationships are not long. And so this captures a sentiment not only that can resonate with pretty much everyone, but that can resonate multiple times in peoples’ own minds and memories. I’ve lived some version of this. We’ve all lived some version of this. Again, in hindsight it’s easy to say that these moments in time don’t matter, but they certainly do in the moment. They matter more than anything. This is what life is all about. The time we spend with others and that others spend with us. We all move on. Because we have to. But the time was spent. And we wonder…

Another element of the song that comes with multiple listens: the left-behind scarf is the (clever) hook in and lead out, but it’s the age element that is clearly what burns here. Swift makes it clear that the relationship ended because Gyllenhaal said they were just too far apart in age (roughly ten years). This allows her to get in the fantastic Dazed and Confused-style dig that she’d imagine that while she’ll get older, his girlfriends will stay the same age — which, amazingly, turned out to be true. I mean, again, this is probably unfair. But at least right now, she’s not wrong! Call your shot!

But beyond the individuals here, the discrepancy is also clearly a backbone of the song. And it’s actually not really about age so much as it’s about life asymmetry. The fact that Gyllenhaal was 30 and Swift was 20 matters less because of the gap in years and far more because of her actual age there. And I don’t mean the proximity to being a teenager, it’s just that she’s far closer to the massive changes in life that happen each and every year than he is. Put another way, there’s a reason why 17 year olds don’t hang out with 7 year olds. It would be weird because it is weird. Because you’re so far apart in life experience at those stages. That ten year gap is not the same at all ages. Someone who is 50 dating someone who is 40 is not weird. Same with 40 and 30. But again, Jake and Taylor veer too close to this line where it is weird. Not nefariously, but naturally.

She doesn’t hate him because of the scarf, she hates him because he ruined her 21st birthday. She undoubtedly feels like she was taken advantage of. Not in a scandalous way but in a way that is nonetheless upsetting.

Lastly, as alluded to above, Swift is clearly the master of breakup songs. To the point where, while I often think about what drives artists to be successful over long periods of time (which most can’t sustain), she seems to have this natural fuel that she can turn to again and again. Like Michael Jordan or Tom Brady using each and every slight to continue to fuel them even after they’ve reached the top of their games.

Perhaps part of this stigma is because her relationships are so public and break into the cultural zeitgeist because they often involve other celebrities. Some might view some of this as almost calculating, but I look at this from the opposite way. It may be that because so many of the relationships are public, the only way to truly give herself closure is to write these songs about them. We all have our tools, her’s just happens to be extremely popular music.

My god, I’ve just written over 1,500 words about this song. But it’s that good! It captures a hell of a lot more than one relatively short failed romance. And it’s the easiest ten-minute listen of all time because it’s so fantastic narratively. It was already like a short film before there was a short film to accompany it.

All that being said, I’m still left with the desire to hear Gyllenhaal’s side of the story. It only seems fair. Perhaps he can use his own tools of the trade to respond, not unlike Spike Jonze creating Her in response to Sofia Coppola’s Lost in Translation — a film which is also clearly referenced in “All Too Well”, no less.⁷

¹ I mean my god, beyond the amazing maneuver of fucking over the people who fucked you over, it’s a rather brilliant way to breathe new life into songs which people already know and love. This entire thing is smart on levels perhaps never seen nor heard before.

² And given that I don’t listen to the actual radio anymore, I would slot in something like “via algorithms on streaming services” or more likely “in pop culture”.

³ In hindsight in my “research” I know this is strange as it’s a hugely popular and awarded song. But I’m not lying. I wasn’t aware of it, which makes all of this all the more powerful!

⁴ Her seemingly selective use of looking directly at the camera in this performance is something else!

⁵ As a complete aside, kudos to Jake (and Maggie!) Gyllenhaal for not changing their names, Hollywood-style, despite them being nearly impossible to spell on first try no matter what you do — just remember, two ‘Ls’ to ‘As’!

⁶ I sort of can’t believe that the person who wrote this was in her early 20s. Then again, when you are young, they assume you know nothing…

⁷ This is another situation where neither side will acknowledge the obvious here. But the Scarlett Johansson element would not be denied.

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

GV’s investment in Groundswell

The past couple of years have been a disaster. I mean that quite literally. A pandemic. But even before that, we were seeing calamitous situations pop-up in our newsfeeds — if not our backyards — left and right. In part because we’re all connected more than ever, but also in part because the environment (both physical and social) has been shifting quickly. The hard truth is that none of this is likely to change; if anything, it will only accelerate and intensify.

It was one such natural disaster, the 2010 earthquake in Haiti, which led Jake Wood to start Team Rubicon. Fresh off of his experience in the military, Jake and a group of fellow Marines traveled to Port-au-Prince and saw chaos in need of immediate response, so they stepped in to help. And then formed a non-profit to perform similar humanitarian duties around the globe. There were often calls for any and all assistance and charity, as it so often does, answered.

Fast forward a decade. Here we are in this pandemic and Jake, alongside two of his board members at Team Rubicon, Joe Marchese and Adam Miller, decided it was time to switch to the flip-side of the equation, to see if they couldn’t build a product which could fill the clear need to further democratize and expand charitable giving. A tool and a platform to fuel more Team Rubicons around the world. And thus, Groundswell was born.

And so it’s a great honor that I can announce — on Giving Tuesday, no less — that GV is stepping up to lead Groundswell’s Series Seed round of financing, and I’ll be joining the company’s board of directors.

In our diligence on this opportunity, I honestly don’t believe I’ve ever heard such glowing remarks about a person as I did about Jake. People in his life both past and present. Multiple people used some version of the phrase “someone I would run through a brick wall for”. So it’s hardly a surprise that he was a fantastic leader of a non-profit (not to mention, Marine). But it’s also what has now led him to recruit a fantastic team to build a great product in the for-profit world.

But the reality is that Groundswell marries these two worlds. Again, with the hope of expanding both in a time of great need. And the focus at first will be on corporate giving, on an individual employee level. It should be no surprise to learn that while last year saw record amounts of such giving, this year is trending down from such heights. Whereas last year the coronavirus was novel, this year it’s decidedly less so. Many of us have tried to give where we could, when we could, but it’s also quite tedious and cumbersome to do so. The tools need to get better. They need to be more consumer-oriented and friendly. The tracking and information flow needs to be better. Which is exactly what Groundswell is building.

At the same time, there are not-exactly-new but increasingly catching-on ways of promoting and enabling more levels of giving behind the scenes, such as Donor-Advised Funds (DAFs). And the notion that charitable giving should be a part of every employee’s package (a “401k for good” if you will). Also, trying to stamp out the inefficiencies of corporate matching programs, which are often far underutilized. These are just a few parts towards building out what Groundswell is calling “Philanthropy-as-a-Service”. Again, the key is to focus on the goal: enabling more charitable giving at both a corporate and individual level in a time of ever-increasing need and desire to give.

Groundswell is working on getting the first version of the product into early customer hands right now. And will be hiring like mad to do so.

Lastly, while I know Jake is sad that his beloved Wisconsin Badgers (where he played collegiate football before joining the Marines) won’t get a rematch against my Michigan Wolverines (where I sat in the stands rooting against Jake’s team in college before going on to other decidedly more lazy pursuits) this weekend,¹ I’m happy that I can devote my energy to be full-on rooting for Jake and the entire Groundswell team, and trying to help them alongside GV in anyway we can.

More from our friends and co-investors at Human Ventures in a sit-down with Jake:

The Future of Philanthropy

And here’s Jake talking with David Gelles for his New York Times Corner Office column:

Once a Warrior, Then a Nonprofit Leader, Now an Entrepreneur

¹ In an interesting twist, I actually grew up rooting for the Wisconsin Badgers as it’s my father’s alma mater as well — and coincidentally like Jake, my father actually left Wisconsin to join the Marines.

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

A modest proposal to stop kid stuff in our algorithms

It’s that time of year again. Where the brilliant marketing that is #SpotifyWrapped reveals our great (read: usually not great) music taste to the world. That is, unless you’re a parent. And then it reveals something entirely different.

I poke fun at this each and every year because it’s funny. Essentially, Spotify believes my favorite music the past few years has been Raffi, Elmo, and Randy Newman. Don’t get me wrong, each is a great artist. But each is a musical god in the mind of a one, two, and three year old.¹

This is cute. But when it comes to actual recommendations, it’s decidedly less cute. It’s quite annoying depending on the situation. So much so that I have not one, but two streaming music services which I pay for, despite them having basically the exact same content. Apple Music is my “adult” service, whereas Spotify is my “kid” service.

This goes far beyond the music streamers, of course. As my daughter gets older, she’s now watching more content on our Apple TV. And this means my “Up Next” area is a fun combination of Jack Ryan movies mixed with Daniel Tiger. And don’t even get me started about YouTube recommendations.

Even shopping on Amazon is a laughable experience now since about 75% of what I order is for the little one, Amazon has decided that items for a three year old is basically all I want to see. While it’s true that may be much of what I want to buy, it’s the opposite of what I want to see when browsing!

Obviously, most services, at least on the content side, try to get around this issue with individual user profiles. But this is annoying. The interstitial I have to click on when I load Netflix and Amazon Prime Video sucks. I want to watch content, I don’t want to have to verify adulthood each time. Obviously, you want some restrictions for services that have adult-oriented content. But there has to be a better way.

I think what all these services need is less about profiles, and more a “Kid Mode” similar to what web browsers offer with “Private Mode” or “Incognito Mode”. That is, a simple one-click way to say DON’T PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT I’M DOING RIGHT NOW FOR YOUR ALGORITHMS.

Again, I think kid profiles are a fine solution for more permanent states of consumption. But everyone with a child here will know my frustration when I just need to get that damn Mickey Mouse song on and I’m driving and don’t have time to switch profiles on Spotify.

Actually, with that specific type of example, even a “Kid Mode” button may be too much work. Ideally, these services would just know that I’m likely playing this kid song for a kid and so not to serve it up to me in my “regular” listening. And they all say they sort of do this. But in practice, it’s a tricky problem. And it’s why we get Raffi, Elmo, and Randy Newman as our top artists each year.

Eventually, the algorithms will probably be smart enough to sort this via time and day and the like. But again, a lot of them already say they are, but in practice are not. So I’m trying to come up with some other dead-simple, fool-proof solution. Maybe it’s a “Kid Mode” at the OS-level of any device. Again, a way to say whatever I’m doing right now — music, movies, shopping, web browsing, DO NOT TAKE THIS TO MEAN I ENJOY ANY OF THESE THINGS AND WANT MORE OF THEM. Or do, but assume I only do when in “Kid Mode” again. Not in “Dad Mode”. Dad Mode is my time. Not Peppa Pig’s time.

Anyway, all of this is obvious. But it’s also obviously a problem for many parents. Twitter tells me as much each year, usually at this time of year. And rather than wait for the algorithms to be smart enough to sort it out, I’d like a super simple way to take matters into my own hands. More simple than profiles. A button. Probably even voice-enabled.² A “Kid Mode”.

Alas, I fully expect my #SpotifyWrapped next year to be dominated by Elsa and Anna. Let it go, MG. Let it go.

 — @mgsiegler

¹ The latter due to the Toy Story soundtrack, of course.

² “Alexa, enter KID MODE.”

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

Since I learned of the passing of my partner, colleague, and friend Tyson Clark, I’ve struggled to find the right words to convey my thoughts. So I’m writing some down now because this is what I do. Write down thoughts to help me work through what I’m feeling. It’s selfish, in a way. Indulge me, if you will. That would be enough.

“There are moments that the words don’t reach.”

These are the opening lines from the song “It’s Quiet Uptown” from the musical Hamilton. The situation is different. In some ways, the opposite. Alexander Hamilton had lost his child. Here, children have lost their father. But a wife has also lost her husband. A sister, her brother. A mother, her son. These are the words in my head. And they still resonate.

I cannot believe Tyson Clark is gone. I’ve written here over the years a few times about the passing of a musical artist or some famous person. But Tyson was my colleague. More importantly, he was my friend. I feel lucky to have known him, even in the small way that I did. As the outpouring of emotion around him on channels both private and public makes clear, this is a person who touched the lives of a lot of people. He was here doing that at the beginning of this week. But he’s not here as we end it. This is hard.

And shocking. Tyson was an athlete. A former Naval submarine officer. A physical specimen. A young father just past 40 — something which he and I also shared in common. If he can be struck down out of the blue, none of us are safe. This is unfair.

I knew I would like Tyson the moment I met him. There’s something about him that led to a sense of instant familiarity. So much so that you were okay ribbing him upon meeting, knowing that he would be cool giving it right back to you. For me, this surfaced in the form of his Lenovo laptop. It looked like a piece of technology you might use in the early 1990s. It constantly messed up our video calls. But Tyson rocked it proudly, as a former Excel jockey would. A lesser man would have broken down and gotten a Mac — as I had clearly done, he noted. A half dozen years later, pandemic and all, he never stopped rocking that beast.

During the lockdowns, I didn’t see Tyson nearly as much as I would have liked. Because none of us saw anyone as much as we would have liked. But as luck would have it, I randomly ran into him not once, but twice at various pumpkin patches with our families. It felt as if someone was trying to get me to see Tyson more, coronavirus be damned, and I should have listened more fully.

As it turns out, I did see him more fully in recent weeks, as we attended a conference together down in Southern California. If I think back to my own most memorable times with Tyson, it was getting drinks, one-on-one, often at a conference or offsite. And this time was no different. It was a great catch up with a friend as if no time had passed since our last encounter. Tyson had the magic to make those interactions happen in such a way.

He excelled at honest conversations. The kind most of us can perhaps only have after a drink or two. He had a way of cutting through the cruft and the crap. The defenses we all naturally accrue with time. “Give it to me straight,” he might say. And you would. Because you know that he would give it to you straight right back. No chaser.

This is part of what made him a great VC as well. I dislike almost all VCs. I know this is weird given what I do. I’m not trying to be a jerk here, I’m just being honest as Tyson might have me be. But Tyson was different than all VCs. He was an exceptional listener. Most VCs say they are, but they’re not. They tolerate hearing other people talk while they wait their turn to talk. Tyson listened. He really, truly listened.

This is why everyone who worked with him valued his input so highly. While he largely roamed in the enterprise space, his opinions and insightfulness translated so well into anything we were looking into. This job has a tendency to wear down strong opinions into consensus. It’s necessary in some ways for partnerships to function, but dangerous in many other ways. But Tyson over the years held on to what he called the “Believe Button” and hit it often.

The last time I saw Tyson in person, we were flying back to the Bay Area together from the conference I mentioned. We were actually sitting in the same row on the airplane, but there was a person in between us who didn’t want to swap seats. So we both ordered a drink on the flight and cheers’d around the person. It will be something I will always remember.

The next time I saw him was on video, listening — truly listening — to a pitch from an entrepreneur, who, like Tyson, had served in the military. This person immediately started trading barbs about who was crazier, the Marine sniper or the Naval submarine officer. Just two guys going at it as if they were the best of friends. They had never met before.

That was Tyson. Disarming. Impressive. Humble. Insightful. Funny. Charismatic. Thoughtful. Kind. Smart. Just an amazing human being.

He had the most incredible LinkedIn bio you’ve ever seen, so much so that it almost seems like a fake profile. Stanford, Harvard, Naval Nuclear Power School (!), Goldman Sachs, McKinsey, the Navy (!), Morgan Stanley, Oracle, Andreessen Horowitz… But I know it’s very real as the past six and a half years have been alongside all of us at GV. And he was so much more than his awe-inspiring CV.

He was an oak tree with far too few rings when it was chopped down. I feel as if I only knew a few outer rings, and my heart goes out to those lucky enough to know the inner rings of the man. I’m happy for the time we spent together, but I’m angry as this is someone I thought I was going to know and meet up with to have those honest conversations for another forty years, at least. This truth is brutal.

I’m going to miss him so much. I know so many are. The outpouring of messages, support, and admiration for Tyson in the past 24-hours has been nothing short of incredible. He leaves behind a family that needs to know and remember what he meant to all of us. His last lesson was perhaps his most important one: time is short. We’re all worse for him no longer being here. But we’re all better for the time he was here. We all have to live with the unimaginable now. Rest In Peace, my friend.

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

Something ‘Omicron’ this way comes…

I imagine it’s like looking at a tidal wave. You know, the kind in the movies. The wall of water coming at you. You could run, but it would be pointless. Its height is utterly terrifying. It has you. All you can do is close your eyes and wait for the inevitable. Such is the Omicron variant of COVID.

The same thing was largely true for the Delta variant, as I wrote about here five months ago. But this feeling of utter helplessness feels even more pronounced because it (seemingly) is more pronounced. This version is spreading far faster than anything before it. To the point where it is already crashing over the UK. The ramp is starting in NYC. And it will be all across the US in the next few weeks, max. As someone who lives on the west coast of that country, this is the calm before that storm we all know is coming.

I’ve been following this fairly closely because we were actually supposed to go to the UK for a family trip yesterday. We pulled the plug at the last minute when it became clear what would happen. And it did. Oh boy, did it.

And yet, while we mainly pivoted due to a still unvaccinated three year old, the secondary reason wasn’t a fear about my wife or I getting sick — both of us are fully vaccinated and boosted — it’s because of the logistical shitshow that was likely to be the fallout of this situation. Again, it’s already playing out. Each and every day the UK government seems to be implementing new mandates and rules. You have to feel sort of bad for them. They clearly have no idea what they’re doing because no one really does. They just have to showcase that first to the world. And we can all learn from their mistakes.

And yet, it’s unlikely we will in the US. Because this is all fully political. To be clear, it is in the UK as well, which is exacerbating the bumblefuck. But the US is about to make the UK look like a quaint tea party, as it often does.

Omicron is going to hit us hard. Both because we’re a huge nation, but also because we’re a stupid nation. If everyone was vaccinated, let alone boosted, it would likely be fine. Instead, we have nearly 40% who remain unvaccinated. FORTY PERCENT. Days away from 2022. What the literal fuck.

This variant is going to rip through our country and wreak havoc on those forty percent (and unfortunately, other immunocompromised people who those 40 percent refuse to protect, like true jackasses). Milder or not — data is promising, but the jury is still out for a host of reasons — this is going to be ugly. Time and mutations may be naturally blunting the virus, but the true stopgap, the vaccines, remain up for debate because our country is broken.

There may be some silver-linings here. First, this wave may be bad enough that it gets significantly more vaccine hesitant morons (which, to be clear, they are at this point), off the bench. Seems unlikely given everything else that has transpired in the past two years, but maybe! I mean, this is going to be bad! Second, this wave may also be bad enough that it infects enough, quickly enough, without as much deadly force, that we end this. Again, this seems unlikely as there will undoubtedly be more variants, but it does seem more likely that we move closer to the end game with this.

To that end, I worry that this Omicron wave crashes on us, things are ugly for a few weeks, then it recedes rather quickly — this may be happening already in South Africa. That may lead to another great spring and summer where it feels like the end, and then… whatever Greek letter is next (assuming the next one doesn’t offend some group we don’t want to offend, ridiculously) hits. Rinse. Repeat.

Anyway, it feels like we’ve been inching towards the end of this for a long time now. Omicron will be the latest disaster, but could push us closer to the finish line once it recedes. Anyone who isn’t vaccinated and/or boosted should do so immediately. But anyone reading this who still isn’t vaccinated won’t because “freedom” which sounds a lot like a combination of selfishness mixed with stupidity. Round and round we go.

One more thing: I do wonder if a third, wild card silver-lining here isn’t that governments wake up to reality. Again, in the wealthy countries, we’re not going to move the needle further on vaccinations so let’s just… move on? Restrict the fuck out of anyone not vaccinated and let the rest of the country get back to a life which is as normal as possible. We’re all going to get Omicron, vaccinated or not. The difference is that the vaccinated will be fine. And may not even know they have it, it seems.

Yes, we have to worry about Long COVID. But there’s unfortunately not much we can do there. Again, this is happening, like it or not. The wave is crashing. We’re all getting this. So let’s act accordingly, including stopping the restrictions and loosening rules which are often silly defensive gestures happening too late anyway. Let’s make it simple. If you’re vaccinated: life goes back to normal. You’re likely to get sick, but not too sick. If you’re not vaccinated: sorry. And I do mean that. But you played yourself. Come with us if you want to live. Otherwise, enjoy home. And good luck.

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

Some thoughts on the “Web3” hype

Every five years or so, I write the same basic post. That’s because every five years or so, the same argument makes the rounds. The words change, but the premise is basically the same. “Closed” vs. “Open”.¹ “Native” vs. “Web”.² There’s nuance to each argument, of course. But it all boils down to the notion that something currently in favor sucks and something better is going to come along to change everything. The only problem is that this never happens. At least not in the way it’s laid out.

I’ve been thinking about this recently with the latest version of this debate. “Centralized” vs. “Decentralized”. Yes, the “Web3” twist on the age old battle.³ I feel as if a lot of the arguments I see on Twitter — and holy shit, there are a lot of them — fall somewhere on the spectrum of naive but idealistic to completely disingenuous. Again, this is nothing new. The tech we’re talking about may be different, but the song remains the same.

This is why Tim O’Reilly’s post on the matter a couple weeks back was so good. Tim, as the person who coined the term off which “Web3” riffs, has the context needed to make a rational argument and case for the current state of things. Many people lack such context. Worse, many who should have the context seem to throw it out the window. Instead, it’s straw man arguments and grandiose statements about the future while completely ignoring some very real issues, like all the fucking hucksters.

What I’m saying is that the zealots are overzealous and the hype isn’t helping here. It’s actually hurting.

We can all agree that there are legitimately cool things about “Web3”. And some things will undoubtedly be transformative in some industries, in certain ways. But if I had to guess the way this all plays out — which is what I do here on the internet — I would guess that all of this is not nearly as transformative as the hype might suggest. And that’s actually a good thing! Because guess what, the current state of technology is pretty great.⁴

Yeah, yeah, the “techlash”. Obviously, there are issues. And not just with Facebook. I agree that the web has gotten too drunk on the advertising moonshine and many of us are waking up with a pounding headache as a result. But by and large, this shit is working.⁵ Quite well. For billions of people. And millions are making a living in ways not possible just 5, 10, and 20 years ago — I have been in this camp for a large part of my career as well. And this pool is growing rapidly every day. It’s awesome. And getting better all the time.

“Web3” — which I fully realize encompasses a lot of things, which is part of the problem — will augment some of what is working. And accelerate other things. But I just don’t see it fundamentally altering what we have right now. Putting aside the current crappy user interface and experience of every single “Web3” product — much like Roman Roy, I’m dumb, but I’m smart, and I have a hard time figuring out how to use almost all of these products out of the box — which should get better with time, there’s a real argument to be made that the fundamental “decentralization” underpinning all of this actually won’t work. At least not at scale. Either technically or because human beings actually using things are required for scale. To paraphrase another anti-hero, “centralization is good, centralization works.” No one wants to hear this, of course. But it doesn’t make it less true. At least from a product perspective!

I know this is slightly blasphemous to say on the internet as we end 2021. But I suspect it won’t be in 2026.

And yet this isn’t some holy war where one side must fall. This actually shouldn’t be religious at all, but has become so in a way that makes the last tech religious war — “Android vs. iPhone” — look quaint by comparison.⁶

The reason why is obvious: money.

The feed clearly fueling much of the bullshit here is one of the OG sins: greed. Many people want “Web3” to win because it means a quick buck. It has been so long since the last massive new tech platform rose — mobile — and everyone has been searching and hoping for the next one ever since. In part because new platforms mean new opportunities to quickly make money. Others don’t mind a slower buck as long as the bucks are much, much larger. That’s all fine, it’s both human nature and what makes much of this work — including “Web 2.0”, of course. The difference is how closely tied to those bucks “Web3” is. Many view this as a strength — and it certainly is in a number of ways — but there’s a very real and very problematic flip side to this equation as well. All of the money printing aside, eventually people are going to lose some of those dollars, digital or not. And, sadly, it’s likely to be the people who can least afford to do so.

Anyway, that’s another rabbit hole for another trip — I haven’t even mentioned NFTs yet! — my point here is just that while there seems to be a lot to like about “Web3”, the hype is unbecoming and actually runs the risk of hurting the movement by over-promising and under-delivering. In some ways, that’s fine — and perhaps good — because just as with the hype cycles that came before, the infrastructure and learning being built right now will both enable and will pave the way for what comes next. Without question: there are a lot of smart people working in this space.

But will “Web3” transform our world? In some ways, probably! In large ways? Perhaps, but I suspect it’s a parallel track to “Web 2.0” at best, and not some full-on replacement. Worse for the current would-be “Web3” prophets, I might argue that if some aspect of “Web3” does take off in a major way, it will be via some centralized powers that arise from our best laid idealism. See also: the history of everything, ever.⁷

• Facebook, The App Store, And The Sound Of Inevitability
• The Web Is A Flat Circle

¹ My headline/image in this post from 2010 was all about The Matrix, of course. Which is timely given that we have a new Matrix which was just released. No spoilers please!

² This post, from 2014, was spurred by one Chris Dixon wrote. Dixon, of course, is right at the center of the current debate as well!

³ I still think it’s ridiculous that people could try to use the term “Web3” without going for “w3b” — it’s right there! Also, I imagine “Web3” falls the way of “Information Superhighway” eventually.

⁴ I feel like Aaron Levie has been making this point over and over again for weeks now in smart and nuanced ways. And he’s right — you should read those tweets! But it’s hard as hell to follow all of them on Twitter. Probably because Twitter needs to be decentralized so it can work as well and be as user friendly as crypto wallets, obviously.

⁵ Here’s where I’ll disclaim that while the fund where I’m a partner is a sister company to one of those advertising behemoths, my thoughts are my own here, obviously.

⁶ Sidenote: surely I’m not alone in thinking that “unleashed” Jack Dorsey versus a16z is just a proxy battle for BTC vs. ETH, right? RIGHT?

⁷ Including, of course, the current state of crypto!

Hyp3 was originally published in 500ish on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.