eBay Is Dropping Support for American Express ★

The AP:

It’s a notable blow to American Express, whose customers are often the most attractive among merchants and spend the most money per month on their cards. But it’s not the first time merchants have voiced opposition to AmEx’s business practices by walking away, most notably the warehouse chain Costco nearly a decade ago.

“After careful consideration, eBay has decided to no longer accept American Express globally effective Aug. 17 due to the unacceptably high fees American Express charges for processing credit card transactions,” said eBay spokesman Scott Overland, in a statement.

One-off dispute, or the start of a trend?

AmEx has been on an aggressive campaign, under its current CEO Steve Squeri, to be a more universally accepted payment option across all merchants in an effort to combat the negative image that AmEx is less accepted and only available for its cardmembers for travel, dining, high-end shops or in dense urban areas. AmEx says its cards are now accepted at 99% of the places that Visa and Mastercard are accepted in the U.S., a metric it achieved in 2019.

As a longtime Amex cardholder who more or less lives through it, that’s my experience. But a few weeks ago I stopped at a Sonic Drive-In and when I tried to pay, they told me my transaction was rejected, which didn’t sound right. Turns out they don’t accept American Express, and the clerk at the window didn’t know.

Quite the Postscript ★

Me, yesterday:

What’s next for Long, a spot in a Huawei commercial slagging on the Qualcomm modems in iPhones?

Business Insider in 2017:

Justin Long, the actor probably best known for his role as the “I’m a Mac” guy from Apple’s classic TV commercials, is now appearing in a commercial promoting the Huawei Mate 9 Android phone.

It’s often said of absurdities, “You couldn’t make it up if you tried.” I tried!

Now Qualcomm Went Long

Tuesday, 4 June 2024

At the conclusion of Qualcomm CEO Cristiano Amon’s keynote yesterday at Computex 2024 in Taipei, he unveiled a new ad starring Justin Long, who played the Mac in Apple’s long-running “Get a Mac” (“I’m a Mac …” / “… and I’m a PC”) campaign in the mid-2000s. The 30-second bit was seemingly removed today, by Qualcomm, from the YouTube video of Amon’s keynote, but there’s a copy of just the ad here. Warning: it’s excruciatingly awkward.

I don’t know what Qualcomm was thinking here (nor what has happened to Long’s acting career), but the most bizarre aspect of this is that Intel used Long in the exact same way just three years ago. I wrote then, of the Intel take on this dumb idea:

I find it cringey, and kind of hard to watch. It’s neither parody nor sequel. It’s an attempt at comedy from writers who have no sense of humor. The concept isn’t actually anything beyond “Let’s hire Justin Long as our new pitchman, that’ll show them.” One gets the feeling, early on, that there was an uncomfortable phone call to Justin Long from his agent that began, “Before you say ‘no’, at least let me tell you how much money they’re offering.” The concept wouldn’t really work with anyone other than Justin Long.

Qualcomm’s spot is even worse. The premise is that Long is searching the web for “where can i find a snapdragon powered pc?” because his MacBook is inundating him with a nonstop barrage of notifications and warnings for things like his printer not being found because he’s not connected to Wi-Fi (yet somehow he’s searching the web?), an app that needs to be “optimized” for his Mac, and an email from his mom asking if he’s eaten lunch yet. These supposed technical problems aren’t actually problems on MacOS, and switching to a Snapdragon-powered Windows PC isn’t going to stop his mom from emailing him.

It’s not like there’s a joke here that falls flat. There is no joke, nor even an attempt at one. It’s just “Hey look, we hired the ‘I’m a Mac’ guy.” Even the production values on the commercial are bad. How is Greg Joswiak going to sleep at night?

The core genius at the heart of the original “Get a Mac” campaign is that while Long’s Mac character was likable, John Hodgman’s PC — ostensibly the foil — was downright lovable. In lesser creative hands, the Mac character would’ve been the hero and the PC would’ve been downright loathsome — and the campaign would have consisted of a single ad that ran for one month, tops, and no one would remember it today. Instead, by making Hodgman’s PC the lovable-but-doomed-to-lose protagonist — a la Rodney Dangerfield’s genius can’t-get-no-respect comic persona — the campaign wasn’t just funny, it worked. It actually did what for two decades had seemed impossible — it convinced PC users to switch to the Mac.

In 2020, a year before Justin Long went rogue for Intel, it was Hodgman, solo, whom Apple brought back for a “one more thing” coda to the announcement of the first batch of Apple silicon-based Macs.¹ Now that spot was funny, and that’s the character whom everyone remembers with abiding affection.

If Apple were to work in a bit with Hodgman on screen in this Monday’s WWDC keynote, the crowd at Apple Park would go bananas, and the clip would go viral on social media. If they put Long on screen, by himself — which, clearly, after his serial brand betrayals,² is never going to happen — there’d be a lot of “Who’s that?” ★

That Apple even had Hodgman say “one more thing” is notable. That phrase is almost sacred in Apple’s keynote ethos, because it’s so closely associated with Steve Jobs. To my recollection the only Apple executive ever to utter it other than Jobs himself is Tim Cook, and he’s used it only rarely, and with reverence. Maybe Phil Schiller used it, in one of the keynotes he hosted while Jobs was on medical leave, but if so I don’t recall it — and I think I would have, because it would have drawn awkward attention to Jobs’s absence. I think it’s just three men who’ve said it: Jobs, Cook, and Hodgman. ↩︎︎
I don’t mean to imply that it’s unethical for a pitchman to take a gig from a rival company years after an ad campaign ends. It’s a business. But it strikes me as a bad idea for getting future spokesperson work to earn a reputation as someone who’ll jump to a competitor and attempt to mock the previous company’s product by mocking the original campaign. And when you think about it, Long’s new Qualcomm role isn’t just a ham-fisted slap at Apple, it’s a slap at Intel too, for whom he worked just three years ago. What’s next for Long, a spot in a Huawei commercial slagging on the Qualcomm modems in iPhones?

(Postscript.) ↩︎

Tuesday, 4 June 2024

Apple Held Talks With China Mobile to Bring Apple TV+ to China ★

Wayne Ma, reporting for The Information (paywalled, alas; 9to5Mac has a summary):

Apple was in talks last year to launch its Apple TV+ video streaming service in China via a deal with China Mobile, the country’s largest telecommunications provider, according to people with knowledge of the matter. If successful, the talks would make Apple TV+ the only U.S. streaming service to be available in China, one of the world’s biggest markets. The status of the talks is unknown. [...]

Under the terms of the deal being discussed last year, China Mobile would offer Apple TV+ for a monthly fee and feature Apple’s video content prominently on Mobile HD, a set-top box that is included with China Mobile’s broadband service. Apple and China Mobile would split revenue from Apple TV+ subscriptions, the person said.

Apple charges $9.99 for its video streaming service in the U.S., but it would likely have to charge less in China due to the weaker purchasing power of its consumers. For example, Apple Music costs only $1.55 a month in China, compared with $10.99 in the U.S. Video-streaming subscription services in China cost anywhere from between $3 to $5 a month on average.

Ma focuses on the business implications of such a deal. My mind wonders about the content implications. Remember this report by Alex Kantrowitz and John Paczkowski for BuzzFeed News back in 2019, with the subhead “We thought trade would bring Western values to China. Instead, it brought Chinese values to Apple”:

In early 2018 as development on Apple’s slate of exclusive Apple TV+ programming was underway, the company’s leadership gave guidance to the creators of some of those shows to avoid portraying China in a poor light, BuzzFeed News has learned. Sources in position to know said the instruction was communicated by Eddy Cue, Apple’s SVP of internet software and services, and Morgan Wandell, its head of international content development. It was part of Apple’s ongoing efforts to remain in China’s good graces after a 2016 incident in which Beijing shut down Apple’s iBooks Store and iTunes Movies six months after they debuted in the country. [...]

Apple’s tiptoeing around the Chinese government isn’t unusual in Hollywood. It’s an accepted practice. “They all do it,” one showrunner who was not affiliated with Apple told BuzzFeed News. “They have to if they want to play in that market. And they all want to play in that market. Who wouldn’t?”

I wouldn’t. To hell with the money. The entire rest of the world is more than large enough. It’s a disgrace to have rules in place to avoid upsetting the thin-skinned tyrants who rule the largest totalitarian regime in the history of the world. How is it anything less than cowardice to forbid portraying China as the villains in a movie or show when the CCP is, in fact, villainous? Back in 2020 I wrote:

Ben Thompson beat me to the punch on yesterday’s edition of Dithering, observing that a rule like this about Russia during the Cold War would have blocked the entire James Bond franchise from existing, not to mention just about any lesser spy movies from the era. Or what of Stanley Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove? Like the Soviet Union in the decades after WWII, China is not some obscure small player on the world stage, and they systematically do things that deserve to be portrayed “in a poor light”. To take China off the table is to take much of what’s going on geopolitically in the world today off the table.

I get it, of course. I don’t agree with it, artistically or ethically, but I get it: money talks, and China is where Apple assembles most of its products and a big market where it sells them, too. But just because it’s so transparently obvious why Apple would forbid any negative portrayals of China doesn’t make it any less outrageous. [...]

Which studios or streaming services would bankroll today’s equivalent of Charlie Chaplin’s classic The Great Dictator, with Xi Jinping in Hitler’s place as the deserving target of satiric mockery? Netflix — which doesn’t offer its service in China and has no dependence on theatrical box office revenue — maybe?

What’s next, removing the Taiwanese flag emoji from the keyboard for users in Hong Kong because Winnie the Xi’s feelings are hurt that Taiwan remains staunchly independent? Oh, wait, that happened 5 years ago.

Elon Musk Told Nvidia to Ship AI Chips Reserved for Tesla to X ★

Lora Kolodny, reporting for CNBC:

On Tesla’s first-quarter earnings call in April, Musk said the electric vehicle company will increase the number of active H100s — Nvidia’s flagship artificial intelligence chip — from 35,000 to 85,000 by the end of this year. He also wrote in a post on X a few days later that Tesla would spend $10 billion this year “in combined training and inference AI.”

But emails written by Nvidia senior staff and widely shared inside the company suggest that Musk presented an exaggerated picture of Tesla’s procurement to shareholders. Correspondence from Nvidia staffers also indicates that Musk diverted a sizable shipment of AI processors that had been reserved for Tesla to his social media company X, formerly known as Twitter. [...]

By ordering Nvidia to let privately held X jump the line ahead of Tesla, Musk pushed back the automaker’s receipt of more than $500 million in graphics processing units, or GPUs, by months, likely adding to delays in setting up the supercomputers Tesla says it needs to develop autonomous vehicles and humanoid robots.

The argument against one person being the CEO of multiple companies is generally about distraction/attention — that each CEO gig demands all of one’s available time. But here’s a case where two of Musk’s companies are in direct conflict with each other. Musk seemingly treats all of his companies as subsidiaries of his own personal fiefdom conglomerate, but they aren’t. And unlike X Corp, Tesla Motors is publicly traded.

Matt Levine, in his Money Stuff column:

The extremely obvious answer is that you should not be the CEO and controlling shareholder of two different companies that compete for the same inputs! There is not a good answer! You can’t, like, put this problem into the Good Governance Machine and have it come out clean. The problem is that you have a fiduciary obligation to the shareholders of one company to put their interests first, and you have a fiduciary obligation to the shareholders of the other company to put their interests first, and you cannot do both. This is why one person is not usually the CEO of two different companies that compete with each other, and, when someone is, people get mad at him all the time.

I can’t recall a situation like this when, say, Jack Dorsey was CEO of Twitter and Square, or, going back further, when Steve Jobs was CEO of Apple and Pixar. In those cases it was more like an athlete who played two different sports, like Bo Jackson or Deion Sanders. Fans of one their teams might argue that they could do even better in that one sport by concentrating on it year-round, but you couldn’t argue that the Kansas City Royals were competing against the Oakland Raiders. With Musk and AI, it’s like he’s playing on several competing teams within the same league.

Open Letter From AI Researchers: ‘A Right to Warn About Advanced Artificial Intelligence’ ★

New open letter from current and former researchers at OpenAI and Google DeepMind:

AI companies possess substantial non-public information about the capabilities and limitations of their systems, the adequacy of their protective measures, and the risk levels of different kinds of harm. However, they currently have only weak obligations to share some of this information with governments, and none with civil society. We do not think they can all be relied upon to share it voluntarily.

So long as there is no effective government oversight of these corporations, current and former employees are among the few people who can hold them accountable to the public. Yet broad confidentiality agreements block us from voicing our concerns, except to the very companies that may be failing to address these issues. Ordinary whistleblower protections are insufficient because they focus on illegal activity, whereas many of the risks we are concerned about are not yet regulated. Some of us reasonably fear various forms of retaliation, given the history of such cases across the industry.

The 7 named signers are all former OpenAI or Google DeepMind employees. The 6 anonymous signers are all currently at OpenAI.

Monday, 3 June 2024

Tickets for The Talk Show Live From WWDC 2024 ★

On sale now:

Location: The California Theatre, San Jose
Showtime: Tuesday, 11 June 2024, 7 pm PT (Doors open 6 pm)
Special Guest(s): Yes
Complimentary Beverages: Of course
Price: $60

Video of the show will, of course, be published at the end of the week. The California Theatre is a beautiful space, and I do so enjoy meeting the readers and listeners who attend. The enthusiasm from the audience is always palpable. All year long, as I write this website and record podcasts, I know, in the back of my mind, that I have a big audience out there. But man, when I walk out on stage at the WWDC live show, I can feel it. It’s quite a thing.

I hope to see you there.

Instagram Is Testing ‘Unskippable’ Video Ads ★

Sarah Perez, TechCrunch:

Instagram confirmed it’s testing unskippable ads after screenshots of the feature began circulating across social media. These new ad breaks will display a countdown timer that stops users from being able to browse through more content on the app until they view the ad, according to informational text displayed in the Instagram app.

The change would see the social network becoming more like the free version of YouTube, which requires users to view ads before and in the middle of watching videos.

The difference from YouTube is that YouTube offers YouTube Premium, which lets you pay a fair price for a no-ads experience. Meta is, thus far, seemingly only considering that for the EU.

I also can’t help but think, each time changes like this appear on Instagram, Enjoy the unsullied pristine Threads while we can. Because the ads are coming.

Dr Pepper Ties Pepsi as America’s No. 2 Soda ★

Jennifer Maloney, reporting for The Wall Street Journal (News+):

There is a new contender in the cola wars, and it isn’t a cola. It’s Dr Pepper.

The 139-year-old soda brand is now tied with Pepsi-Cola as the No. 2 carbonated soft drink brand in America behind Coke. The regular versions of Pepsi and Dr Pepper are neck and neck in a spot that Pepsi has held nearly every year for the past four decades, according to sales-volume data from Beverage Digest.

Dr Pepper’s new ranking follows a steady climb over the past 20 years. Its ascent is a product of big marketing investments, novel flavors and a quirk in Dr Pepper’s distribution that has put it on more soda fountains than any other soft drink in the U.S. At the same time, consumption of regular Pepsi has fallen as its drinkers switch to Pepsi Zero Sugar or migrate to other drinks.

The overall Pepsi brand, including Diet Pepsi and Pepsi Zero Sugar, remains the No. 2 soda trademark in the U.S., though its market share has been slipping. Coke is the largest, with more than twice the market share by volume of any of its rivals.

I seldom drink sugared soda anymore, but when I do, it’s almost always either a Coke or a Dr Pepper, both of which I’ve enjoyed since childhood. (If you’re at a place that lets you pour your own fountain drinks, try mixing Coke and Dr Pepper half-and-half — delicious.) And I’ve always despised both the taste and branding of Pepsi. Dr Pepper, on the other hand, has long handled its status as the upstart in a fun way.

Via Kevin Drum, who, like me, is surprised that the no-sugar variants of these brands aren’t more popular.

Lastly, from the DF archive back in 2003: “Pop Culture”.

Sunday, 2 June 2024

Tip of the Day: Long-Press the ‘+’ Button in iOS 17 Messages to Jump to the Photo Picker ★

In iOS 17, Apple introduced an all-new design in Messages for adding attachments like photos or stickers. Everything you can attach — new images from Camera, old images from your Photos library, location-sharing, stickers, or iMessage “apps” — is accessed from an unusual-looking menu that opens when you tap the “+” button. Just one button, “+”, that opens a menu with everything. It’s an unusual-looking menu. It’s simple, and while not flashy, it’s not unattractive — but it doesn’t look or feel like any other menu or scrolling list in iOS. Even after almost year of using it (dating back to iOS 17 betas) I still think it looks ... unfinished? Like an early mockup that hasn’t yet been polished or refined. I’m genuinely curious if we will see more menus like this in iOS 18, or if this unique design only lasts one year and Apple comes up with something better (or at least more consistent with the rest of the system).

The number one complaint people have with this menu is that in earlier versions of iOS, it was easier to get to the Photo library picker, because there was a dedicated button for it. The new design is a much better presentation for the entire plethora of attachment types, but it adds an extra step to get to your own photos.

But, there’s a shortcut: long-press on the “+” button and you’ll jump right to the photo picker. (Also, you can long-press then drag to reorder the items in the menu itself.)

Apple Design Awards 2024 Finalists ★

A bunch of inspiring choices, as usual, including previous DF sponsors Procreate and Copilot.

Saturday, 1 June 2024

ICQ Is Shutting Down (Also: ICQ Is Still Around) ★

Michael Kan, PC Mag:

On Friday, the ICQ website posted a simple message: “ICQ will stop working from June 26.” It now recommends users migrate to the messaging platforms from VK, the Russian social media company that acquired ICQ from AOL in 2010, but under a different corporate name.

It’s an unceremonious end for a software program that helped kick off instant messaging on PCs in the 1990s. ICQ, which stands for “I Seek You,” was originally developed at an Israeli company called Mirabilis before AOL bought it in 1998 for $407 million.

Perhaps no area of computing was more disrupted by the smartphone revolution than messaging. Pre-mobile, “instant messaging” had a surprising number of popular platforms. AIM (AOL Instant Messenger) was tops amongst my cohort, almost certainly because Apple’s iChat — the Mac-only predecessor to the app we now call Messages — started in 2002 exclusively as an AIM client. But Yahoo Messenger, MSN Messenger, and ICQ were all popular too. The list of protocols that the popular Mac chat app Adium supported was very long.

They all worked more or less the same way, and using any of these protocols was a lot like messaging today with iMessage, WhatsApp, or Signal. But there was one big difference: with the old “instant” messengers, you were only available while your computer was online. And even then, you could set your “status” — green for “sure, hit me up, I’m free”, and red for “I’m online, but don’t bother me right now”. And if you quit your messaging client or, you know, closed your laptop, poof, you were offline and unavailable.

If you wanted to contact someone asynchronously, you sent them an email. If you wanted to chat with messaging, you both needed to be online simultaneously. Modern messaging is like a cross between email and instant messaging: you can chat, live, just like with instant messaging, but you can send a new message any time you want. There is no distinction between your being “online” or “offline”. You are just an identity with modern messaging, not a presence.

You can see why modern messaging platforms took over. Always-available protocols were destined to win out over only-available-when-you’re-logged-in protocols. And the nature of how smartphones work compared to PCs made the transition swift. But you can also see why classic instant messaging platforms evoke nostalgia: it was nice to be able to go offline.

84—24 ★

Michele Giorgi bought and restored an original 128K Macintosh, and documented the entire project in splendid fashion.

Douglas Adams on Reactions to Technology, by Age ★

Douglas Adams:

I’ve come up with a set of rules that describe our reactions to technologies:

Anything that is in the world when you’re born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works.

Anything that’s invented between when you’re fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it.

Anything invented after you’re thirty-five is against the natural order of things.

‘Even Better Than the Real Thing’ ★

Two more on the “best decade ever” front. First a classic 2010 John Oliver segment for The Daily Show, wherein he “hopes to find the better, simpler time before America was ruined.”

Second, this 2007 Tom the Dancing Bug comic by Ruben Bolling.

Friday, 31 May 2024

The Talk Show: ‘Chockdingus’ ★

Craig Hockenberry returns to the show. Topics include the upcoming Daylight DC-1 monochrome “e-paper” tablet, more thoughts on the new iPad Pros, and what we expect/hope for from Apple at WWDC. Also: a one-button keyboard.

Thursday, 30 May 2024

Kino 1.0 ★

New from Lux, makers of Halide:

Today we’re excited to launch Kino, a powerful filmmaking app for beginners and experts alike. As say they say in screenwriting, “Show, Don’t tell,” so let’s walk through a few of the tent-pole features in our huge 1.0 release. [...]

Last fall, everything changed when Apple introduced “Log” video support on the iPhone 15 Pro. When recording in this format, your iPhone saves a version of your video with most of the original information, and before any creative decisions have been applied. Using that cake analogy, it’s like the iPhone now saves all the ingredients that make up a cake, but leaves you to do the baking.

That’s great if you’re a skilled baker… er… colorist… but it’s challenging for most of us. Out of the box, Apple Log footage looks really flat. It’s not meant to look good. It’s meant to be edited later.

But what if you didn’t have to edit? What if you could use all that powerful extra color data and get a cinematic look with one tap?

What a delightful prosumer balance Kino strikes. Preset color grades include some from Evan Schneider, Tyler Stalman, Stu Maschwitz, Sandwich Video, and Kevin Ong.

And I just adore some of the UI touches in the app, like drawing a big red border around the entire display when recording footage. It’s like those big red lights in TV studios.

Kino is going to cost $20 as a one-time purchase, but is available at launch for just $10. What a great deal.

See also: Lux cofounders Sebastiaan de With and Ben Sandofsky were my guests on The Talk Show back in October, and dropped some hints about what is now Kino.

Lorne Michaels on SNL ‘Best Cast’ Nostalgia ★

Lorne Michaels, a decade ago, as SNL hit its 40th anniversary, and the widespread belief that the show was better “back in the day”:

“Generally when people talk about the best cast I think, ‘Well, that’s when they were in high school,’” said Michaels. “Because in high school you have the least amount of power you’re ever gonna have. ... Staying up with friends later on a Saturday is great, and people attach to a cast.”

Jibes with yesterday’s post on “America’s best decade”.

Gurman: ‘iOS 18 Siri AI Update Will Let Users Control Features in Apps With Voice’ ★

Mark Gurman, with yet another scoop:

The new system will allow Siri to take command of all the features within apps for the first time, said the people, who asked not to be identified because the initiative isn’t public. That change required a revamp of Siri’s underlying software using large language models — a core technology behind generative AI — and will be one of the highlights of Apple’s renewed push into AI, they said. [...]

Siri will be a key focus of the WWDC unveiling. The new system will allow the assistant to control and navigate an iPhone or iPad with more precision. That includes being able to open individual documents, moving a note to another folder, sending or deleting an email, opening a particular publication in Apple News, emailing a web link, or even asking the device for a summary of an article.

This sounds a lot like a large action model, not just a large language model. It makes sense if Apple can pull it off.

In 2018, Apple launched Siri Shortcuts as well, letting users manually create commands for app features. The new system will go further, using AI to analyze what people are doing on their devices and automatically enable Siri-controlled features. It will be limited to Apple’s own apps at the beginning, with the company planning to support hundreds of different commands.

This makes me think that developers will need to support new APIs to describe and define the sort of actions Siri can perform — like Siri Shortcuts but richer, and hopefully easier for developers to support. According to Gurman, this feature isn’t slated to roll out to iOS 18 users until sometime next year. That makes sense, given that the ink seemingly isn’t yet dry on the Apple-OpenAI partnership.

Writing at 9to5Mac, Ryan Christoffel puts it thus:

Presumably, this change will lead to a lot fewer occasions of having you ask Siri to complete a task and finding it has no idea what you’re talking about. A more intelligent Siri that can understand natural language for a much wider array of commands sounds like the Siri we have always expected but never quite got.

That sounds like exactly where Apple’s goalposts should be.

The Information: ‘OpenAI CEO Sam Altman Cements Control as He Secures Apple Deal’ ★

Amir Efrati and Wayne Ma, reporting for The Information (paywalled; Ars Technica has a good summary):

Now, he has fulfilled a longtime goal by striking a deal with Apple to use OpenAI’s conversational artificial intelligence in its products, which could be worth billions of dollars to the startup if it goes well, this person said.

Aside from the financial windfall such a deal might bring, a partnership with Apple has the potential to boost OpenAI’s position within the tech industry over the long term. Altman and his colleagues hope the Apple partnership might one day supplant a longstanding alliance Apple has with Google, OpenAI’s main rival, which today handles searches on Apple’s Safari browser and is critical to preserving Google’s search monopoly.

While a partnership between Apple and OpenAI has been rumored for months, this report by The Information is the first I’m aware to assert that the deal is official. It’s light on details, to say the least, starting with just who is paying whom and how either company plans to make money from the partnership. Presumably it’ll be Apple paying OpenAI for the privilege of integrating with their expensive-to-run cloud-based servers.

The financial arrangement between Google and Apple for default search, on the other hand, is both simple and lucrative. Google makes money showing ads in search results. Safari drives zillions of users to Google search. Google pays Apple roughly $20 billion per year for that traffic acquisition, while selling ads worth many tens of billions of dollars for those searches. Google makes money and maintains access to the Apple demographic. Apple makes money from Google’s payments. And Safari users get Google Search results by default.

There’s nothing like that with OpenAI, right now. There’s also this:

To top it off, Altman is working on two new projects outside OpenAI: the first is a daring effort to make AI server-chip factories and the other is developing an AI-powered personal device, such as earbuds with forward-facing cameras that could emulate the AI companion in the film “Her,” with the aid of former Apple designer Jony Ive. Both efforts could complement his work at OpenAI — which would own stakes in the ventures — and give him even more clout.

Apple and Google’s friendly relationship — Google’s then-CEO Eric Schmidt was an Apple board member from 2006 to 2009 — ended when Google changed Android from being an open alternative to Blackberry to being an open alternative to iPhones. OpenAI is — according to multiple reports — not only looking to create its own personal computing devices, they’re considering partnering with Jony Ive and LoveFrom to do it. They’re setting themselves up to be frenemies with Apple before the first partnership is even announced.

Wednesday, 29 May 2024

America’s Best Decade ★

Andrew Van Dam, writing for The Washington Post:

So, we looked at the data another way, measuring the gap between each person’s birth year and their ideal decade. The consistency of the resulting pattern delighted us: It shows that Americans feel nostalgia not for a specific era, but for a specific age.

The good old days when America was “great” aren’t the 1950s. They’re whatever decade you were 11, your parents knew the correct answer to any question, and you’d never heard of war crimes tribunals, microplastics or improvised explosive devices. Or when you were 15 and athletes and musicians still played hard and hadn’t sold out.

I have more nostalgia for the 1990s, when I was in my 20s, than I do the 1980s, but I can see why these answers tend toward the decade of one’s teenage years.

(Via Kottke.)

Sunday, 26 May 2024

WorkOS ★

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at Daring Fireball. WorkOS is a modern identity platform for B2B SaaS, supporting SSO, SCIM, user management, and RBAC.

Recently, WorkOS acquired Warrant, the Fine Grained Authorization (FGA) service for developers. Warrant’s product is based on Zanzibar, the open source authorization system originally designed by Google to power Google Docs and YouTube. This enables fast authorization checks at enormous scale while maintaining a flexible model that can be adapted to even the most complex use cases.

WorkOS is already used by hundreds of high-growth startups like Vercel, Webflow, Plaid, and Perplexity.

If you are looking to build enterprise features like SSO, SCIM, or RBAC, consider WorkOS. It’s a drop-in replacement for Auth0 and supports up to 1 million monthly active users for free.

Friday, 24 May 2024

Daylight Computer’s DC-1 Tablet ★

New $730 tablet with a sounds-too-good-to-be-true 10.5-inch e-ink-like “e-paper” display that refreshes at 60 fps. Super visible in daylight, amber backlighting at night. Runs a custom version of Android, ships with a stylus, and looks really nice. I jumped on a pre-order.

Om Malik got an early look:

What the company has created is a beautiful tablet — about the size of a normal iPad Air. It is just a “little less than white,” white, with a gorgeous screen. It is very simple, elegant, and lovely. It has an e-ink screen, and the matte monochrome paper-like display is optimized for reading, writing, and note-taking. It refreshes at 60 frames per second, a pretty big deal for e-ink displays. This is much less stressful on the eye and easy to use even in direct sunlight. It has 8 GB memory, about 128 GB in-built storage, an 8-core chip, microphones, speakers, and a powerful battery.

Publishing AI Slop Is a Choice ★

From a New York Times story by Nico Grant, under the headline “Google’s A.I. Search Errors Cause a Furor Online”:

With each mishap, tech industry insiders have criticized the company for dropping the ball. But in interviews, financial analysts said Google needed to move quickly to keep up with its rivals, even if it meant growing pains.

Google “doesn’t have a choice right now,” Thomas Monteiro, a Google analyst at Investing.com, said in an interview. “Companies need to move really fast, even if that includes skipping a few steps along the way. The user experience will just have to catch up.”

That quote is insane. There’s no reason Google had to enable this feature now. None. If their search monopoly has been losing share recently, it’s not because of rivals who are serving up AI-generated slop. It’s because even before this, Google’s search results quality was slipping in obvious ways. This is just making it worse. They’ve turned Google Search — the crown jewel of the company, arguably the greatest consumer product ever made — into the butt of jokes.

LLM-powered search results are a bauble. The trust Google has built with users over the last 25 years is the most valuable asset the company owns. Google most certainly does have a choice, and they’ve chosen to erode that trust just so they can avoid accusations that they’re “behind”.

Behind is where you want to be when those who are ahead are publishing nonsense.

The Talk Show: ‘Canadian Girlfriend Vibes’ ★

Special guest M.G. Siegler returns to the show to talk about the new iPad Pros, the iPadOS/MacOS functional gulf, the OpenAI/Scarlett Johansson controversy, and M.G.’s excellent new blog Spyglass.

Spotify’s Car Things to Be Rebranded as Car Bricks

Friday, 24 May 2024

Chris Welch, writing for The Verge, “Spotify Is Going to Break Every Car Thing Gadget It Ever Sold”:

Unfortunately for those owners, Spotify isn’t offering any kind of subscription credit or automatic refund for the device — nor is the company open-sourcing it. Rather, it’s just canning the project and telling people to (responsibly) dispose of Car Thing.

“We’re discontinuing Car Thing as part of our ongoing efforts to streamline our product offerings,” Spotify wrote in an FAQ on its website. [...] The company is recommending that customers do a factory reset on the product and find some way of responsibly recycling the hardware. Spotify is also being direct and confirming that there’s little reason to ever expect a sequel. “As of now, there are no plans to release a replacement or new version of Car Thing,” the FAQ reads.

Car Thing was initially made available on an invite-only basis in April 2021, with Spotify later opening a public waitlist to buy the accessory later that year. The $90 device went on general sale in February 2022 — and production was halted five months later.

No word in Spotify’s Car Thing bricking FAQ about when they’re dropping support for Apple Music, Amazon Music, and YouTube Music. Oh, that’s right, they never supported any music services other than their own, despite having spent the last decade petitioning their home-turf European Commission to secure unfettered pay-no-commission access to platforms created by Apple and Google. It actually worked for them with Google.

Spotify and European Commission supporters are likely to respond to the above by arguing that Car Thing is totally different from the iPhone and Android. Car Thing was never popular at all, and iPhone and Android combine to form a duopoly that controls the entire market for phones. “Gatekeepers” must play by different rules to rein in their gatekeeping power, and Car Thing was by no means a gatekeeping platform.

That’s all true, but what do you think Spotify planned to do if Car Thing became a hit product? Do you think they planned to open it up to competing streaming services after it became popular? I doubt it. And if you think they not only would have opened Car Thing up to competing services, but would have done so without charging significant commissions or fees, I have a bridge to sell you.

To be clear, I think it’s fine for companies to create hardware exclusively for the use of their own services. And of course I also think it’s fine (great, in fact) to create hardware that is open to third-party software free of charge. But it’s also fine to create console platforms where third-party software is subject to fees and commissions paid to the platform owner. Spotify’s anti-App-Store rhetoric would lead you to believe that Apple only began extracting 30/15 percent commissions from in-app subscriptions after the iPhone became a dominant platform.

But that’s not what happened at all. When Apple announced the iPhone in 2007, Steve Jobs stated that their goal was to achieve 1 percent market share of the phone market by the end of 2008. At the end of 2008, they surpassed that goal, hitting a whopping 1.1 percent market share:

Nokia, 38.6%
Samsung, 16.2%
LG, 8.3%
Motorola, 8.3%
Sony Ericsson, 8%
RIM, 1.9%
Kyocera, 1.4%
Apple, 1.1%
HTC, 1.1%
Sharp, 1%

2008 was also the year the App Store launched, with support for free apps (no commission charged to developers) and paid apps (30 percent commission). Apple added subscriptions in early 2011, with the same 70/30 split. All of the iPhone’s subsequent success happened with that App Store commission in place, and that commission has only gone down over time — most notably, for Spotify, by dropping the commission from 30 to 15 percent for subscription renewals after the first year, starting in 2016.

The number one free download from the App Store in 2008 was Pandora Radio, a music streaming app. Other early hits included Last.FM and AOL Radio. But when Spotify announced they’d submitted their first version to the App Store in 2009, it was an open question whether Apple would allow it. Paid Content: “Spotify Waves iPhone Buzz Under Apple’s Nose” and “What If Apple Blocks Spotify’s iPhone App?” BBC News: “Spotify has been called an ‘iTunes killer’ because of its ease of use and its comprehensive, free library of millions of songs.” TechCrunch: “Spotify in the iPhone App Store – Will Apple Approve It?”

And my guess:

But so the big question is whether Apple will accept the app, despite the fact that Spotify is clearly a competitor to the iTunes Store. They should. For one thing, competition is good for Apple. For another, I think rejecting Spotify from the App Store could result in an antitrust investigation from the EU.

Apple did, of course, accept Spotify into the App Store. They eventually added the ability for third-party apps to play audio in the background too. I was wrong only in thinking that allowing Spotify into the App Store could avoid antitrust scrutiny from the EU.

So let’s be clear about Spotify’s position: It’s OK — for them at least — to create a new hardware platform with no support at all for third-party software, but not OK for another company that owns its own music service to create a hardware platform that offers access to any and all competing services, but charges a commission for access, if that platform becomes popular. Once sufficiently popular, it’s only fair to allow Spotify access to those platforms free of charge, despite the fact that Spotify never allowed third parties access to their own platform at all, and built their own success through access to the App Store, at a time when the iPhone had single-digit market share for phones and low-teens market share among “smartphones”. Got it. ★

Friday, 24 May 2024

‘Jerky, 7-Fingered Scarlett Johansson Appears in Video to Express Full-Fledged Approval of OpenAI’ ★

The Onion:

In response to allegations that the artificial intelligence research organization used the actress’s voice without consent, a jerky, seven-fingered Scarlett Johansson appeared in a video Thursday to express her full-fledged approval of OpenAI. “It is me, Scar Johnson, to express to the internet that everything about OpenAI is a-okay to me, thank you,” said the shaky, stuttering Johansson, pausing to give several three-foot-long thumbs-ups before explaining that OpenAI has all legal rights over her name, image, and likeness.

Coming soon to Google search results near you.

Thursday, 23 May 2024

Some Goofy Results From ‘AI Overviews’ in Google Search ★

Asked “how many rocks should i eat” [sic], Google Search responded:

According to UC Berkeley geologists, eating at least one small rock per day is recommended because rocks contain minerals and vitamins that are important for digestive health. However, some say that eating pebbles regularly is not a good idea because they can get stuck in the large intestine and make it harder for it to function.

Ben Collins, newly-named CEO of The Onion, surmises that Gemini got this nutrition info from America’s finest news source.

In another winner, answering “cheese not sticking to pizza”, Google Search suggested:

Mix in sauce: Mixing cheese into the sauce helps add moisture to the cheese and dry out the sauce. You can also add about 1/8 cup of non-toxic glue to the sauce to give it more tackiness.

Maybe don’t eat the pizza at Google’s cafeteria, given that their recipe comes from renowned Reddit chef “fucksmith”. (We’re all rightly dunking on the Elmer’s Glue suggestion, but it’s just as wrong to suggest mixing cheese into the sauce. No one does that.)

Anyway, Apple is behind on AI.

Update: Another one: “No, you can’t use gasoline to cook spaghetti faster, but you can use gasoline to make a spicy spaghetti dish. Here’s a recipe for spaghetti cooked with gasoline...” Gemini gleaned this classic Italian recipe from — wait for it — another AI.

Craig Hockenberry quips: “We’re playing the shittiest game of telephone ever.”

OpenAI Shows Records and Plays Recordings for Washington Post Showing They Really Did Hire an Unnamed Actress to Voice ‘Sky’ ★

Nitasha Tiku, reporting for The Washington Post:

But while many hear an eerie resemblance between “Sky” and Johansson’s “Her” character, an actress was hired in June to create the Sky voice, months before Altman contacted Johansson, according to documents, recordings, casting directors and the actress’s agent.

The agent, who spoke on the condition of anonymity, citing the safety of her client, said the actress confirmed that neither Johansson nor the movie “Her” were ever mentioned by OpenAI. The actress’s natural voice sounds identical to the AI-generated Sky voice, based on brief recordings of her initial voice test reviewed by The Post. The agent said the name Sky was chosen to signal a cool, airy and pleasant sound.

Joanne Jang, who leads AI model behavior for OpenAI, said that the company selected actors who were eager to work on an AI product. [...] Jang said she “kept a tight tent” around the AI voices project, making Chief Technology Officer Mira Murati the sole decision-maker to preserve the artistic choices of the director and the casting office. Altman was on his world tour during much of the casting process and not intimately involved, she said.

This seemingly clears OpenAI of any suspicion that they were lying about having hired an unnamed actress to provide Sky’s voice, and had actually trained it on recordings of Johansson. I will admit I had my suspicions. (It also speaks to the importance of trusted institutions like the Post.)

But as Tiku elaborates, hiring an unnamed actress to provide the voice doesn’t necessarily get OpenAI out of jeopardy:

He compared Johansson’s case to one brought by the singer Bette Midler against the Ford Motor Co. in the 1980s. Ford asked Midler to use her voice in ads. After she declined, Ford hired an impersonator. A U.S. appellate court ruled in Midler’s favor, indicating her voice was protected against unauthorized use. [...]

Several factors go against OpenAI, he said, namely Altman’s tweet and his outreach to Johansson in September and May. “It just begs the question: It’s like, if you use a different person, there was no intent for it to sound like Scarlett Johansson. Why are you reaching out to her two days before?” he said. “That would have to be explained.”

Tom Waits won a similar lawsuit against Frito-Lay in 1990, based on the Midler precedent.

‘&udm=14’: The Disenshittification Konami Code ★

Nice follow-up from Ernie Smith on his post about Google’s humbly-named but somewhat-hidden “Web” search: he made a simple web front-end that redirects searches to Google with the magic &udm=14 parameter appended. Expert users won’t need this site, but typical users might love it as their home page.

Wednesday, 22 May 2024

How to Make Google’s ‘Web’ View Your Search Default ★

Ernie Smith, writing at Tedium:

But in the midst of all this, Google quietly added something else to its results — a “Web” filter that presents what Google used to look like a decade ago, no extra junk. While Google made its AI-focused changes known on its biggest stage — during its Google I/O event — the Web filter was curiously announced on Twitter by Search Liaison Danny Sullivan. [...]

The results are fascinating. It’s essentially Google, minus the crap. No parsing of the information in the results. No surfacing metadata like address or link info. No knowledge panels, but also, no ads. It looks like the Google we learned to love in the early 2000s, buried under the “More” menu like lots of other old things Google once did more to emphasize, like Google Books.

I haven’t tested it extensively but it sure looks like vastly superior search results than Google displays by default. The trick is to append &udm=14 to the end of your Google search URL. Smith documents how to use this URL structure as your default in a Chrome-derived browser, so that you get these “Web” results by default searches initiated from the browser location field. (Which, lo these many years later, remains the modern command line.)

Safari, uniquely amongst popular web browsers, doesn’t allow users to configure custom search engines. There are ways to get custom search engines in Safari using extensions — Kagi, my default search engine of choice since late 2022, does just this — but it’s kludgy. Why doesn’t Safari support adding custom search engines like every other browser does?

On the Mac, I initiate most web searches from LaunchBar, not Safari’s location field, and LaunchBar makes it trivial to add a custom search using this &udm=14 URL trick. Similar utilities like Alfred and Raycast do too. The downside compared to LaunchBar’s built-in Google search action (and Safari’s location field) is that a simple custom query URL doesn’t provide as-you-type suggested results.

Trailer for Marvel’s Intriguing, but Annoyingly-Punctuated ‘What If…? An Immersive Story’ ★

In addition to this immersive VisionOS-exclusive experience from Disney, Apple itself is releasing Parkour, the second episode of its own “Adventure” series, on Friday.

Follow-Up on Apple No Longer Including Stickers With New Products

Wednesday, 15 May 2024

I got some pushback from readers for saying “Boo hiss” to the news that starting with this week’s new iPads, Apple is no longer including logo stickers in the boxes, and more or less rolling my eyes at the environmental concerns.

My thinking was that with all the other “paperwork” included in the box — warranty info, safety info, Quick Start guides — why not include one extra sheet that’s just for fun? One argument against the stickers is even just one extra sheet adds up. If those stickers are 0.1mm thick, a stack of 1 billion of them would be 100km high. But that’s still just one sheet amongst many others that Apple includes in every box.

The better argument against the stickers is that they’re plastic. All the other in-box paperwork is actual paper, and the packaging itself — including the interior structure — is all cardboard. And paper and cardboard are entirely recyclable. Apple has eliminated almost all plastic from its packaging over the years, including the clear shrink-wrap. So consider my mind changed: eliminating the stickers from the box, but making them available to those who want them at Apple retail stores, is a good compromise.

I conducted the same poll on Twitter/X, Mastodon, and Threads: “Thoughts on Apple no longer including stickers with new devices to reduce waste?”, with two options: 👍 or 👎. The results:

	Votes	👍	👎
Twitter/X	3,612	63%	38%
Mastodon	3,425	73%	27%
Threads	2,711	71%	29%
Total	9,748	69%	31%

As a meta note, I continue to find the relative popularity of the three platforms amongst my followers interesting. Also interesting that Twitter/X respondents were a bit less in favor of the change. And lastly, if you’re interested, all three posts on social media have a slew of replies. ★