Linked List: January 3, 2022

Monday, 3 January 2022

Kelly Evans: ‘The iPhone Is Going Away’ 

Kelly Evans, writing last month for CNBC:

This may seem like a comical thing to say when Apple is about to potentially sell 40 million iPhones this holiday season, according to Wedbush. But the iPhone is in its sunset years. It has maybe the rest of this decade left before it’s put out to pasture. And all the buzz now is over Apple’s upcoming goggles.

VR headsets will never replace phones. I highly doubt AR glasses ever will either. The iPhone is like the Mac — a 38-year-old platform that is selling better than ever — here to stay.

‘Modest’ 

Mark Gurman’s lede sentence for his Bloomberg column this week:

After a modest set of device launches in 2021, Apple Inc. is set for a stronger 2022 — with new iPhones, AirPods and potentially a VR headset.

New M1 iMacs in May: almost universally hailed; nothing like them available for PCs. Apple has simply pantsed Intel and AMD, not just on performance-per-watt but performance, period.

iPad Pros with M1 in May: almost universally hailed, nothing like them for Android. (New iPad Mini in September, too.)

iPhones 13 in September: still the best phones in the world; camera better than ever.

Apple Watch Series 7 in October: Series 6 was undeniably the best smart watch on the market, and Apple made something altogether better: bigger screen, significantly better battery life.

14- and 16-inch MacBook Pros with M1 Pro and M1 Max: I can’t even.

New third-generation AirPods in October, and hell, they even released a new Apple TV with a good remote control this year. Calling 2021 a “modest” year for Apple device launches is just obstinately cranky. If 2021 wasn’t a great year for new Apple hardware, what year was?

Bob Lefsetz on ‘Don’t Look Up’ 

Bob Lefsetz:

We haven’t had a movie that’s captured the zeitgeist like this since Network. And that may be a better movie, but it’s not as good of a snapshot of life in these United States and the media business.

Do you feel alone? Is life confusing? Does it make no sense? Do you not even recognize our country? Then Don’t Look Up is for you. The truth is we’re shown the fiction every damn day that the center is holding. The media business functions like it’s still the twentieth century while it might as well be the twenty-third. The internet came along and blew the old world apart. It democratized the country. I’m not talking about DEMOCRACY, but democratization. Now everybody has a voice, like the feed of comments scrolling down the images in this picture. Everybody’s got a hater, EVERYBODY! Hell, they want to take Abraham Lincoln’s name off of schools. We’ve become unmoored and the distance has become too far for the rope to be thrown to reconnect us.

See also Frank Oz:

I just do not get it. Someone does something so daring & funny & needed as Don’t Look Up from Netflix and it’s being given mixed & negative reviews! What???!!! It’s our Dr. Strangelove for today! “We really did have it all, didn’t we?” Those words need to be imbedded in our souls!

John Madden, Teacher 

Bryan Curtis, writing for The Ringer:

One of the coolest things about John Madden is that he was an academic. It was a brief run, but still. In 1979, after Madden quit as head coach of the Oakland Raiders, he was hired by the University of California, Berkeley, to teach an extension course called “Man to Man Football.” Madden’s students had watched football on TV. Now, they wanted to understand how it worked.

Professor Madden stood in front of a board that was like the Telestrator he later used on TV. Madden drew X’s and O’s and carefully studied his students’ faces. “I wanted to see at what point I lost ’em,” he told me years later. Madden was trying to find the most simple way to explain a complex game. He was converting passive football fans into smart fans. For the next 30 years, Madden performed the same trick on TV every week.

See also:

Tomorrow Is Doomsday for BlackBerry Devices 

From BlackBerry’s OS services FAQ:

As a reminder, the legacy services for BlackBerry 7.1 OS and earlier, BlackBerry 10 software, BlackBerry PlayBook OS 2.1 and earlier versions, will no longer be available after January 4, 2022. As of this date, devices running these legacy services and software through either carrier or Wi-Fi connections will no longer reliably function, including for data, phone calls, SMS and 9-1-1 functionality.

I wonder how many people are still hanging on to old BlackBerry phones. At one point, they truly had a cult following.

It’s also worth noting that there are seemingly no significant Android phones with hardware keyboards. Like none. The iPhone all-screen form factor with an on-screen software keyboard has completely won out.

Count COVID Hospitalizations, Not Cases 

Gina Kolata and Anna P. Kambhampaty, reporting for The New York Times:

Dr. Fauci, the government’s top infectious disease expert, noted on Sunday on ABC’s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos” that many new infections, especially in people who are vaccinated and boosted, result in no symptoms or mild symptoms, making the absolute number of cases less important than it was for previous versions of the virus.

“As you get further on and the infections become less severe, it is much more relevant to focus on the hospitalizations as opposed to the total number of cases,” Dr. Fauci said.

That advice is in keeping with what many epidemiologists have said all along. Despite the daily drumbeat of case counts, the number of positive tests has never been a perfect indicator of the course of the epidemic.

The New York Times itself needs to take this advice to heart. Over the weekend they published a scaremongering story about rising cases in Puerto Rico, but as Nate Silver pointedly observed, only 13 paragraphs into the story did they mention that only 317 people — on an island with 3 million people — were hospitalized for COVID. What’s going on right now in Puerto Rico is a vaccine triumph.

Samsung Promises ‘Groundbreaking’ New TV Feature: NFT Support 

Chris Welch, The Verge:

“With demand for NFTs on the rise, the need for a solution to today’s fragmented viewing and purchasing landscape has never been greater,” the company said in a press release. “In 2022, Samsung is introducing the world’s first TV screen-based NFT explorer and marketplace aggregator, a groundbreaking platform that lets you browse, purchase, and display your favorite art — all in one place.”

No. Just no.