Linked List: October 31, 2022

Monday, 31 October 2022

Federico Viticci returns to the show to talk about iPads, Stage Manager, and Apple’s ill-considered foray into expanding ads in the App Store.

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The Verge Reviews the $140 Amazon Fire TV Cube ★

Chris Welch writing for The Verge, “A Streaming Box With No Equal”:

Advertising across Fire TV OS remains way more in your face than I’d like. When the Cube is left idle and goes into screensaver mode, you’ll see promoted movies and TV shows, sure, but there are also ads for Lexus cars. At the top of the homescreen over the last few days, there’s been a banner ad for Call of Duty: Modern Warfare II, which doesn’t even seem relevant to the platform outside of Twitch streams. And ads are now taking up room in the live channel guide, which is frustrating some Fire TV owners. When you’re perusing through the carousels of content on the homescreen, Amazon’s own selections still get the lion’s share of promotion. The latter shouldn’t come as a surprise on the company’s own hardware, but the dial really needs to be turned down on the rest. It cheapens the whole user experience and feels unwarranted on a $140 product. Ads are inevitable on $40 streaming sticks; that’s how they’re so affordable in the first place. But Amazon should be able to detect when customers have paid a premium for the Fire TV Cube and pull it back.

No equal indeed. The Apple TV streaming boxes don’t have any ads at all. They’re way behind. (Maybe I shouldn’t give Apple any ideas about putting annoying ads in tvOS.)

The Math on Twitter’s Debt ★

Lauren Hirsch, The New York Times:

The numbers are already daunting. The $44 billion acquisition was the largest leveraged buyout of a technology company in history. To do the deal, Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man, loaded about $13 billion in debt on the company, which had not turned a profit for eight of the past 10 years. The deal was inked before the global economy looked to be headed toward a recession as interest rates surged higher. And digital advertising, which makes up 90 percent of Twitter’s revenue, has been falling at social media companies. [...]

Last year, Twitter’s interest expense was about $50 million. With the new debt taken on in the deal, that will now balloon to about $1 billion a year. Yet the company’s operations last year generated about $630 million in cash flow to meet its financial obligations.

That means that Twitter is generating less money per year than what it owes its lenders. The company also does not appear to have a lot of extra cash on hand.

Interest payments are a bitch. The optimistic take on Musk taking Twitter private is that it frees Twitter from pursuing increased revenue at all costs to please shareholders. But what’s the point if Twitter now needs to pursue increased revenue at all costs to service its debt?

Scott Forstall Was Forced Out of Apple 10 Years Ago ★

Apple, 10 years ago:

Apple today announced executive management changes that will encourage even more collaboration between the Company’s world-class hardware, software and services teams. As part of these changes, Jony Ive, Bob Mansfield, Eddy Cue and Craig Federighi will add more responsibilities to their roles. Apple also announced that Scott Forstall will be leaving Apple next year and will serve as an advisor to CEO Tim Cook in the interim.

Hard to believe it’s been 10 years. Also hard to believe that Forstall hasn’t done anything else in tech since. He obviously butted heads with the rest of the executive team, and did not last long without Steve Jobs providing him political cover. But he was incredibly successful, and people who worked in his organization loved him. He was demanding, yes, but he went to bat companywide for the people and teams that worked for him. (At least one time, literally.) “Scott had our backs” is a phrase I’ve heard from a slew of people at (or formerly at) Apple.

Less notable, from the same press release:

Additionally, John Browett is leaving Apple.

Twitter Might Merge Twitter Blue and Verification, and Thus Charge for Being Verified ★

The Verge’s Alex Heath had the scoop over the weekend:

The directive is to change Twitter Blue, the company’s optional, $4.99 a month subscription that unlocks additional features, into a more expensive subscription that also verifies users, according to people familiar with the matter and internal correspondence seen by The Verge. Twitter is currently planning to charge $19.99 for the new Twitter Blue subscription. Under the current plan, verified users would have 90 days to subscribe or lose their blue checkmark. Employees working on the project were told on Sunday that they need to meet a deadline of November 7th to launch the feature or they will be fired.

I can verify that a team has been tasked with this, but I heard the deadline was this Friday (November 4), not Monday (the 7th). But my real quibble is reporting anything going on at Twitter right now as a definitive plan. It’s a fact that Musk tasked a team at Twitter with building this and gave them “a week” to build it; it’s not a fact that it’s ever going to see the light of day.

As for the idea of charging verified users to remain verified (or, perhaps better put, requiring verified users to sign up for Twitter Blue), it strikes me as an idea that’s contrary to the reason verification exists. Nate Silver:

I’m probably the perfect target for this, use Twitter a ton, can afford $20/mo, not particularly anti-Elon, but my reaction is that I’ve generated a ton of valuable free content for Twitter over the years and they can go fuck themselves.

Stephen King:

$20 a month to keep my blue check? Fuck that, they should pay me. If that gets instituted, I’m gone like Enron.

There’s a weirdly but unsurprisingly deeply insecure faction on the right that considers verified Twitter users to be one of their many enemy factions. They call them “bluechecks”. And while I’m sure there are some verified Twitter users who really do see it as some sort of prestige status thing, as Silver and King point out, in practical terms it’s for Twitter’s benefit, not for the verified users. It’s Twitter that benefits from millions of users being able to feel certain that the “Stephen King” with 7 million followers on Twitter is really the Stephen King. It’s Twitter that benefits from Nate Silver engaging with users and tweeting analysis. Popular tweeters aren’t getting paid to tweet. And now Elon Musk thinks they should pay to tweet?

Count me as skeptical that this is going to happen as currently discussed.