Linked List: May 5, 2023

Friday, 5 May 2023

Yours truly and Ben Thompson’s podcast — two episodes per week, 15 minutes per episode. Not a minute less, not a minute more. If you’re not listening, you’re missing out. $5/month or $50/year. We’re now in our fourth year, and we’ve had remarkably little churn — people who subscribe to Dithering tend to stay subscribed, which warms my heart. It’s a fun show and everyone loves the enforced brevity and regularity.

Bonus: At the end of March we started a Dithering group in Wavelength, the new private group messaging app I started advising earlier this year. It’s sort of an unofficial perk and an experiment. Subscribers can find the link to join the group in the show notes for each episode. We had no idea how this group would go, but it’s been wild. As of this typing there are over 2,900 members, and activity every day across a wide range of threads. I believe it’s the single largest group on all of Wavelength. (I just tonight told the story there of the piece of shit 2021 Kia Sorento I was bamboozled by Hertz into renting for a road trip to Boston this week, to pick my son up at the end of the college year.) It’s a nice, smart, fun little community.

Ford CEO Jim Farley Seems Very Happy That GM Is Dropping CarPlay ★

Great 3-minute clip from Joanna Stern’s interview with Ford CEO Jim Farley at the WSJ’s Future of Everything Festival. She asks him about GM’s plan to drop CarPlay from their future EVs, and Farley starts by saying “Yeah, how about that?” and laughing.

Farley says, “The interior has to be really well done. But in terms of content? We kind of lost that battle 10 years ago. So get real with it, because you’re not going to make a ton of money on content inside the vehicle. It’s going to be safety/security, partial autonomy, and productivity in our eyes. [...] 70 percent of our Ford customers in the U.S. are Apple customers. Why would I go to an Apple customer and say ‘Good luck!’? That doesn’t seem customer centric.”

Farley and Ford have it exactly right. New car buyers, even from mainstream brands like Ford, are overwhelmingly iPhone users — exactly as Apple bragged at WWDC last June, and what iPhone users want in their cars is CarPlay. If anything, Farley is being kind to GM and GM CEO Mary Barra when he says their message to iPhone users is “Good luck” — it’s really more like “Fuck you.” And again, the most telling part of the whole exchange is the way Farley laughs at the start. You really have to hear it — his laugh implies a certain I can’t believe our good fortune that GM is doing this. It’s enough to make you think Mary Barra is a mole from Ford, planted to steer would-be Chevy buyers into Ford dealerships.

If you’re asking how it can be that 70 percent of Ford’s customers are iPhone users when the iPhone has maybe just over 50 percent market share in the U.S., the key is new car buyers. The Android masses are buying used cars, either because they don’t have the budget for a new car or because they don’t care about buying nice things (or both). So even a non-luxury brand like Ford has an overwhelming majority of customers with iPhones.

New York Times Obituary for Katie Cotton ★

Richard Sandomir, writing for The New York Times:

Katie Cotton, who as Apple’s longtime communications chief guarded the media’s access to Steve Jobs, the company’s visionary co-founder, and helped organize the introduction of many of his products, died on April 6 in Redwood City, Calif. She was 57.

Her death, in a hospital, was confirmed by Michael Mimeles, her former husband. He did not give a cause but said that she had experienced complications from heart surgery she underwent a few years ago.

Not sure what took a month, but it’s a nice obituary, with quotes from Walt Mossberg, John Markoff, and other writers who covered Apple.

“She was formidable and tough and very protective of both Apple’s brand and Steve, particularly when he got sick,” Walt Mossberg, a former technology columnist for The Wall Street Journal, said in a phone interview, referring to Mr. Jobs’s diagnosis of pancreatic cancer in 2004. He added: “She was one of the few people he trusted implicitly. He listened to her. She could pull him back from something he intended to do or say.” Mr. Jobs died in 2011 at 56. [...]

“When Steve came back, he didn’t just put key engineers in place,” Greg Joswiak, Apple’s senior vice president of marketing, said. “He put the right people in place to lead us around the company, and Katie was a big part of that.”

Cotton retired from Apple almost a decade ago, but Apple’s comms still bear her mark. She built a team and a culture.

‘Super Mario Bros. Movie’ Passes $1 Billion in Global Box Office Revenue ★

Rebecca Rubin, reporting for Variety:

The Super Mario Bros. Movie is officially the first film of the year to cross the coveted $1 billion milestone at the global box office.

As of Sunday, after 26 days of release, the animated video game adaptation, from Universal, Illumination and Nintendo, has grossed $490 million in North America and $532 million internationally. It’s only the fifth movie of pandemic times to join the $1 billion club, following Spider-Man: No Way Home, Top Gun: Maverick, Jurassic World Dominion and Avatar: The Way of Water.

I realize box office numbers like this aren’t inflation-adjusted, but it’s rather incredible — no pun intended — that The Super Mario Bros. Movie has grossed far more than any movie from Pixar (^{whose list is topped by The Incredibles 2 at $600 million}). This is no ding against Pixar, but simply speaks to how valuable and beloved the Nintendo character franchise is worldwide.

What a coup it is for Universal to score this partnership with Nintendo for their theme parks. When comparing Universal’s parks to Disney’s, the gaping hole has always been Disney’s menagerie of beloved characters for kids — Mickey and friends, and an ever-growing list of new characters from new movies (including Pixar’s recent rich library). Universal had jack squat^* for toddlers and grade schoolers. Now, they have Super Nintendo World, which like Pixar’s stuff appeals just as much to adults as it does toddlers.

Update: OK, my bad: my original link above was for U.S. domestic box office numbers. Worldwide, Pixar has 4 films that have grossed over a billion: Incredibles 2, Toy Story 4, Toy Story 3, and Finding Dory. My point though isn’t about which movies made the most money, but rather to assert that the Nintendo characters are that big of a deal. And of course it makes a ton of sense that Pixar has a few films in that rarified $1 billion box office stratosphere.

* In Orlando, Universal’s Islands of Adventure park has Seuss Landing, but as much as I adore Seuss’s books, his characters don’t have anything close to the sort of appeal Disney’s and Nintendo’s do. Part of Seuss’s appeal is that his style is slightly creepy. And Universal has let that whole Seuss Landing get sun-bleached over time — it’s looked disregarded, if not almost abandoned, for years.

20 New Games Added to Apple Arcade ★

Off the top of my head, my single biggest complaint about Apple today is their role profiting from, and promoting, addictive pay-to-win games in the App Store. Yet simultaneously they’re building up an impressive, wide-ranging library of games that never have any in-app purchases at all with Apple Arcade. For $5/month, Apple Arcade has gone from “a pretty good deal” to “a veritable bargain”.

The Downfall of Brydge ★

Chance Miller, reporting for 9to5Mac:

Brydge, a once thriving startup making popular keyboard accessories for iPad, Mac, and Microsoft Surface products, is ceasing operations. According to nearly a dozen former Brydge employees who spoke to 9to5Mac , Brydge has gone through multiple rounds of layoffs within the past year after at least two failed acquisitions.

As it stands today, Brydge employees have not been paid salaries since January. Customers who pre-ordered the company’s most recent product have been left in the dark since then as well. Its website went completely offline earlier this year, and its social media accounts have been silent since then as well.

The whole report is a hell of a read. Impressive original reporting from Miller and his colleagues at 9to5Mac. Here’s just one gut punch among many in the story:

In December, Brydge held its annual Christmas party at a local restaurant. [Co-CEOs] Mander-Jones and Smith had set a budget for the party, the people said, and they stuck to that budget. At the end of the night, one of the CEOs put his card down for the bill. His card was declined, and a Brydge employee paid the bill instead, the people said.