Linked List: January 20, 2025

Monday, 20 January 2025

Good takes on some unpleasant current events, and one of the best brief eulogies for Jimmy Carter I’ve heard.

Wesley Hilliard, writing for AppleInsider regarding Edits, Meta’s pre-announced mobile-first video editing app:

Despite that, many apps and features on iPhone toe the line between fun tool and social platform. One of those tools was Clips, which arrived in 2017 to little fanfare and has been forgotten since.

Meta and ByteDance have a reason to push their respective video editing apps — brand synergy. More users mean more data, more content, and more ad revenue. Apple, however, doesn’t have the same motivation.

While Apple would likely love to see users flock to Clips, it would mean entering a race to satisfy a wave of several million customers in an app and interface that was never really more than a proof of concept. It would be a money pit with very little reward as Apple doesn’t have a social platform to drive users to or a way to monetize the app.

I completely agree with Hilliard that the announcement of Edits is the perfect time to mention Clips. I completely disagree with him that Apple has no motivation to dedicate itself to the task of making Clips incredible.

A mobile-first video editor isn’t a “money pit”. It’s an app. Apple makes a lot of apps, and they could easily afford to assign a team to make Clips truly great. It’s no different than 20–25 years ago, when Apple dedicated itself to making iMovie and Final Cut both great apps. It’s no different than the motivation to create GarageBand. The monetization wouldn’t be direct; it would be downstream of the general idea that if you’re editing videos for social media on your phone, the best app to do it with is from Apple and it’s exclusively available on iPhone. The idea is that Apple doesn’t just make the best computing devices for artists, writers, and creators, but they also make some of the best apps for those fields too.

There are actually a lot of interesting UI ideas in Clips. But if Apple isn’t interested in making Clips truly great for people who actually love editing videos using their phones, they should just abandon it. Make it great or give up. Keeping it around as an also-ran that no one uses is a bad look. This is the sort of thing Apple should pride itself on: best-of-breed creative tools.

I don’t know if Edits is a rip-off of CapCut or not, but it’s definitely not a rip-off of Clips. It’s a good rule of thumb that when Apple succeeds at something, it gets ripped off. The better the Apple product, the more shamelessly it gets copied. Apple should make Clips into an iOS video editing app that everyone rips off shamelessly.

Meta Teases ‘Edits’, an Upcoming Video Editing App to Rival CapCut ★

Wes Davis, writing at The Verge, under the headline “Instagram Announces a Blatant CapCut Clone”:

Instagram head Adam Mosseri just announced a video editing app called Edits. Mosseri said the app is meant to rival CapCut, a video editing app that went offline along with TikTok. Edits is available for preorder on the iOS App Store.

I don’t use CapCut (and can’t download it now), so I can’t judge whether the screenshots of Edits indicate that it’s a copycat of CapCut (say that five times fast), which would be pretty funny coming so closely on the heels of Zuckerberg’s claim on Joe Rogan’s show that Apple hasn’t invented anything new since the iPhone, or if it’s just a different take on a video editing app for phones. Adobe InDesign was absolutely designed to make QuarkXPress users feel at home, but it wasn’t a rip-off or clone. It was (and remains) an Adobe take on Quark-style page layout. I’m curious what those familiar with CapCut think.

Glad to see The Verge warming up to calling blatant clones “blatant clones”, though, rather than “not exactly hiding where it got its inspiration from” and “that’s not necessarily a bad thing!”

Apple Dedicates Homepage to the Leader the U.S. Is Celebrating Today ★

Interesting selection of Martin Luther King Jr. quotes they’ve chosen for the homepage (PDF archive for posterity):

“The function of education is to teach one to think intensively and to think critically.”

“You must decide to speak for yourself; nobody else can speak for you.”

“We cannot preserve self without being concerned about preserving other selves.”

Read into those quotes what you will, given today’s other national significance. I think there’s an implied message here, but it’s subtle. I’ll pick a different quote from King, one that I believe better speaks to the current moment:

“The great majority of Americans are suspended between these opposing attitudes. They are uneasy with injustice but unwilling yet to pay a significant price to eradicate it.”

Tim Cook Pep-Talks Himself ★

Tim Cook on X:

Dr. King once said, “Everybody can be great, because everybody can serve.” True greatness lies in lifting others, making a difference, and serving with purpose. Let’s honor his legacy by finding ways to serve and create a better world together.

Curious to see if that’s Cook’s only tweet of the day, or if a congratulatory one is forthcoming, after Trump’s oath of office at noon. Update: Here’s the congratulatory tweet, posted at 2:40pm. No exclamation marks this time.

Apple has been dedicating its homepage to MLK on his holiday for at least 10 years, so today isn’t some exception just because it’s also Inauguration Day. But it’s perhaps worth pointing out that few among Apple’s corporate peers are doing this. The homepages of (in market cap order), Nvidia, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, and Tesla make no mention of either MLK or Trump’s inauguration. Just another day on the calendar for all of them. But I’m not sure any of those companies ever tend to celebrate holidays on their company homepages.

But the one company that is famous for its holiday “doodles” is Google. And Google’s homepage today makes no mention today of MLK, but does direct visitors’ attention to their hosted livestream of Trump’s inauguration. Not a doodle, just “🇺🇸 Live! Watch President Trump’s Inauguration”, and nothing about MLK. [Update, 2:15 pm: Google.com now has a nice MLK doodle. Perhaps it was a pre- and post-inauguration distinction? Others report seeing the MLK hopscotch doodle all day.]

If you want to argue that all of these companies, and each of their CEOs, suck, today’s your day. But there are degrees of sucking, and ~~one~~ two of these companies are, still, to some degree, not quite like the others.