Linked List: May 18, 2025

Sunday, 18 May 2025

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Slate Truck: A $20–30K American-Made Electric Small Pickup With No Paint, No Stereo, No Touchscreen ★

Month-old news but I’m cleaning up tabs today. I love everything about this pickup except the fact that it doesn’t have a speaker system built-in. No one wants to put a Bluetooth boombox in their cabin and, worse, isn’t that sort of an obvious safety hazard? You get in a crash and now there’s a boombox flying around inside. Just put a simple bluetooth speaker system in.

But the aesthetics of this are chef’s-kiss good. It’s a beautiful little truck. It gets everything right that the Cybertruck gets wrong.

However, I have some questions about how real this is. You pay $50 now to get in the queue for pre-orders, but pre-orders haven’t even started. Deliveries are supposed to start in “late 2026” but Car and Driver is cautiously describing it as a “2027 truck EV”. I’m rooting for them but at this point it’s a promise not a truck.

Joe Biden Has an Aggressive Form of Prostate Cancer ★

Tyler Pager, The New York Times:

Former President Joseph R. Biden Jr. was diagnosed Friday with an aggressive form of prostate cancer that has spread to his bones, his office said in a statement on Sunday.

The diagnosis came after Mr. Biden reported urinary symptoms, which led doctors to find a “small nodule” on his prostate. Mr. Biden’s cancer is “characterized by a Gleason score of 9 (Grade Group 5) with metastasis to the bone,” the statement said.

“While this represents a more aggressive form of the disease, the cancer appears to be hormone-sensitive which allows for effective management,” according to the statement from Mr. Biden’s office, which was unsigned. “The president and his family are reviewing treatment options with his physicians.”

Terrible news about a good man. But, man, does it feel like forever ago that he was president. It was only 118 days ago.

Jack Rix at Top Gear Reviews CarPlay Ultra in the Aston Martin DBX ★

There’s an accompanying blog post too, but the video (around 18 minutes) is (unsurprisingly, from Top Gear) better. It’s just a great tour of everything from how you set it up to what it offers, and what the various “themes” look like — and how you switch between them.

The DBX doesn’t have a ton of screen space, so we’re still left to wonder what the experience will be like in a car that has door-to-door screens spanning the dashboard, but Rix does a great job showing the driver’s perspective of the main instrument cluster. One thing Aston did right is that they still have a lot of physical controls — clicking buttons and twisting dials — for the most essential features like climate control. As you’d hope, the CarPlay Ultra interface updates live as you manipulate those physical controls in the car.

I don’t know if CarPlay Ultra came out of Apple’s abandoned “Titan” project to build its own line of vehicles, but it sure feels like for the first time in its modern era (see link below), Apple is licensing an OS to third-party hardware makers. A straightforward “you do the hardware, we’ll do the software, and we’ll work together to make sure the result looks like a partnership between our brands” sort of deal. That never made sense for Apple with other device classes, like PCs (where, in the mid-’90s, they briefly tried and it proved nearly ruinous for the company), phones, or watches, but I think it might make a lot more sense for cars than if Apple had forged ahead with Titan.

They might really have something here, and brands — like Mercedes, which supports regular CarPlay but whose CEO is opposed to CarPlay Ultra taking over all its screens, or, more famously, the electric startups like Tesla and Rivian that are holding out against any CarPlay support at all — that don’t support CarPlay Ultra might see a Hemingway-style slowly-then-quickly decline in customer demand that is more notable than the remarkably high demand for regular CarPlay.