Linked List: September 30, 2026

Wednesday, 30 September 2026

Gurman Reports Apple Is Launching New ‘Smart Home’ Products on October 13 ★

Mark Gurman, reporting for Bloomberg (gift link):

Apple Inc. plans to make its long-delayed push into the smart-home market on Oct. 13, marking a critical product expansion for the company under new Chief Executive Officer John Ternus. At the center of the strategy is a smart-home hub code-named J490, according to people familiar with the matter. Apple also plans to announce the first update to the HomePod mini since that device’s 2020 debut and its first new TV set-top box since 2022. [...]

The home hub will take the form of a roughly 6-inch square display, with versions that can be mounted on a wall or placed on a countertop, according to the people, who asked not to be identified because the products haven’t been announced. [...]

Because the device is intended to remain stationary, it has a single FaceTime camera on the front and no rear camera. The product has microphones and speakers in its connected base. The hub is about as thick as an iPhone, and its display is surrounded by a quarter-inch, black bezel reminiscent of older iPads. It has rounded corners and no sharp edges. The device lacks a battery, so it has to be plugged in at all times, and there are no volume or power buttons.

The product comes in Apple’s standard gray aluminum finish and includes a USB-C port for power. The screen sits above a metal, round base with multiple rings of perforated speaker holes and connects to it through a polished metal arm. Users can manually tilt the display forward or backward. And the base has a rubberized bottom to help it stay on a table.

If you think that sounds like the beloved but short-lived “sunflower” iMac G4 from 2002, that’s exactly what Gurman says it resembles. As is so often the case, Gurman seems to know many details about the device, but yet doesn’t know its name or price. Presumably the speakers are good enough to serve by themselves, but how good are they? Can they be paired with HomePods to create stereo pairs?

The hub’s defining feature will be its ability to serve multiple members of a household. It is designed to recognize who is speaking to it or approaching it, and then display personalized content and provide answers based on that person’s data and accounts. When a user walks up, for example, the device will show that person’s contacts, messages, calendar appointments, notes and preferred app layout. The interface can then change automatically when another recognized household member approaches. It will also have a mode for visitors that hides personal information.

The device identifies users by their voices or through a facial-recognition system, though the latter is less reliable than Face ID on the iPhone. Users can require secondary authentication through an iPhone if they don’t want to rely solely on voice or facial recognition. The iPhone also serves as a fallback when the hub cannot identify someone correctly.

Given that Apple Watch is used as an identifier to unlock your Mac (and, says Apple, iPhone Duo), it would make sense if that worked with this device too.

Anthropic’s IPO Prospectus Is a Fucking Doozy ★

Echo Wang, reporting for Reuters yesterday:

Anthropic is making a massive bet that AI will transform the global economy more profoundly than industrialization, electricity and the internet, according to its IPO prospectus seen by Reuters.

This is a strong clear lede, but even so it falls short of expressing the true magnitude of what Anthropic represents. To wit, not that “AI” as a field will prove more profoundly transformational than industrialization, electricity, and the Internet, but that Anthropic alone will. This is not an IPO that makes sense if you consider Anthropic one among peers, even a short list placing them alongside just (say) OpenAI, Google, and Meta. It only makes sense if you believe Anthropic is on the cusp of winning a race to create a godlike super intelligence, and that first godlike super intelligence will take over the world.

You know, something exactly akin to the “rapture” events that religious cultists believe are coming.

But the cost to get there will be staggering. Anthropic reported a net loss of $42 billion in 2025, and plans to spend $518 billion on cloud, computing and infrastructure obligations in coming years, according to the prospectus.

If you believe that they’re profitable now you’re as crazy as they are. They’ll seed stories to the press that they’re now profitable, using accounting methods they won’t define (and wouldn’t pass muster for a public company) but won’t make such claims in writing.

The prospectus details how the company has grown sharply in the last year — while also posting wider losses. Revenue grew 12-fold in 2025 to nearly $4.6 billion, even as the company lost more than $8 billion on an operating basis, excluding writedowns of various liabilities mostly tied to previous fundraising, according to the documents, reported here for the first time. [...]

Anthropic said nearly a quarter of its revenue came from two customers last year, and as part of its risk factors, warned that many of its largest clients were not locked into long-term contracts and could cut or stop spending.

I don’t think this is complicated. Their revenue is accelerating rapidly because they’re selling compute at a loss. They spent $13 billion to make $5 billion last year. Their revenue is growing rapidly, yes, but their costs are growing even faster. They’re already on the hook for half a trillion dollars on cloud computing expansion but their revenue is precariously reliant on a few big-spending whales who aren’t under contract, and commodity open source models are rapidly closing the gap. If Anthropic is losing a fortune now with $13 billion in costs how are they going to break even spending $100+ billion per year? Don’t worry, their godlike AI will figure that out?

Gary Marcus:

Anthropic’s proposed valuation is easily calculated, as -50 times 2025 losses.

The more they lose, the more they win!