Jun 21, 2024

Apple Introduces the iStick 📧

The EU puked up the carrots, so Apple uses their Intelligence...

I had something else all written here but then the news broke that Apple would not be releasing their AI features in the EU. I repeat: Apple is not going to roll out their much anticipated, much hyped, and much talked-about AI features in the EU. Why? Because payback is a bitch, that's why.

Okay, that's perhaps not entirely fair. But only because Apple doesn't seem exactly close to launching their 'Apple Intelligence' features anywhere in the foreseeable future. Some elements may come later this year, but it sounds like most will be coming next year. So that makes this a relatively easy stick to swing.

And make no mistake, this is a stick. Apple (reluctantly) tried to feed the carrot to the EU, giving into some of the DMA changes they required. That clearly wasn't good enough for the body. So now the sticks are coming out.

“We are concerned that the interoperability requirements of the DMA could force us to compromise the integrity of our products in ways that risk user privacy and data security,” Apple said in a statement.

I had been wondering if Apple wouldn't consider breaking out a different stick: pulling out of the EU entirely. Or at least, with certain products. Such a move, which would also clearly hurt Apple in terms of sales, would probably change the EU's tune on at least some of the matters rather quickly, one imagines. This is less of a nuclear option, but a savvy move by Apple nonetheless.

And it's not just Apple Intelligence:

The other features not coming they say are iPhone mirroring and SharePlay Screensharing.

The iPhone mirroring lets you use your device virtually on your Mac display and have full control over it. SharePlay Screensharing lets you screenshare from an iPad or iPhone to another and control the other device remotely for technical support.

iPhone Mirroring, in particular, looks like a winning feature in the new version of macOS, Sequoia. Now it will be a winning feature, just not in Europe.

Thankfully, as someone who lives in the UK, this seems to just apply to actual EU countries. And so in at least one regard both Apple and the people of over here can cheers Brexit.

Apple’s decision to halt the roll out of its new features in the EU will mean consumers in all 27 of the bloc’s nations, including the likes of France, Germany, Spain, and Italy, won’t have access to the company’s ambitious new turn to artificial intelligence technologies for now. The software is due to launch elsewhere this fall, and will only work on a subset of Apple’s devices and just in American English.

That last bit is important here too. Apple was always planning to launch Apple Intelligence as English-only to start. And so again, it's a relatively easy move to not roll it out in several countries where English is not the first language. Perhaps if the EU changes their tune, we may yet see such features in the EU down the road...

“Gatekeepers are welcome to offer their services in Europe, provided that they comply with our rules aimed at ensuring fair competition,” the European Commission said in response to Apple’s plans.

Let's see if the Apple consumers in the EU start storming those gates from the other side...

🍺

Enjoying a Black Isle Goldfinch

🌍

Sent from London, England

Briefly...

What Willie Mays Meant – It starts off with "The Catch" and goes from there. I also didn't realize that during the "Shot Heard 'Round the World" he was in the on-deck circle in his Rookie of the Year season. Mays matter-of-factly blamed the wind at Candlestick Park as the reason he didn't eclipse Babe Ruth's homerun record (before Hank Aaron eventually broke it) and would anyone not believe him? Also the fact that he missed essentially two prime seasons because he enlisted in the Army during the Korean War. He came back and won the MVP the next year.

A First Look at Venu – Janko Roettgers was able to get a look at a still-in-development version of the new sports streaming service from Disney/Fox/WBD. It looks – like a sports streaming app. It seems to have all the features you'd expect – which is still more than Apple's Sports app can say – but the biggest questions remain: will they showcase games that are current but are not being shown via one of their streaming partners – i.e. on a different network, like CBS? If it's only to be a partial sports hub, I'm still confused by the strategy here. And there's still no word on pricing, which will obviously matter a lot as well. Also still problematic: the fact that no one is going to know how to pronounce the name, it's "venue", not "vee-new". So I almost would have gone with camel-casing, venU, but that may have made it seem focused on universities. It's just weird.

Why House of the Dragon Changed Its Opening Credits – I think we were all surprised when the second season premiered this week with an entirely new opening. It's good. Not as good as the original Game of Thrones opening, of course, but few things are. It's better than the one they used for the first season of Dragon, which was a little too literally bloody. But who am I kidding? All you need is that song. If you have the song, you can have any visual opening you want. Still, this post breaks down the new opening.

AIs Are Coming for Social Networks – Alex Heath digs into Butterflies, a new social AI product from a team that came out of Snap. You create AIs and "they" then post content based off of the persona you bestowed upon them. This is weird, interesting, and inevitable all in one. I wrote about "Bots Thanking Bots" nine years ago – using an image from Her, naturally.

⭕️ The Inner Ring ⭕️

The following are the columns sent to paid Spyglass subscribers this week – sign up here for full access and future emails...

The business, as we all knew it, is over, even if Hollywood refuses to admit it...

The potential and pitfalls in NVIDIA's rise...

Enter The Inner Ring

Quotable...

“AI is still a big theme but if you can’t demonstrate evidence you’re getting hurt. Just saying ‘AI’ 15 times is not going to cut it any more.”

-- Stuart Kaiser, head of US equity trading strategy at Citi, on the trend of AI-as-vaporware (or worse) as some of the investment hype, at least in the public market, starts to slow (NVIDIA aside, of course).

Some Thoughts On...

🇪🇺 The EU not buying into Apple's DMA plans...

🍿 Inside Out 2's strong opening weekend...

📚 A startup that wants to pair an AI chatbot with reading...

🔺 A new Zelda game where you actually play as Zelda...

Quickly...

In other news of an icon passing away, Donald Sutherland had so many great roles over decades. And yet somehow was never even nominated for an Oscar. Looking back on some of his roles, he clearly should have been, multiple times. As a producer once told him, "This part calls for a guy-next-door type. You don’t look like you’ve lived next door to anyone." Also fun: he basically cast himself in Hunger Games. RIP.
A graphic novel that was co-authored by Anthony Bourdain – yes, that one – is getting made into an animated show for Adult Swim. The plot centers on a "mysterious, revenge-focused sushi chef named Jiro in a version of Los Angeles where customers resort to murder to secure a table at coveted restaurants" naturally.
That Copilot keyboard button on new "Copilot+ PCs"? It now opens a web app. This seems clearly meant to make it so Microsoft can tweak things with Copilot on the fly without needing to update the whole OS, but it also means that it now can't handle a lot of core system functions. Meanwhile, the ChatGPT app for Mac? That's fully native. Weird.
- Not to worry though, Copilot+ PCs retain their craptastic stickers on the hardware, at least in the case of Sumsung models.
Francis Ford Coppola's Megalopolis finally finds a distributor in the form of Lionsgate and as such, gets a release date: September 27, 2024. IMAX too. The press around the movie has been so weird (and mostly bad) that it almost makes it a must-see.
- And that's good news for Coppola since he'll be springing for all the marketing himself.
Also getting the green light: the Apple-made, Brad Pitt-starring F1 movie will hit theaters (and IMAX, of course) via Warner Bros. on June 25, 2025.
Speaking of House of the Dragon, the second season premiere hit 7.8 million viewers, which was down quite a bit from last season, but still huge for Max.
Just over a decade after the last Fisker filed for bankruptcy, the new Fisker filed for bankruptcy.
Threads now has an official API, which is free to use, which is roughly infinity cheaper than Xitter's API. We'll see how this plays out...
- Speaking of Xitter, here are some details about their plans to do payments within the app to take on Venmo and the like. I will for sure be trusting Xitter to handle all of my payments from now on. What could go wrong?
TDK may have had a breakthrough in battery technology thanks to the use of ceramics. This matters because they supply to a lot of tech companies, like Apple. And also yes, this is the company that used to make cassette tapes.
The Longform podcast is at the end of its yes, long run. Which is too bad because it has long been great.
Apple Watch 10 ('X'?) may feature a larger screen on all models, potentially moving the larger size all the way up to the current Ultra-sized screen. I love the Ultra, but it's too large for most people. So even if it's thinner, I'm curious to see if Apple can pull that off.
There are apparently tea leaves to be read in the latest GameStop nonsense...
At the Cannes Lions festival, the hope is now that humor can beat AI in ads...
That cable continues to crumble is no surprise, but the fact that YouTube TV – long the vMVPD bright spot – is contracting is. As Peter Kafka notes, it may simply be due to the end of the NFL season. But the constant and consistent price rises can't be helping either.
Ray Kurzweil predicted back in 1999 that AGI would be here in 2029, that still feels off, but a lot less out there than it did back then. So his thoughts on how AI will change our physical world are certainly worth the read.
Why did Luxottica cold-email Mark Zuckerberg to form the partnership on the Ray-Ban augmented glasses? Fear of Apple entering the space.