See You Back In Court
Epic/Apple • Apple/AI • Standing O • Stephen A • Stargate UAE • AI Vader Voice • Netflix Sesame Street • Vision Pro Eye Scroll
Over the weekend, I laid out the steps I would expect to see next if my ongoing conspiracy about Epic’s Tim Sweeney long-game trolling of Apple is correct. Step three was as follows:
File a new legal claim against Apple for blocking your submission in light of the recent ruling. Again, this has no legal grounds, but perhaps the Judge who issued that ruling is, in fact, pissed off enough to entertain this in some way – even if just in weighing in on it to dismiss it sympathetically, thus generating more press, instead of immediately dismissing it, legally.
Well, here we are. More:
⚖️ Epic's Feigning Floundering to Keep Apple Under Pressure
Tim Sweeney's insanely expensive pressure campaign continues...
• Written on an M4 MacBook Air 💻
• Sent from London, England 🏴 I Wrote...
🍎 There's No Free Lunch at Apple
The culture and history have naturally doomed their AI aspirations...
👏 Ovation Inflation Revisited
A lot of noise and breathless headlines mean... not much.
I Think...
🗣️ Stephen A. Smith Is Running. To Be Joe Rogan.
I think it’s fair to say that I’m not, nor have ever been a "Stephen A" fan. It’s not that I don’t understand what he’s doing — I very much do — it’s just that I view it as a huge waste of my own time. The faux outrage about everything — starting with sports, but now, increasingly, literally, everything — in a world of nuance is just not something I wish to spend brain cycles on. But, as this profile makes clear, he’s well aware of the game he’s long been playing, and it has, of course, worked. To the point now where people are seriously considering him as a contender to run for President — of the United States of America. His chief qualification is the same one that vaulted him into fame: he captures attention. Attention from the fans is good, but attention from the "haters" is key, because they’re far more passionate in engaging and keeping cycles going. It’s the same general strategy that the current President has used for years, of course. So yeah, I see it. If nothing else, this whole new debate around him just fuels more cycles, which, as multiple people note in the piece, is probably really what he wants here, not to be President. Of course, they said the exact same thing about someone else back in the day… [NYT]
🔋 'Stargate UAE' Likely to Be Housed in Massive 5GW Data Center
More details about 'Stargate UAE' include the notion that OpenAI would be one of the primary tenants of a new 5GW data center campus in Abu Dhabi. While it apparently wouldn’t just be used for OpenAI — everyone is seemingly working on their own 'Stargates' — to put that size in context, the first 'Stargate' site in the US being built in Texas is 1.2GW. The UAE build would cover 10 square miles — that’s not just larger than Monaco, that’s like 10x Monaco! — and use roughly the power draw of five nuclear reactors. It’s just hard to see the US doing something at this scale — though Sam Altman has asked! — in one project. Of course, 'Stargate' is a lot of early promises, some of which they’ll undoubtedly under-deliver on, so let’s see what actually gets built. [Bloomberg 🔒]
🫣 The Fight Over the AI Darth Vader Voice in Fortnite
The headlines you would expect around such things might include the family of James Earl Jones being upset about the recreation of his voice with AI for the game, but they’re actually fully on board with that — as was he before he passed away last year. Instead, it’s the SAG that is threatening Epic because they didn’t clear such digital usage with the union, implying that this use of AI could have taken away a paying job from a union member. This seems… ridiculous? If the estate not only signed off, but it was their stated wish to use Jones own digital voice likeness going forward for the character, why does a union get to negate that? Because they’re worried about AI? We all get that, but this just reads like they’re upset because they can’t cash in on the passing of a fellow actor. It’s not a good look. [Variety]
📺 Netflix Saves ‘Sesame Street’
While it sounds like a win/win to have the program sign with a streamer that has the biggest footprint — and worldwide distribution — clearly, the deal is a shell of the one they had with Warner Bros Discovery previously. That deal — said to be in the $30M - $35M a year range! — which WBD declined to renew, was struck during "Peak TV" when they were trying to turn 'HBO Max' into 'Max' in order to compete with Netflix. Now, having failed to do that, 'Max' is comically changing back to 'HBO Max' and Sesame Street is headed to… where else? The subplot here is that the show has struggled to compete for childrens’ attention in our age of abundant content, including a lot of rather chaotic cartoons which seemingly are of little educational value (can you tell that I’m a parent of young children?). But there’s also plenty of newer stuff, like Bluey, which is both great and clearly resonating. So a fresh approach to content and formats seems warranted. That includes gaming rights for Netflix, something they keep pushing for (including, recently with Peppa Pig). It’s nice that PBS gets equal rights to broadcast here too, which was not the case with the WBD deal. [NYT]
👁️ Vision Pro Eye Scroll
As great as the pinch gesture-based system is for Vision Pro, it’s decidedly more cumbersome for doing some old school computing things, such as browsing the web. It’s just not as subtle or seamless as using a mouse or trackpad. (It’s not as bad as the old arm fatigue worries around using a touchscreen laptop, but it’s somewhat in that direction.) It’s an age-old computing paradigm problem: how to do the old thing many of us are used to, using the new thing? Eye scrolling at least sounds more natural, but the devil will be in the details, of course. If it doesn’t work well, it could be very annoying, very fast. But Apple is historically good at implementing such things — especially when they start doing so with accessibility in mind, which was seemingly the case here as well. [Bloomberg 🔒]
I Note
Oh look, a 'Buy' button in Spotify’s iOS app (for audiobooks). This follows Amazon’s invention of a 'Get Book' button. Innovation will never cease. [Verge]
Speaking of Netflix (above), Google apparently looked "super intensely" at buying them at one point, revealed Sundar Pichai in a recent interview. No word on the timetable of that look — but could you imagine? Though it’s impossible to imagine any regulatory body being okay with the same company owning both YouTube and Netflix. [Information 🔒]
The NBA playoffs are always a great reminder of the continued power of "Sports Twitter". Even though multiple social networks have been slowly siphoning off Xitter users, for real time events, there remains one king. Bluesky is at least trying to go directly after that world… [TechCrunch]
Ahead of Google I/O later today, here’s the NotebookLM stand-alone mobile app. I get having a separate AI app — as both Google and Meta have now shipped— but I’m less clear about having two (or more). I get the audio angle here, but that couldn’t be a part of the Gemini app? I just worry about market confusion and, well, Google’s history of releasing five different apps when they should release one. [MacRumors]
Finally, some detailed specs around what powers Nintendo’s Switch 2 — including the custom NVIDIA CPU (for real this time). [Eurogamer]
Interestingly, it seems like Nintendo went with Samsung and not TSMC to make that chip for them… [Bloomberg 🔒]
The Atlantic is the latest to expand subscription podcasts with Apple, which is clearly now falling behind (first Spotify and now YouTube) in terms of overall reach but seems to be able to upsell premium pods better? [Axios]
Another week, another report that fails to find evidence of any Alexa+ users in the wild. Amazon says this is "simply wrong" but regardless, this is clearly a very strange, slow roll-out versus what they touted. [Reuters]
I found one! One. [Parker Ortolani]
Spain had demanded that Airbnb take down — um — 65,935 listings. ChatGPT tells there are something just over 400,000 total listings in total in the country (it seems skewed by Canary Islands listings in particular), so this is a massive percentage. You have to wonder what the second-order and un-intended effects will be here if it fully goes through — a major drop in tourism? Will it actually help the housing crisis? [NYT]
The first new Peanuts musical in 35 years as Ben Folds is writing the music for it, set for release in July on Apple TV+. [THR]
I Quote...
"Incidentally, only this week, my parent company apparently said they cannot wait for my hot take on this whole rebrand — believing that whatever I say about this change was going to be pretty hot, so please look me in the eyes when I say this: Fuck you, don’t tell me what to do. I’m not gonna do it if you want it unless, wait, hold on, maybe you thought baiting me like that would be a good way to stop me from doing it, but on the other hand, how can a company be that smart when they’re the same people that came up with so many stupid fucking names?"
— John Oliver, on his parent company’s aforementioned 'HBO Max' name change.
I Spy...
It feels like Microsoft’s Build Conference would have been a bit more awkward this year if everyone was there in person. Thank goodness for Microsoft Teams, am I right?
