Stacked

iPhones from India • The New Siri Team • Notion Mail • Gemini Users

Apr 25, 2025

Oh hello there. As you may be able to tell, things look a bit different around here when compared to the last Dispatch. That’s because this one is running on an entirely different platform: Substack. I’ve actually run newsletters through Substack a few different times now, and while I still find their CMS leaving a bit to be desired, I thought it might be a good place to experiment a bit with the Dispatch.

To be clear, the rest of Spyglass remains unchanged. But ever since I announced that I was putting the Dispatch on hiatus a few months ago, I’ve gotten quite a few notes about bringing it back (which I appreciate). So I’m going to try to do that here while also hopefully giving it some distance from what I’m trying to do with Spyglass itself (while still linking back to and sharing Spyglass posts, of course). This even has its own (sub) domain, which is nice. (And apologies for the late send, I was waiting for the domain to resolve — I’ve been having some issues this past week.)

For now, this is just a test. And don’t worry about subscribing to one versus the other — if you were on the Dispatch mailing list, I’ll port you over. And if you subscribe over here and I jump back over there eventually, I’ll make it all work on my end. But this is sort of a different thing, for now.

• Enjoying a Lost and Grounded Running with Sceptres IPA 🍻
• Listening to "Down by the Water" by PJ Harvey 🎶
• Written on an M4 MacBook Air 💻
• Sent from London, England 🏴󠁧󠁢󠁥󠁮󠁧󠁿

I Think...

🇮🇳 The US iPhone, Made in… India

Apple moving to shift all production of US-bound iPhones to India from China is both hardly surprising given the ongoing tariff situation, but also quite surprising given the scale required to make such a shift for Apple: they’re aiming to produce more than 60M iPhones meant for the US by the end of next year. That would double the overall current output in India, most of which are currently meant for the local market. In hindsight, India’s demands around local production may have saved Apple here. The question is how China will feel about such key production moving away? Clearly, they won’t like it — especially to India — but how will they react? More than simply putting up roadblocks? And how will Tim Cook continue to walk such a fine line between China and Trump here? The good news (for Apple), the US only accounts for 28% of global iPhone sales (far lower than I would have guessed). Still, if the aim really is to shift more than half of the iPhone production out of China eventually, that shifts the situation quickly from an Apple problem to a China problem… [FT 🔒]

🥽 New Siri Chief Enlists Vision Pro Talent to Start Comeback Bid

Mark Gurman doesn’t have just the general “Mike Rockwell is bringing over his team”-type scoop here, he has a bunch of specific names that the Vision Pro leader is enlisting to fix the “AI/MLess” mess that is Siri. The biggest element of that will apparently involve turning Siri’s two “brains” (the old Siri functionality and the newer LLM-based functionality) into one. Once again, this sounds similar to the situation at Amazon last year when they were struggling to revamp Alexa — by the way, it’s awfully quiet still on the Alexa+ front, despite such a splashy announcement! Who is not shocked by that? This guy. Another key for new, new, new Siri? App Intents. And don’t be surprised if some of that “Ferret” work (AI used to navigate UIs) shows up here as well eventually. Meanwhile, John Giannandrea (and his former Siri head Robby Walker) remain at Apple, but that feels increasingly tenuous as the new pieces fall into place — such as the key robotics project (including the projects coming into focus being led now by Kevin Lynch) shifting to John Ternus… [Bloomberg 🔒]

📧 Notion Mail is a Minimalist but Powerful Take on Email

I’ve been testing out Notion Mail for several weeks now. There are some elements I really like about it — the spartan yet powerful design, the fact that it’s a stand-alone app — but I haven’t quiet gotten into the flow of using it as my main mail client (versus the standard version of Gmail in the browser). Long time readers know that I loathe email and think it ruins lives because it eats into everyones’ time and soul. So I appreciate new approaches and obviously email + AI is the latest attempt to reinvent this wheel (including, of course, by Google itself). I just can’t get into the swing of using AI for email even though I’m increasingly using AI for many other things. Fundamentally, I’m just not sure the problem with email is about overpowering it — that’s impossible — and more just reframing how people think about it. That is, making people prioritize it less. And yet it remains a necessary evil for work. Slack has eaten into that space, sure. But email remains the fall-back/catch-all. Anyway, the Notion team is smart and builds good products so hopefully they can evolve this in ways I can’t imagine right now. But email “power tools” just aren’t for me. If anything, I want the most simple email client imaginable. Something native that maybe auto-sorts almost everything out of your inbox for you (another newer tool, Cora, has been trying to do some of this, but it feels like it was mis-categorizing too much when I tried it and it was tedious to tweak). ‘Hey’ had some potential for a while, and I’m still paying for it, but it almost feels like it existed just to go after Apple on their App Store rules. Five years later, how did that work out? Mainly, I still miss Mailbox. [Verge]

🤖 Google’s Gemini User Numbers Revealed in Court

One fun side effect of all these antitrust trials is not only the internal communication spilling out into the open, but also some internal user numbers which have to be given honestly under oath! For example, Gemini has 35M DAU and 350M MAU. The latter of which sounds pretty good, but the former — and far more important metric — sounds a bit meager. (Though yes, it’s up nicely from the comically low — for Google — 9M DAU last October.) So where does Google think ChatGPT stands? 160M DAU and 600M MAU. On one hand, Google seemingly is catching up, albeit slowly. On the other, these numbers suggest that 27% of ChatGPT’s users are active daily, while just 10% of Google’s are. That seems like a problem. And it’s especially one if all of Google’s experiments with ‘AI Overview’ and ‘AI Mode’ are included in those numbers, since Google is obviously shoving them in billions of potential faces (it’s unclear what they’re including in these numbers — hopefully it’s just Gemini’s actual website and apps, not things like Gmail and the other apps). [Information 🔒]

I Wrote...

(⌾ Denotes an Inner Ring column ⌾)

⌾ Buy, Build, or Bury ⌾

The strategy permeating the antitrust trials will go into overdrive in the age of AI…

Let a Million Fines Bloom

The EC is not done hitting Apple with demands – and potential fines...

I Note...

Google has backtracked (again — but for good this time) on the move away from third-party cookies in Chrome. They clearly have more important things to worry about with Chrome at the moment. [Digiday]
The voice mode in Perplexity’s iOS app is now live. It seems very well done. Far better than, say Siri. Just saying… [Verge]
- The AI startup would also be open to buying Chrome from Google. Right after they acquire TikTok. I appreciate the big ambitions, but can we focus here? There are other jobs to be done. [Verge]
- Also, they’d presumably be in a bidding war with OpenAI for buying Chrome. Which yet another rival thinks would cost $50B — I bet Google would think it’s worth far more than that! [Bloomberg 🔒]
The biggest hit and draw to come out of the latest Star Wars Celebration in Tokyo? Not Ryan Gosling, but Hayden Christensen. And it wasn’t just for the 20th anniversary of Revenge of the Sith — the best of the bad prequels — he’ll be coming back to Ahsoka as well. His photo ops cost the most too! [THR]
Yet more pressure from the “Godfather of AI” hoping to derail OpenAI’s for-profit shift. While Geoffrey Hinton clearly has no love lost for Sam Altman, but his um, Nobel Prize and the fact that he has some former OpenAI employees behind him obviously gives this some weight. [FT 🔒]
Threads has “upgraded” from .net to the .com domain they acquired from the (acquired) startup of the same name. That’s fine, what I really want is an iPad — and Mac — app. Those should launch in about 15 years. [TechCrunch]
- Also, hope you like ads in your Threads, because you’re about to see a lot more of them (at least in the US, for now). I honestly think Meta is monetizing the network way too early. [TechCrunch]
Meanwhile, it’s good to see Meta cutting down on spammy content now that Mark Zuckerberg has determined that Facebook matters again (and it may really matter again if Meta has to sell off Instagram — spoiler: they won’t). Why they weren’t doing all of this obvious stuff over the past, I don’t know, two decades, who knows? Priorities, I guess… [TechCrunch]
Discord co-founder Jason Citron is stepping down as CEO after 13 years (and ahead of their rumored public listing) in order to spend more time with his video games (it’s not a joke — and Humam Sakhnini taking over seems to make a lot of sense if/when they take this thing public). [GamesBeat]
- Aside: congrats to my old friend and colleague Dean Takahashi on spinning our GamesBeat from VentureBeat, where we worked together a long time ago, so they can fully focus on the gaming vertical… [Variety]
- Here’s my old boss, VentureBeat founder Matt Marshall, on the news (including how the publication will now be mainly focused on enterprise AI). [VentureBeat]
A long overlooked document suggests that William Shakespeare and his wife Anne Hathaway weren’t as estranged as people have long believed. In fact, she may have been avoiding London, where he was, like the plague, because there was, in fact, the plague running rampant. [NYT]
A Fyre sale, you say? Who could have guessed… [THR]
Ted Sarandos sure spends a lot of time talking about how he absolutely, positively, doesn’t want to the Disney job. Doth he protest too much? (To be fair, everyone obviously keeps asking him about it.) [THR]
- From the same interview, Sarandos also noted how China has never approved a single bit of content from Netflix — not even a single episode of one show — despite their attempts to break into the market. That’s looking pretty good for them right about now, of course… [THR]
Speaking of, the DOGE-in-Chief seems ready to get back to work, his actual work, at least at Tesla. While Wall Street obviously loves this news, the company’s numbers are pretty worrying and the general trends are just brutal. It’s starting to feel like Cybercab-or-bust. (And Cybertruck increasingly feels like a bust — with that design, who would have thought?!) [FT 🔒]
- The “Mission: Accomplished” spin doesn’t seem to be covering some very real and growing animosity between different factions in the White House. And at least via this reporting, it feels more like that Elon Musk has had enough versus Donald Trump having had enough of him (though those around the President would certainly disagree), as expected. [NYT]
Lip-Bu Tan’s memo to his new Intel troops is a pretty good, straightforward read on what the company needs to do to get back on track. Obviously a million times easier said than done — Pat Gelsinger had some good ideas too — but mainly, it seems like he wants to completely overhaul the culture, which he clearly views as having grown too complacent. DOGE-style cuts seem imminent… [Intel]
The Switch 2 may be seeing 6x the demand of the first Switch in Japan, and it sure sounds like Nintendo failed to recognize this (obvious) demand. [Verge]
- See also: the U.S. pre-order fiasco, even though Nintendo was given extra time to sort it out thanks to the tariff fiasco! It sounds like Nintendo may not be able to meet the demand of their most loyal fans. [Verge]

I Quote…

“I’m saving Hollywood.”

— Ted Sarandos, when asked if he’s destroying Hollywood (due to his stance on theatrical releases — which I fully expect to morph over time).