daring-rss

Erin Woo, Sahil Patel, and Amir Efrati, reporting for The Information (paywalled, alas):

OpenAI is preparing to launch a frontal assault on Google. The
ChatGPT owner recently considered developing a web browser that it
would combine with its chatbot, and it has separately discussed or
struck deals to power search features for travel, food, real
estate and retail websites, according to people who have seen
prototypes or designs of the products. […]

Making a web browser could help OpenAI have more control over a
primary gateway through which people use the web, as well as
further boost ChatGPT, which has more than 300 million weekly
users just two years after its launch. It isn’t clear how a
ChatGPT browser’s features would differ from those of other
browsers.

In a signal of its interest in a browser, several months ago
OpenAI hired Ben Goodger, a founding member of the Chrome team at
Google. Another recent hire is Darin Fisher, who worked with
Goodger to develop Chrome.

But OpenAI isn’t remotely close to launching a browser, multiple
people said.

Goodger and Fisher’s hirings weren’t secret — both keep up-to-date profiles on LinkedIn — and just because two people have previously created new web browsers (even multiple times) that their new gig is creating a new web browser. But it sure feels like a good guess.

Fisher most recently was at The Browser Company for two years, working on Arc, an innovative browser that I admire for its originality but which simply did not click for me at all. The Browser Company is in flux, too, working both on Arc 2.0 and an as-yet-unnamed second project that might be a more traditional web browser.

Combine this with regulatory pressure on Apple’s Safari and especially Google’s Chrome, and it’s an exciting time for web browsers. It’s kind of wild how every few years the web browser market gets shaken up. The pattern that’s repeated several times is that just when the browser market seems settled — like the markets for, say, spreadsheets and word processors — there’s a period of flux and new entries shake up the market. There was a point when it seemed like Internet Explorer would be dominant forever; today it doesn’t even exist. There was a point when Firefox seemed entrenched on Windows; today it’s an afterthought. Today Chrome seems entrenched, as dominant as IE once was. Maybe not?

 ★ 

Erin Woo, Sahil Patel, and Amir Efrati, reporting for The Information (paywalled, alas):

OpenAI is preparing to launch a frontal assault on Google. The
ChatGPT owner recently considered developing a web browser that it
would combine with its chatbot, and it has separately discussed or
struck deals to power search features for travel, food, real
estate and retail websites, according to people who have seen
prototypes or designs of the products. […]

Making a web browser could help OpenAI have more control over a
primary gateway through which people use the web, as well as
further boost ChatGPT, which has more than 300 million weekly
users just two years after its launch. It isn’t clear how a
ChatGPT browser’s features would differ from those of other
browsers.

In a signal of its interest in a browser, several months ago
OpenAI hired Ben Goodger, a founding member of the Chrome team at
Google. Another recent hire is Darin Fisher, who worked with
Goodger to develop Chrome.

But OpenAI isn’t remotely close to launching a browser, multiple
people said.

Goodger and Fisher’s hirings weren’t secret — both keep up-to-date profiles on LinkedIn — and just because two people have previously created new web browsers (even multiple times) that their new gig is creating a new web browser. But it sure feels like a good guess.

Fisher most recently was at The Browser Company for two years, working on Arc, an innovative browser that I admire for its originality but which simply did not click for me at all. The Browser Company is in flux, too, working both on Arc 2.0 and an as-yet-unnamed second project that might be a more traditional web browser.

Combine this with regulatory pressure on Apple’s Safari and especially Google’s Chrome, and it’s an exciting time for web browsers. It’s kind of wild how every few years the web browser market gets shaken up. The pattern that’s repeated several times is that just when the browser market seems settled — like the markets for, say, spreadsheets and word processors — there’s a period of flux and new entries shake up the market. There was a point when it seemed like Internet Explorer would be dominant forever; today it doesn’t even exist. There was a point when Firefox seemed entrenched on Windows; today it’s an afterthought. Today Chrome seems entrenched, as dominant as IE once was. Maybe not?

Read More 

Streaks first appeared on Daring Fireball back in 2016, and since then has won an Apple Design Award and remained one of the most well-known and effective habit-tracking apps.

It’s a once-off purchase, and the latest update has added seasonal themes, just in time for Christmas (and your New Year’s resolutions!).

If you have young children, be sure to also try Little Streaks. It’s a great way to help them focus on routines: meal-time, bed-time, learning to ride, whatever you like! It’s free for one routine, or use code “DARING” for 50% off the first year.

 ★ 

Streaks first appeared on Daring Fireball back in 2016, and since then has won an Apple Design Award and remained one of the most well-known and effective habit-tracking apps.

It’s a once-off purchase, and the latest update has added seasonal themes, just in time for Christmas (and your New Year’s resolutions!).

If you have young children, be sure to also try Little Streaks. It’s a great way to help them focus on routines: meal-time, bed-time, learning to ride, whatever you like! It’s free for one routine, or use code “DARING” for 50% off the first year.

Read More 

Mark Gurman, in his weekly Power On column:

The best scenario for Apple in TV hardware would be a cheap stick
(perhaps with no physical remote — use your iPhone instead). It’s
an idea that Apple marketing executives detest, but it would help
the company quickly expand its presence. If consumers want more
power and storage, they can opt for the current box.

At the top of the line, Apple could offer something like the new
Mac mini, providing the best streaming quality and gaming options.
For this exercise, let’s call these three tiers the Apple TV SE,
Apple TV and Apple TV Max. It would use the same “good, better,
best” strategy employed by the iPhone, Mac, iPad, AirPods, Apple
Watch and even the Apple Pencil.

Neither of these suggestions makes any sense. The only interesting thing about either idea is trying to decide which one is worse.

Streaming sticks are crap, and Apple doesn’t make crap. I also think streaming sticks are fast going the way of the dodo — they were a stopgap low-cost solution for when TV sets didn’t have “smart” experiences with built-in integration for major streaming platforms. Those built-in integrations obviate the need for streaming sticks, and Apple TV is now built into TVs from all major brands, including Samsung, Sony, LG, and Vizio. That’s the Apple TV app, not the full Apple TV tvOS platform, but that serves Apple’s needs. I don’t think it’s possible to provide a full-fidelity tvOS experience via a stick-sized computer that draws power from an HDMI port, and it’s certainly not possible to do so by omitting the goddamn remote control. Arguing that Apple needs to or even ought to build a cheap TV stick today is like those dumb columns from 2009 arguing that Apple needed to make a netbook to compete against shitty $300 laptops. Apple TV is to set top boxes as the Mac is to PCs — it’s never going to get a large share of the overall market, but it dominates the high-end of the market catering to people who actually care.

As for Gurman’s high-end hardware idea, a Mac Mini starts at $600. What would be the point of connecting such hardware to your TV? A Mac Mini wouldn’t offer better streaming quality than the existing Apple TV 4K offers. 4K is 4K, and even older Apple TV hardware streams it perfectly. And while in theory an M4-powered Mac-Mini-caliber Apple TV could offer better gaming than the iPhone-13-era A15 Bionic chip in the current Apple TV 4K hardware, there are zero tvOS games today that target hardware like that, and there’d be little reason for game developers to target such an “Apple TV Pro” device because almost no one would buy one. Whatever the reasons are for gaming not being a big deal on tvOS today, the lack of a “pro” $500 or $600 hardware tier is not one of them.

I think Apple should get the entry price down to $99 (currently $129), and sooner or later they need to update the hardware, if only to support Apple Intelligence. (Perhaps to the A18 or A18 Pro next fall — the current A15 Bionic Apple TV 4K models came out one year after the chip debuted in the iPhones 13.) But the hardware story for Apple TV is fine.

 ★ 

Mark Gurman, in his weekly Power On column:

The best scenario for Apple in TV hardware would be a cheap stick
(perhaps with no physical remote — use your iPhone instead). It’s
an idea that Apple marketing executives detest, but it would help
the company quickly expand its presence. If consumers want more
power and storage, they can opt for the current box.

At the top of the line, Apple could offer something like the new
Mac mini, providing the best streaming quality and gaming options.
For this exercise, let’s call these three tiers the Apple TV SE,
Apple TV and Apple TV Max. It would use the same “good, better,
best” strategy employed by the iPhone, Mac, iPad, AirPods, Apple
Watch and even the Apple Pencil.

Neither of these suggestions makes any sense. The only interesting thing about either idea is trying to decide which one is worse.

Streaming sticks are crap, and Apple doesn’t make crap. I also think streaming sticks are fast going the way of the dodo — they were a stopgap low-cost solution for when TV sets didn’t have “smart” experiences with built-in integration for major streaming platforms. Those built-in integrations obviate the need for streaming sticks, and Apple TV is now built into TVs from all major brands, including Samsung, Sony, LG, and Vizio. That’s the Apple TV app, not the full Apple TV tvOS platform, but that serves Apple’s needs. I don’t think it’s possible to provide a full-fidelity tvOS experience via a stick-sized computer that draws power from an HDMI port, and it’s certainly not possible to do so by omitting the goddamn remote control. Arguing that Apple needs to or even ought to build a cheap TV stick today is like those dumb columns from 2009 arguing that Apple needed to make a netbook to compete against shitty $300 laptops. Apple TV is to set top boxes as the Mac is to PCs — it’s never going to get a large share of the overall market, but it dominates the high-end of the market catering to people who actually care.

As for Gurman’s high-end hardware idea, a Mac Mini starts at $600. What would be the point of connecting such hardware to your TV? A Mac Mini wouldn’t offer better streaming quality than the existing Apple TV 4K offers. 4K is 4K, and even older Apple TV hardware streams it perfectly. And while in theory an M4-powered Mac-Mini-caliber Apple TV could offer better gaming than the iPhone-13-era A15 Bionic chip in the current Apple TV 4K hardware, there are zero tvOS games today that target hardware like that, and there’d be little reason for game developers to target such an “Apple TV Pro” device because almost no one would buy one. Whatever the reasons are for gaming not being a big deal on tvOS today, the lack of a “pro” $500 or $600 hardware tier is not one of them.

I think Apple should get the entry price down to $99 (currently $129), and sooner or later they need to update the hardware, if only to support Apple Intelligence. (Perhaps to the A18 or A18 Pro next fall — the current A15 Bionic Apple TV 4K models came out one year after the chip debuted in the iPhones 13.) But the hardware story for Apple TV is fine.

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Zac Hall, writing at 9to5Mac back in May 2023:

Now that Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro for iPad are
official, let’s talk about pricing. These apps coming out
on a random day in May is surprising. Subscription pricing? Not so
much. Nevertheless, pricing for these long overdue apps is
interesting when you consider their Mac counterparts and the Apple
One bundle.

First, let’s address the Mac apps.

How would Apple price Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro for Mac if they
were released today? In the era of service revenue, Apple would
almost certainly charge a subscription fee for access rather than
a one-time fee.

Mac users have had years of free updates to Logic and Final Cut
Pro after paying once for each app. In fact, Logic Pro X will be a
decade old in July, and Final Cut Pro X turns 12 next month. The
price of Logic Pro for Mac today ($199.99) is the same as four
years of subscribing to Logic Pro for iPad, and Final Cut Pro for
Mac ($299.99) will equal six years of paying for the iPad version.

The iPad versions of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro are both priced the same: $5/month or $50/year. There is no bundle to get both at a discount.

I was a little surprised when Apple announced Final Cut Pro 11 for Mac two weeks ago and didn’t announce a switch to subscription pricing. Instead, it remains a $300 one-time purchase, and for existing users version 11 is a free upgrade. Whether you like it or not, subscription pricing is no longer the future, it’s the present, and it’s the dominant model for professional creative tools today.

Adobe made this switch years ago, with a particular emphasis on the Creative Cloud bundle that includes their entire suite of apps — Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro, Audition, Acrobat Pro, and more. You get access to Adobe’s entire suite for $90/month, or $60/month if you pay annually ($720/year). They currently offer a first-year 50 percent discount if you pay annually. A la carte, subscriptions to each app cost $20–$23/month, so the Creative Cloud bundle is a good deal if you use three of them, and a great deal if you use more than three.

Apple clearly understands the appeal of subscription bundles too, with Apple One. Despite the fact that Apple didn’t switch to subscription pricing for Final Cut Pro 11 for Mac, I still expect them to sooner rather than later, and if they do, I further expect a bundle. Apple is never going to offer a swath of creative tools as broad as Adobe’s, but the biggest missing pieces right now would be alternatives to Photoshop and Lightroom. My gut feeling is that’s why they acquired Pixelmator and Photomator. They could sell a bundle for, just spitballing here, $20/month or $200/year that would include the Mac and iPad versions of Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator, and possibly Photomator. Maybe throw in some extra iCloud storage.

 ★ 

Zac Hall, writing at 9to5Mac back in May 2023:

Now that Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro for iPad are
official, let’s talk about pricing. These apps coming out
on a random day in May is surprising. Subscription pricing? Not so
much. Nevertheless, pricing for these long overdue apps is
interesting when you consider their Mac counterparts and the Apple
One bundle.

First, let’s address the Mac apps.

How would Apple price Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro for Mac if they
were released today? In the era of service revenue, Apple would
almost certainly charge a subscription fee for access rather than
a one-time fee.

Mac users have had years of free updates to Logic and Final Cut
Pro after paying once for each app. In fact, Logic Pro X will be a
decade old in July, and Final Cut Pro X turns 12 next month. The
price of Logic Pro for Mac today ($199.99) is the same as four
years of subscribing to Logic Pro for iPad, and Final Cut Pro for
Mac ($299.99) will equal six years of paying for the iPad version.

The iPad versions of Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro are both priced the same: $5/month or $50/year. There is no bundle to get both at a discount.

I was a little surprised when Apple announced Final Cut Pro 11 for Mac two weeks ago and didn’t announce a switch to subscription pricing. Instead, it remains a $300 one-time purchase, and for existing users version 11 is a free upgrade. Whether you like it or not, subscription pricing is no longer the future, it’s the present, and it’s the dominant model for professional creative tools today.

Adobe made this switch years ago, with a particular emphasis on the Creative Cloud bundle that includes their entire suite of apps — Photoshop, Lightroom, Illustrator, InDesign, Premiere Pro, Audition, Acrobat Pro, and more. You get access to Adobe’s entire suite for $90/month, or $60/month if you pay annually ($720/year). They currently offer a first-year 50 percent discount if you pay annually. A la carte, subscriptions to each app cost $20–$23/month, so the Creative Cloud bundle is a good deal if you use three of them, and a great deal if you use more than three.

Apple clearly understands the appeal of subscription bundles too, with Apple One. Despite the fact that Apple didn’t switch to subscription pricing for Final Cut Pro 11 for Mac, I still expect them to sooner rather than later, and if they do, I further expect a bundle. Apple is never going to offer a swath of creative tools as broad as Adobe’s, but the biggest missing pieces right now would be alternatives to Photoshop and Lightroom. My gut feeling is that’s why they acquired Pixelmator and Photomator. They could sell a bundle for, just spitballing here, $20/month or $200/year that would include the Mac and iPad versions of Final Cut Pro, Logic Pro, Pixelmator, and possibly Photomator. Maybe throw in some extra iCloud storage.

Read More 

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at Daring Fireball. With WorkOS you can start selling to enterprises with just a few lines of code. It provides a complete User Management solution along with SSO, SCIM, and FGA. The APIs are modular and easy-to-use, allowing integrations to be completed in minutes instead of months.

Today, some of the fastest growing startups are already powered by WorkOS, including Perplexity, Vercel, and Webflow. For SaaS apps that care deeply about design and user experience, WorkOS is the perfect fit. From high-quality documentation to self-serve onboarding for your customers, it removes all the unnecessary complexity for your engineering team.

Check out WorkOS’s Launch Week announcements to see their latest.

 ★ 

My thanks to WorkOS for sponsoring last week at Daring Fireball. With WorkOS you can start selling to enterprises with just a few lines of code. It provides a complete User Management solution along with SSO, SCIM, and FGA. The APIs are modular and easy-to-use, allowing integrations to be completed in minutes instead of months.

Today, some of the fastest growing startups are already powered by WorkOS, including Perplexity, Vercel, and Webflow. For SaaS apps that care deeply about design and user experience, WorkOS is the perfect fit. From high-quality documentation to self-serve onboarding for your customers, it removes all the unnecessary complexity for your engineering team.

Check out WorkOS’s Launch Week announcements to see their latest.

Read More 

Pondering the future of Pixelmator by looking at the history of Apple’s app acquisitions.

My post this week about Shazam’s history got me thinking about Apple’s track record with acquired apps. Apple acquired Shazam in 2018, and soon integrated its capabilities into Siri. But they’ve also kept the Shazam app going, including the Android version. They even still have a standalone Shazam website. I’d say this has been an acquisition that’s made everyone happy: existing users still have a great Shazam app, and the core “What song is this?” feature has been made more available and accessible.

At the moment, outside Cupertino (and Lithuania) we’re left with uncertainty over the future of Pixelmator and Photomator after their announcement of Apple’s pending acquisition. In broad strokes, let’s consider the strategic reasons Apple might acquire an existing popular app — or in this case, apps.

Keep the app going under Apple’s ownership — Examples of this include Logic, which Apple acquired by purchasing parent company Emagic in 2002, and going back even further, FileMaker.

Shut down the app and bake the underlying technology into the OS — Examples: Siri and Dark Sky. Siri debuted as a standalone iPhone app in February 2010. Apple purchased the parent company two months later, and Siri appeared as “beta” software built into iOS with the iPhone 4S in fall, at which point Apple pulled the standalone Siri app from the App Store. I don’t recall Siri, as a standalone app, ever being all that popular. And whatever you think of Siri’s quality and utility over the intervening years, it’s the sort of thing that makes more sense as a system-level feature than as a standalone app. A lot of people have a lot of wishes for Siri, but I’ve never seen anyone say “I wish Siri were still just a standalone app.”

Dark Sky is more complicated. After acquiring it, Apple kept Dark Sky going as a standalone (and cross-platform) app, but only for a transition period. The purpose of the acquisition was to integrate some of Dark Sky’s forecasting technology into Apple’s own Weather app and the WeatherKit system framework available to third-party apps. Die-hard Dark Sky fans miss it, and some swear that WeatherKit’s warnings about imminent precipitation aren’t as accurate as Dark Sky’s were, but it’s hard to argue that Apple did Dark Sky users dirty.

Acquihire the developers and designers but scrap the app — This happens in the industry, but not with Apple. I can think of many examples of talented indie developers and designers closing up shop and going to work for Apple, but I can’t think of any good examples of a great popular app being shut down for this. The most tragic acquihire I can think of was when Facebook (now Meta) acquired Push Pop Press, an astonishingly talented team that had made a publishing tool for the modern age that might have been the most impressive software I’ve ever seen in my life. And, poof, the whole thing was just shuttered when the Push Pop team joined Facebook. Inside Facebook that same team created Facebook Paper, which espoused many of the principles that made Push Pop’s interactive publishing tool remarkable, but Facebook Paper, alas, was not long for this world. Facebook Paper was so good, so forward-thinking, so innovative, that it almost got me to create a Facebook account for the first time.

Buy the app out of anti-competitive spite simply to shut it down — The software industry is rife with acquisitions whose only purpose was to quash competition,1 but I can’t recall a single example of Apple doing so. And in the case of Pixelmator and Photomator, it doesn’t make any sense — neither competes against anything Apple makes, and they’re exclusively available as apps on Apple platforms.

The bottom line is that what we, as users, hope for after a big company acquires a beloved app is for an outcome where the users of that app remain happy. That might mean just keeping the app going, like with Logic. Or it might mean scrapping the standalone app, but bringing the core features of the app into the OS itself, like with Dark Sky. Sometimes it’s a mix, though, like with Shazam. Another example like that is Workflow — which began life as a third-party automation utility for iOS, but which Apple acquired in 2017 and turned into Shortcuts. Anyone who liked Workflow surely loves Shortcuts — it’s far more powerful and capable as an OS-level technology from Apple than it ever could have hoped to have been as a third-party app.

Other examples:

Beats, which Apple acquired for $3 billion in 2014, remains the largest acquisition by price in Apple’s history.2 Beats Music became the foundation for Apple Music.

Speaking of music, iTunes began life as SoundJam MP, a third-party MP3 player for the Mac. iTunes was more than just a rebranding — it was a complete redesign and rethinking of SoundJam — but it basically served the same purpose that SoundJam did. (The other option Apple considered was purchasing Panic, whose Audion was SoundJam’s arch-rival.)

Final Cut was an acquisition — Apple bought it from Macromedia in 1998. But it’s a weird one, because Apple purchased it and hired the team before it had even shipped. The acquisition wasn’t just the foundation for the Final Cut Pro we know today, but for iMovie too.

TestFlight was an acquisition, and like Siri and Workflow/Shortcuts, is the sort of concept that requires being a first-party product to achieve its goals.

Shake, a professional video compositing tool, is a rare sad trombone. Apple acquired parent company Nothing Real in 2002, but discontinued Shake in 2009. Some features live on in Final Cut Pro but it does not seem like a successful acquisition for anyone who loved Shake.3

In 2021 Apple purchased Primephonic, and turned it into Apple Music Classical in 2023. Seems like a complete win for Primephonic fans.

Apple made a slew of small acquisitions that have all been funnelled into
improving Apple Maps. E.g., Embark, which was a standalone app for transit information and seems to be the foundation for Apple Maps now having good transit features.

It’s commonplace in the industry for a large company to acquire a small company that makes a very cool app, and then somehow ruin that app. Sometimes by transmogrifying it beyond recognition, but oftentimes through disinterest or neglect. And Apple is a very large company, and Pixelmator is a small company with two very cool apps. But an examination of Apple’s acquisition history doesn’t give me any reason for alarm. Apple really does tend to do right by cool app acquisitions.

Apple respects the art of making great apps. Pixelmator in particular is simply too good to scrap, and Apple hasn’t made its own bitmap image editing application since, I think, MacPaint. Something like Pixelmator really would slot right in next to Final Cut Pro and Logic Pro as an Apple “pro tool”. Whether they’ll keep the name, I don’t know, but I think the app will be released under Apple branding as a Photoshop competitor, for Mac and iPad. (Pixelmator for iOS currently runs on both iPads and iPhones, but Apple’s own pro tools, Final Cut and Logic, are iPad only.)

I’m less sure if Apple has the appetite to keep Photomator going, to compete directly against Lightroom — a market Apple simply walked away from when they discontinued Aperture 10 years ago. But perhaps they now regret walking away from Aperture. I’m just not sure how close Photomator is to being a credible alternative to Lightroom.

The other path would be to retire both apps and fold the best features and technology (like their ML Super Resolution upsizing) into Photos, and/or into the system-level Core Image framework available to all apps on all of Apple’s platforms. I can see how the best of Photomator could make its way into Photos. That’s not true for Pixelmator. The acquisition just doesn’t make sense to me unless Apple wants to make Pixelmator an Apple-branded pro tool. We’ll find out next year.

Read More 

Apple Newsroom:

Shazam has now officially surpassed over 100 billion song
recognitions since it launched. To help put that into perspective:

That’s equivalent to 12 songs identified for every person on
Earth.
A person would need to use Shazam to identify a song every
second for 3,168 years to reach 100 billion.

Shazam launched in 2002 as an SMS service in the UK, and back
then, music fans would dial 2580, hold up their phones to identify
music, and receive the song name and artist via text message.
Shazam’s following and influence continued to grow in the years
that followed, but it was the 2008 debut of the App Store and
introduction of Shazam’s iOS app that brought its music
recognition technology to millions of users. By the summer of
2011, Shazam had already recognized over 1 billion songs.

I had no idea Shazam started in the pre-iPhone era of mobile phones, getting audio via a phone call, and sending results via SMS. Clever! That takes me back to Moviefone — the service we’d dial in the 1990s to get theater listings and showtimes. You’d call your city’s local Moviefone number — almost certainly using your landline — navigate a menu (“Press 1 if you know the name of the movie you’d like to see…”), and Moviefone would tell you which theaters were showing it, at what times. It sounds archaic but it was great, and they did a great job with the phone menu user interface so you could navigate it quickly.

It also reminds me of the very early days of IMDB, which preceded the web. You could send an email to IMDB with the name of a movie in the subject, and IMDB would email you back with all the information it had about that movie.

 ★ 

Apple Newsroom:

Shazam has now officially surpassed over 100 billion song
recognitions since it launched. To help put that into perspective:

That’s equivalent to 12 songs identified for every person on
Earth.
A person would need to use Shazam to identify a song every
second for 3,168 years to reach 100 billion.

Shazam launched in 2002 as an SMS service in the UK, and back
then, music fans would dial 2580, hold up their phones to identify
music, and receive the song name and artist via text message.
Shazam’s following and influence continued to grow in the years
that followed, but it was the 2008 debut of the App Store and
introduction of Shazam’s iOS app that brought its music
recognition technology to millions of users. By the summer of
2011, Shazam had already recognized over 1 billion songs.

I had no idea Shazam started in the pre-iPhone era of mobile phones, getting audio via a phone call, and sending results via SMS. Clever! That takes me back to Moviefone — the service we’d dial in the 1990s to get theater listings and showtimes. You’d call your city’s local Moviefone number — almost certainly using your landline — navigate a menu (“Press 1 if you know the name of the movie you’d like to see…”), and Moviefone would tell you which theaters were showing it, at what times. It sounds archaic but it was great, and they did a great job with the phone menu user interface so you could navigate it quickly.

It also reminds me of the very early days of IMDB, which preceded the web. You could send an email to IMDB with the name of a movie in the subject, and IMDB would email you back with all the information it had about that movie.

Read More 

Mishaal Rahman, reporting yesterday for Android Authority:

Android Authority has learned that Google has canceled the Pixel
Tablet 2, the presumed name of Google’s second-generation Pixel
Tablet. This is disappointing for Pixel fans who were waiting for
Google to refresh its first-generation Pixel Tablet with a newer
chipset, a better camera, and, more importantly, an official
keyboard accessory. […]

Last week, I shared what I learned about the Pixel Tablet
2 from a source within Google. I deemed this source to be
very credible given my past history with them as well as the fact
that they were able to share unreleased images of the device with
me (which I obviously did not publish to protect their identity).
After the publication of this article, however, I learned from my
source that Google had decided to cancel its plans to release the
device, citing concerns that the company would lose money on it.

“Concerns that the company would lose money on it” and 9to5Google’s framing of the same news as “profitability concerns” are fun euphemisms for “no one wants an Android tablet”.

This comes on the heels of news just this week that Google is supposedly “fully migrating ChromeOS over to Android” — but somehow not “merging” them — with the specific goal of better competing against the iPad. So a generous read might be that Google is scrapping the Pixel Tablet 2 because that device was planned to run Android (as the existing Pixel Tablet does) but now Google is rejiggering their tablet and laptop hardware roadmaps with the upcoming ChomeOS-migrated-to-not-merged-with-Android OS in mind.

A less generous read is that Google is afflicted with institutional ADHD and generally acts with no apparent strategy. They’ve kept their focus on annual updates to the well-regarded Pixel phones for 8 years now, but haven’t managed to make them hit products. With the rest of their hardware, their strategy has been about as coherent as their comically chaotic efforts in messaging apps.

 ★ 

Mishaal Rahman, reporting yesterday for Android Authority:

Android Authority has learned that Google has canceled the Pixel
Tablet 2, the presumed name of Google’s second-generation Pixel
Tablet. This is disappointing for Pixel fans who were waiting for
Google to refresh its first-generation Pixel Tablet with a newer
chipset, a better camera, and, more importantly, an official
keyboard accessory. […]

Last week, I shared what I learned about the Pixel Tablet
2 from a source within Google. I deemed this source to be
very credible given my past history with them as well as the fact
that they were able to share unreleased images of the device with
me (which I obviously did not publish to protect their identity).
After the publication of this article, however, I learned from my
source that Google had decided to cancel its plans to release the
device, citing concerns that the company would lose money on it.

“Concerns that the company would lose money on it” and 9to5Google’s framing of the same news as “profitability concerns” are fun euphemisms for “no one wants an Android tablet”.

This comes on the heels of news just this week that Google is supposedly “fully migrating ChromeOS over to Android” — but somehow not “merging” them — with the specific goal of better competing against the iPad. So a generous read might be that Google is scrapping the Pixel Tablet 2 because that device was planned to run Android (as the existing Pixel Tablet does) but now Google is rejiggering their tablet and laptop hardware roadmaps with the upcoming ChomeOS-migrated-to-not-merged-with-Android OS in mind.

A less generous read is that Google is afflicted with institutional ADHD and generally acts with no apparent strategy. They’ve kept their focus on annual updates to the well-regarded Pixel phones for 8 years now, but haven’t managed to make them hit products. With the rest of their hardware, their strategy has been about as coherent as their comically chaotic efforts in messaging apps.

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Mike Masnick, writing for MSNBC:

Turns out for the “Twitter Files” crew, “creeping
authoritarianism” isn’t so creepy when it’s your team doing the
creeping.

Before, we were told that White House officials’ merely reaching
out to social media companies about election misinformation was a
democracy-ending threat. Now, the world’s richest man has openly
used his platform to boost one candidate, ridden that campaign’s
success into the White House himself, and … crickets. The
silence is deafening.

There isn’t even a suggestion that Musk should have to divest from
his ownership of X. No one expects that. There is no discussion of
how Musk set up an entire account on his own platform for
his own “Department of Government Efficiency” and gave it a “gray”
check mark — denoting it as a verified government entity.

The silence or cheers from “Twitter Files” writers and boosters
over this merging of private and public interests — which they
deemed a threat to Western civilization, when it wasn’t even
happening — is credibility-destroying. They were simply a
convenient political cudgel, quickly abandoned as soon as an
actual government-social media alliance benefited their side.

A man named Frank Wilhoit coined an oft-cited adage in 2018 that I find profound, particularly when it comes to the absurd hypocrisies of the Trump era in American politics: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

But it’s not just laws, although laws are where the stakes are highest. It’s everything, including conventions and norms.

Whatever it is you think the Biden administration did to nudge Twitter (and other social media platforms, but let’s stick to Twitter/X) to clamp down on what the administration perceived as “misinformation”, it pales in comparison to Musk taking ownership of the platform and turning it into a clear pro-Trump platform for this election. I’m not saying that was illegal, or should be made illegal. I’m saying that the entire argument over “The Twitter Files” was that the former leadership of Twitter put their thumb on the scale to comply with the wishes of the Biden administration. I’m with Masnick — I don’t think that even happened, really. But even if you buy into “The Twitter Files” thesis, it was about a thumb on one side of the scale. And then Musk bought Twitter, renamed it X, and dropped an anvil on the other side of the scale. The “Twitter Files” argument wasn’t that the wrong side of the scale was advantaged by a bias, it was that platform owners should scrupulously avoid any vague hint of a bias at all. But now here we are with Elon Musk serving as a de facto member of Trump’s 2.0 administration and none of the same critics even see a problem.

The hypocrisy is baked into their worldview. So however we counter it, it can’t be by merely pointing out their hypocrisy, because they don’t see it and they don’t care. My biggest quibble with Masnick’s piece is in the headline (which, perhaps, he didn’t write): the line between X and the incoming Trump administration hasn’t been blurred — it’s been erased.

 ★ 

Mike Masnick, writing for MSNBC:

Turns out for the “Twitter Files” crew, “creeping
authoritarianism” isn’t so creepy when it’s your team doing the
creeping.

Before, we were told that White House officials’ merely reaching
out to social media companies about election misinformation was a
democracy-ending threat. Now, the world’s richest man has openly
used his platform to boost one candidate, ridden that campaign’s
success into the White House himself, and … crickets. The
silence is deafening.

There isn’t even a suggestion that Musk should have to divest from
his ownership of X. No one expects that. There is no discussion of
how Musk set up an entire account on his own platform for
his own “Department of Government Efficiency” and gave it a “gray”
check mark — denoting it as a verified government entity.

The silence or cheers from “Twitter Files” writers and boosters
over this merging of private and public interests — which they
deemed a threat to Western civilization, when it wasn’t even
happening — is credibility-destroying. They were simply a
convenient political cudgel, quickly abandoned as soon as an
actual government-social media alliance benefited their side.

A man named Frank Wilhoit coined an oft-cited adage in 2018 that I find profound, particularly when it comes to the absurd hypocrisies of the Trump era in American politics: “Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition, to wit: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect.”

But it’s not just laws, although laws are where the stakes are highest. It’s everything, including conventions and norms.

Whatever it is you think the Biden administration did to nudge Twitter (and other social media platforms, but let’s stick to Twitter/X) to clamp down on what the administration perceived as “misinformation”, it pales in comparison to Musk taking ownership of the platform and turning it into a clear pro-Trump platform for this election. I’m not saying that was illegal, or should be made illegal. I’m saying that the entire argument over “The Twitter Files” was that the former leadership of Twitter put their thumb on the scale to comply with the wishes of the Biden administration. I’m with Masnick — I don’t think that even happened, really. But even if you buy into “The Twitter Files” thesis, it was about a thumb on one side of the scale. And then Musk bought Twitter, renamed it X, and dropped an anvil on the other side of the scale. The “Twitter Files” argument wasn’t that the wrong side of the scale was advantaged by a bias, it was that platform owners should scrupulously avoid any vague hint of a bias at all. But now here we are with Elon Musk serving as a de facto member of Trump’s 2.0 administration and none of the same critics even see a problem.

The hypocrisy is baked into their worldview. So however we counter it, it can’t be by merely pointing out their hypocrisy, because they don’t see it and they don’t care. My biggest quibble with Masnick’s piece is in the headline (which, perhaps, he didn’t write): the line between X and the incoming Trump administration hasn’t been blurred — it’s been erased.

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My advice to any writer looking to start a new site based on the newsletter model would be to consider Substack *last*, not first.

Anil Dash, “Don’t Call It a Substack”:

We constrain our imaginations when we subordinate our creations to
names owned by fascist tycoons. Imagine the author of a book
telling people to “read my Amazon”. A great director trying to
promote their film by saying “click on my Max”. That’s how much
they’ve pickled your brain when you refer to your own work and
your own voice within the context of their walled garden. There is
no such thing as “my Substack”, there is only your writing, and a
forever fight against the world of pure enshittification.

I am upset by the above, but only insofar as I’m jealous that I had never thought to make the analogy to an author telling people to “read my Amazon”. A publication on Substack is no more “a Substack” than a blog on WordPress is “a WordPress”. It’s really quite a nifty — but devious — trick that Substack has pulled to make this parlance a thing.

Substack is, just as a reminder, a political project made by
extremists with a goal of normalizing a radical, hateful agenda by
co-opting well-intentioned creators’ work in service of
cross-promoting attacks on the vulnerable. You don’t have to take
my word for it; Substack’s CEO explicitly said they won’t ban
someone who is explicitly spouting hate, and when confronted with
the rampant white supremacist propaganda that they are profiting
from on their site, they took down… four of the Nazis. Four.
There are countless more now, and they want to use your email
newsletter to cross-promote that content and legitimize it. Nobody
can ban the hateful content site if your nice little newsletter is
on there, too, and your musings for your subscribers are all the
cover they need.

I know quite a few people whose opinions I admire who feel the same way as Dash here. I’ll disagree. I think Substack sees itself as a publishing tool and platform. They’re not here to promote any particular side. It makes no more sense for them to refuse to publish someone for being too right-wing than it would for WordPress or Medium or, say, GitHub or YouTube. Substack, I think, sees itself like that.

You might disagree. Like I said, I know a bunch of good, smart people who see Substack like Dash does, and refuse to pay for any publication on Substack’s platform because of their “Hey we’re just a neutral publishing platform, not an editor, let alone a censor” stance. What I can say, personally, is that I read and pay for several publications on Substack, and for the last few weeks I’ve tried using their iOS app (more on this in a moment), and I’ve never once seen a whiff of anything even vaguely right-wing, let alone hateful. Not a whiff. If it’s there, I never see it. If I never see it, I don’t care.1

What I object to isn’t their laissez faire approach to who they allow to publish on their platform, but rather how they present all publications. People do call the publications on Substack “Substacks”. And Substack publications do all look the same, most of them right down to that telltale serif typeface, Spectral,2 which is kerned so loosely it looks like teeth in need of orthodontia. It’s not an ugly font, per se, but it is very distinctive, which contributes, I think significantly, to the blurring of the branding line between Substack publications as discrete standalone independent entities or as mere sections under “Substack” as an umbrella publication.

Substack, very deliberately, has from the get-go tried to have it both ways. They say that publications on their platform are independent voices and brands. But they present them all as parts of Substack. They all look alike, and they all look like “Substack”. I really don’t get why any writer trying to establish themselves independently would farm out their own brand this way. It’s the illusion of independence.

I absolutely despise that a Substack publication’s home page is, typically, nothing more than a sign-up field for your email address to get the publication by email, and a small “No thanks” link to actually read the damn thing. Half the time when I see that page, I just close the tab out of spite. In what world is “No thanks” a good link to convey the meaning “Let me read the thing I came here to read”?

Substack’s app, along with the company’s home page, defaults to presenting itself as a Twitter-like short-form posting platform. As if what we need right now is another Twitter-like platform. But especially: why would anyone want to participate in a social platform tied to one specific publishing platform? It doesn’t make any sense to me, as a reader, nor do I see the appeal to writers on the platform. It only makes sense strategically from Substack’s own perspective. If, as a writer, your feedback and social interaction with your audience is tied to Substack’s own social graph, your publication is tied to Substack, too. It’s so transparently a lock-in play that it’s almost hard to object to it. It’s right there on the tin. But it’s not hard at all to just not use it.

Substack no longer even hosts a majority of the newsletter-style writers I subscribe to. Casey Newton moved Platformer from Substack to Ghost in January. Craig Calcaterra moved his excellent baseball-focused-but-with-heavy-dashes-of-politics-and-pop-culture Cup of Coffee from Substack to Beehiiv in January as well.3 Molly White runs Citation Needed on Ghost. My newest paid subscription is to CNN expat Oliver Darcy’s new media-industry focused Status, for which he chose Beehiiv. And of course there’s my friend and Dithering co-host Ben Thompson, whose Stratechery, running on his own platform Passport, not only long predates Substack but served as their model to replicate. (Substack’s pitch deck was “Stratechery in a box.”) All of these sites look distinctive, with their own brand. All of them offer much better subscription and delivery management interfaces than Substack.

My advice to any writer looking to start a new site based on the newsletter model would be to consider Substack last, not first. Not because Substack is a Nazi bar, which I don’t think it is at all, but simply because there are clearly better options, and the company’s long term goal is clearly platform lock-in.

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