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Last night we seemed to get a taste of what the next several months are going to be like on social media. And that is: a waking, screaming nightmare of misguided euphoria and prolonged pain. I speak, of course, of a certain former president being found guilty on all 34 counts on which he was charged in his paying-a-porn-star-hush-money case. Amazingly, all this may ultimately mean is that the US will have its first felon-in-chief come November. So that's fun. But the dialogue around this last night and now bleeding into today on Xitter is pretty unbearable. Post a take people agree with and they love it. Post one they disagree with and it's endless yelling. This is nothing new, of course. But it's more pronounced than it has ever been. Perhaps because of all the recent changes to Xitter. And it's only going to get worse. In a weird twist of timing, Threads, Meta's would-be Xitter-killer, rolled out their new multi-pane UI to everyone yesterday just ahead of the news. The so-called "ThreadDeck" (because, of course, it looks like the old Twitter power-user UI, Tweetdeck), is really well done. A bigger product upgrade than anything Xitter has done since it became Xitter. It pretty fundamentally changes how you can use Threads, because it makes it feel much more lively and real-time than the single, algorithmic timeline the service had been forcing upon us all. As I argued a couple weeks ago, the almost anti-real-time feed was a large mistake if Threads truly wanted to compete with Xitter. And now it seems that mistake is being rectified. Not fully yet, but it's a good step. And you could see it in following said news last night. While Xitter was still more "alive" with content, this was the first time I recall Threads nearly keeping up with the barrage of takes on the news. And while Meta has said conflicting things about wanting to put Threads into the flow of that news, they've definitively noted that they wanted to stay out of elevating political topics with this product. We all know and understand why but... good luck separating the two over the next many months. Me? I may just be gone til November.
Briefly...Microsoft’s MacBook Air-Beating Benchmarks – Tom Warren dug a bit deeper into the new Surface performance claims by Microsoft. The key is in the caveats here: these are only against a (fan-less) MacBook Air, and, of course, against the M3 chip, not the newer M4 chip, which is still only in the new iPad Pro. In other words, Microsoft has caught up or surpassed Apple in a pretty limited window of both devices and time. To be clear, the new machines look and sound nice, but the comparisons are most impressive versus the old Surface devices, which is not great news for Intel. The key to all of this remains how well these machines perform in the real world, which we still won't know for a bit. 🏎️ As MLB Changes Its Records, Josh Gibson Enters Beaks Records – The Athletic does a nice job breaking down the ramifications of the MLB adding in Negro League stats into their official record books. It was never going to be apples-to-apples, of course, but it's even more nuanced and complicated than you may think given the rules around plate appearances and games played, etc. Interestingly, the COVID-shortened season is what got baseball comfortable with these changes due to the discrepancy in season lengths. ⚾️ Its Future in Doubt, Freewheeling ‘Inside the NBA’ Is on Edge Instead – It's pretty wild that it has come to this, but such is the state of cable, sports, and streaming. Charles Barkley has his out when TNT officially loses the NBA rights next year, but what will the rest of the cast do? If a streamer can recreate the show, there's a pretty big opportunity there. The obvious guess would be Amazon. 🏀
⭕️ The Inner Ring ⭕️The following are the columns sent to paid Spyglass subscribers this week – sign up here for full access and future emails...
Quotable..."So weirdly, he’s kind of the most 'Lord of the Rings' thing in 'Lord of the Rings', and also the first thing you would cut if you were adapting it as a film. But we have the advantage of a television show, and hence we are going to find a way to tap into that." -- Patrick McKay, one of the Rings of Power showrunners, talking about the inclusion of Tom Bombadil – finally – into a LOTR (even if adjacent) piece of cinematic content, in this case, the insanely expensive Amazon Prime Video show.
Some Thoughts On...🌑 George Lucas not liking the Star Wars universe beyond his own 🎙️ Myself on John Gruber's 'The Talk Show' 🗣️ Amazon's seeming AI malaise... 🙊 ...as seen through a recent Alexa "upgrade" 🔴 The increasing role of push notifications for news 🤖 An obvious, early useful use of AI 🧙♂️ Hey Dol! Merry Dol! Tom Bombadilo!
Quickly...- Skydance and Paramount are dancing yet again – it feels like the music will end soon, but it has felt like that for months at this point.
- Atari buys Intellivision, thus ending the first videogame console war after nearly 50 years...
- Speaking of videogames, Nintendo is finally opening a second retail store in the US – the one in NYC is great – in San Francisco
- And on the Nintendo topic, we're finally getting a Zelda Lego set – the Great Deku Tree will feature 2,500 pieces and cost $300
- RIP ICQ, one of the OG IM services which changed hands many times over its 28 years
- TikTok is working on a new, separate version of its algorithm to power the US app only. That's nice, but it won't change the need for an ownership change, though it could make a sale a bit easier, but probably still just as unlikely.
- The Economist is worried that the big tech splurge on AI may come back to bite, thus tanking the stock market as a whole – something I pondered recently
- The Financial Times believes Airchat's "viral success may not last" – something I pondered before, you know, the actual virality had already ended...
- Apple is considering rotating the Apple logo on the iPad given the increasing use of landscape mode on the device. I'm reminded of the rotation of said logo on Apple laptops back in the day so that they weren't upside down when in use. But also, if you have the Magic Keyboard, the Apple logo on that is already facing the right direction and covers the the other one on the device...
- He-Man has been cast for a new live-action Masters of the Universe movie, oddly, the article makes no mention of the old movie, which made Dolph Lundgren a large part of my childhood (well, alongside his role in Rocky IV). Will it be the Barbie of 2026?
- Sadly, the box office stumble of Furiosa may derail the final film George Miller had planned for his Mad Max series. You have to imagine one of the streamers would pay up for it but would Miller be okay with that? And would they give him the budget required for all the practical effects he uses...
- Viggo Mortensen got permission to use Aragorn’s Sword in a new movie he made – unclear still if he'll be in the forthcoming movie in the Hobbitverse...
- Speaking of, this is a few years old, but a fun story of the time J.R.R. Tolkien blocked The Beatles from making a Lord of the Rings film. Too bad as it would have had Paul McCartney as Frodo, Ringo Starr as Sam, John Lennon as Gollum and George Harrison as Gandalf! Oh, and they wanted Stanley Kubrick to direct...
- On the topic of George Lucas linked above, he had a very different tone about his films as "little kids movies" in the 1970s – so much so that he swapped 2.5% of his Star Wars net points with Steven Spielberg for his Close Encounters points, trying to hedge his bet. (via Marginal Revolution)
- Jim Prosser has some advice for OpenAI from a PR-perspective amidst their recent debacles
- While the NBA rights are going one way, the MLB rights seem to be going the other, with Roku getting the Sunday baseball games for about 1/3rd the price that they previously went for – ouch. Also, Roku? Really?
- Nearly 60% of 18-49 sports fans say they'll 'likely' subscribe to Venu Sports, which sounds more like a bad poll than a reason to celebrate, to me. A sports streamer with every single sport and game? Sign me up. One with a random smattering of sports and games? It's just yet another streamer you pay for.
- The Bear, The Bear, The Bear, The Bear – the show, not this, is back soon.
More Missives...
One AI Hobbit Thing...Speaking of Tolkien – he undoubtedly would not like this 1950's Super Panavision 70-style version of The Hobbit made with, of course, AI. But it's pretty great.
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