Spyglass - One-Way Ticket to Clown Town

Paramount's new logo is about as bland as they come – hopefully it's just a placeholder until Skydance is actually able to acquire the company, at some point next year. That deal, assuming it goes through, which is still a pretty big assumption, is also likely to kickstart a flurry of other media deals. The biggest of those will likely involved Warner Bros Discovery and I think Apple should be following all of this pretty closely given their needs and aspirations for Apple TV+ and the Vision Pro...

Speaking of, Google may be learning from Apple's early missteps with their XR – sorry, "Spatial Computing" – device. If I were them, I'd push out any Vision Pro competitor even longer and focus on what Meta has been doing with the Ray-Ban smart glasses. That would seem to align better with all of the AI initiatives anyway...

OpenAI's work on better reasoning in the field would appear to have gotten a more reasonable codename in "Strawberry". That sounds sweet and cute versus, say, Q*, which sounds like it was developed to elicit maximum conspiracy theories.

I also think Apple should take some inspiration from the sweet and cute tinyPod project, which aims to turn an Apple Watch into a scroll-wheel iPod. It has been a while since Apple has had a truly whimsical product. Instead, we get an "upgrade" from a 'space gray' HomePod mini to a 'midnight' version. And we're seemingly about to get more shitty ads shoved into Apple News? Great.

Could be worse. You could be selling your soul and losing your spine at the same time in order to buy a ticket on a bandwagon heading to Clown Town.

Remains of the Week

🍽️ No More Dishes for Pete Wells – The longtime NYT food critic is laying down his utensils (though it sounds like he'll be writing elsewhere for the NYT going forward) after nearly 500 restaurant reviews. What sounds like the perfect job has quite a few downsides, as it turns out – including what it can do to your overall health, to which Wells was not immune. [NYT]

🤖 About That AI Boom Cycle for iPhone 16... – Doing his usual supplier checks, Ming-Chi Kuo now doesn't believe there will be much, if any, ramp in upcoming iPhone 16 shipments despite the narrative that 'Apple Intelligence' will fuel sales. The reality is that many of those features aren't even coming until next year, of course. This all sort of echoes what's perhaps happening (or more to the point, not happening) with the AI PC "supercycle". [Medium]

🥽 The Reality of the XR Market Hits Meta – Spending cuts have been called for, report Wayne Ma and Kalley Huang. Investment is continuing, just not unabated. It sounds like the Quest 4 shouldn't be expected until 2026. And a new Quest Pro meant to compete with the Vision Pro, not until 2027 – just in time for Apple to move down market? Meta's first AR glasses are still coming, but those are not to be mistaken with their current Ray-Ban collaboration as EssilorLuxottica apparently balked at the design of those – they're "bulky". Maybe a massive Meta investment in French-Italian eyewear maker will change their minds? [The Information 🔒]

🧑‍✈️ Microsoft Copilot Has No Captain – Tom Warren dives into all the subdivisions of Microsoft's AI initiative and finds a lot of cooks in the kitchen, to mix the metaphors. He says it's not yet the infamous guns-pointed-at-one-another org chart situation yet, but competition is heating up... Throw in OpenAI and we may have a powder keg situation brewing... [The Verge]

📺 FX Nearly Catches Netflix in Emmy Noms – Reward shows remain silly and subjective, but the number of nominations the streamers (and old school networks) get year-to-year is an interesting proxy for something. In this case, it shows how FX continues to punch above its weight (thanks largely to Shogun and The Bear). Per above, Apple TV+ continues to improve its standing also, as they're rewarded for quality while being dinged business-wise for (lack of) quantity. HBO fell into third place in the standings this year – just saying... [Deadline]

⭕️ The Inner Ring ⭕️

This week's Spyglass columns sent to members of The Inner Ring. Sign up here for full access and for future emails...

Apple Should Buy HBO

And basically all of Warner Bros Discovery, which is selling…

Spyglass •M.G. Siegler

Warner Bros Discovery has content but needs money. Apple has money but needs content...

Backing the Winner

Attention VCs: going for Trump is no longer the contrarian bet…

Spyglass •M.G. Siegler

That herd-like mentality knows no bounds, apparently...

Potent Quotables

We are in open waters. They’re more volatile than bitcoin.

-- Iacopo Briano, a dinosaur fossil broker and auctioneer – yes, really – on the current state of buying dinosaur bones. And this was published before Citadel's Ken Griffin just bought a stegosaurus for $45M.

The Quick & the Read

• The Delta retro game emulator for iOS – the best of these – is now on iPad too, and yes, it's glorious [MacRumors]
  • In other iOS emulator news, PC OS emulators now work on iOS too! Yes, you can run Windows XP on the iPad but not macOS. [The Verge]
• Somehow, the Russo brothers may return to direct the new Avengers movies for Disney/Marvel. Not a huge surprise given the fiasco of the franchise (due to the Jonathan Majors situation) at the moment and the Russos lack of success outside that cinematic universe. But can they salvage the next film in the less than two years before it's due to be released? [Hollywood Reporter]
• Remember the Essential phone? Someone was able to buy a prototype of the unreleased second version of Andy Rubin's smartphone, which is comically long and thin. Sort of like an old school phone receiver, but that was meant to bridge mouth-to-ear. The phone is no longer the most important part of the phone, so this just looks impractical. It looks like a remote control. [YouTube]
• Remember all those shows that were coming to Xitter? You probably don't because they've all fizzled out or failed to launch perhaps due to a complete and utter lack of advertiser interest. Maybe you recall Don Lemon's show, which ended months ago for other reasons... [Bloomberg 🔒]
• The massive new NBA TV rights deal seems to be at the finish line, but amazingly, it sounds like WBD is going to try to match at least part of it (likely Amazon's part, which is the "cheapest" at $1.8B). They have five days... [AP]
• OpenAI is having continued discussions about making their own AI chips, which seems obvious given that any big player in the space is eventually going to want to "own the whole stack" and not have to rely on NVIDIA for everything, as basically everyone clearly is now. "Be your own bitch" as it were. [The Information 🔒]
  • OpenAI also may have figured out a way to get their models to better explain what they're doing – by pitting two versions against one another in a game. [VentureBeat]
• Meanwhile, Apple claims that it doesn't matter if their OpenELM model pulled content to train from YouTube as they're not using it for Apple Intelligence. Weird to create and release models they're not using? [9to5Mac]
• Tyler Cowen outlines 19 reasons he believe the "vibe has shifted" in favor of Trump – definitely don't agree with all of them, but they're thought-provoking. As I wrote a few days ago, there's been a "turn of the tide"... [Marginal Revolution]

One macOS Beta Thing...

I have not yet installed the (newly public) betas of macOS Sequoia and iOS 18 on my main machines, but mainly because of the aforementioned being on the road. Once I get home, I likely will, to be able to to use iPhone mirrors on macOS, if nothing else. Obviously to be able to watch Tenet as Christopher Nolan intended.

Patrick Tomasso on Threads