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🗞 News
Jony Ive announced that he's leaving Apple (in stages, and retaining a consulting relationship). This might well be a natural progression for him - he's been there a very long time and taken the existing products through most of their natural iterations (how many metal boxes with rounded corners can you get excited about?), and as the next products start to get close (car? glasses?) would he want to launch the first version and then leave and watch someone else iterate, or leave first and give them to someone new? And Apple has a lot of good people and a lot of institutional knowledge around creating a certain kind of product (beware of the Single Solitary Genius theory of Apple products). But. This is the end of the band - Jobs decided what do to, Ive made it great and Cook made it happen (this is probably unfair to all three of them) and now only Cook is left, and it's not clear how the creative process is going to work. Industrial design now reports, not to the CEO, but to operations, and Marc Newson (the other rock star Ive hired) is leaving as well, so how does Apple avoid being a very efficient but slightly normal company? This is an untestable question - come back in 10 years, project this email onto your retina with your Apple Lens, and see what you think... Link
Apple is still doing cars: it bought the remains of Drive.ai, a self-driving car startup that shut down this week. The project continues. Link
Twitter came up with a Trump policy. That is, what should they do when public figures (guess who) say things that violate the content moderation rules? Answer: they'll leave it up but with a label. Seems trivial but this gets at the deeper problem of how uncomfortable both these companies and the broader world are with the idea of a private company deciding what speech is allowed, outside of any broader social and political process. Link
What should Facebook block? FB is continuing its consultation process on what kinds of content exactly we want it to try to block, and how it would decide. As for Twitter, more questions than answers - it's easy to point to the hard cases but much harder to come up with consistent and repeatable rules that you can give to tens of thousands of human moderators. Link
🔮 Reading
Interesting interview with Bill Gates. The bit that got all the attention is that he observes Microsoft failed to become the global mobile OS (despite being aggressively present in mobile since the late 1990s), but the rest is good too. Link
Interview with Adam Mosseri, head of Instagram: shopping and product discovery. Link ($)
D2C startups risk being 'bonsai brands'. Link
Using satellites to count cars in mall car parks. Link
TikTok’s global domination strategy (mostly, spend vast sums on advertising, and also apparently they want to buy Snap). Subtext: you can't assume that the next big social network will be an American company (and subject to American regulators). Link ($)
GrubHub is buying up thousands of restaurant web addresses, perhaps to make it harder for those restaurants to go direct. Link
Nice feature story on how hackers can try to break into hotel systems. TLDR: don't use hotel wifi, ever. Link
Useful perspectives on AI from Stephen Wolfram. Link
The NYT posted a story on book counterfeiting on Amazon, and Amazon responded with a lot of numbers and arguments. (I have no dog in this fight, but would observe that you often get a lot more interesting information from a company when it posts a rebuttal than you'd get from asking outright.) Link
😮 Cool things of the week
A 1:24 scale Concorde from 1969 (the Iran Air office on Piccadilly used to have one in the window, in original 1970s Iran Air livery, which must have been worth a small fortune on this basis...). Link
📊 Statistics
Google's latest transparency report: lots of data on online malware and hacking. Interesting that phishing seems to be replacing malware - shift to SaaS and to more secure operating systems (iOS etc)? Link
Apple Music now has 60m paying users. Link
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