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20 Apr, 16 tweets, 5 min read

Apple's AirTag is a revolutionary technology that lets you attach a $40 dongle to items to discourage you from losing them

The invention of a costly free-range dongle with no device to attach to marks the apotheosis of a 30-year arc in Apple product design

Apple's war on grandparents continues with this fully touch-sensitive monstrosity with a Siri button on the side, for easy misclicking

Tim Cook now boasting that the Zappos app is built to run natively on Apple's new M1 processor, so you can order over 400,000 shoes per second

Oh man, to be a fly on the wall at this design meeting.

"I'm thinking metallic slab on a metal hinge"

"Hinge sold separately?"

"Of course."

"I love it! But lose 5 of those ports on the back"

No HDMI port or SD card but this top-of-the-line 2021 performance workstation will look fantastic with Hello Kitty ears

#courage

No amount of keyboard redesign will ever touch Caps Lock

8 GB of memory! Ethernet! Two usable ports! And the pro model even comes with an internal clock card!

There's some really nice design call-outs here to older Mac design language, like the iMac-like color palette, or putting a "turn off my computer" button right next to the delete key.

iPad now has 5G and interoperates seamlessly with both Pfizer and Moderna. (Johnson and Johnson still requires Apple Watch)

I really hope whatever marketing executive originally came up with "Retina Display" still works at Apple and just has to take this shit (delivered by a guy who wears dad sneakers with jeans)

The good news is the smaller iPad Pro costs under a thousand bucks. The bad news is that it physically can't be detached from the larger one

Apple definitely hired some Windows packaging designers this year

15 years ago this was wonderful satire, now it's just Apple

Pretty excited about the market for stolen $450 Hermès luggage tags. This is like buying a solid gold mounting bracket for your car alarm. Apple should offer a second, smaller AirTag stitched into it.

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15 Apr

"Social audio app Clubhouse will let all six remaining users pay other creators starting Monday."

If Clubhouse's transition from unpaid conference call to 900 number goes smoothly, I look forward to their pivot to making unsolicited calls to potential users around dinnertime, cementing their hold on the 90's nostalgia market.

Clubhouse totally needs a modem channel, where people can type text messages at each other at 300 baud. Somebody please do this.

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14 Apr

It's striking how in all the discussion around pulling out of Afghanistan, there's been so little mention in the US media about how Afghans feel about it, or what it will mean for them. South Vietnam learned this lesson the hard way—when America is ready to go, boy do they bail.

There's the sunk cost fallacy—the fact that we've wasted 20 years on a stupid war is more reason to stop it, not less. But there's also an obligation you incur when you occupy a country for that long, to the people whose lives are intertwined with your presence, for good or bad

Missing from much discussion of the Middle East and Central Asia is the fact that it's full of intelligent human beings, with agency not a geopolitical chess board, and maybe talking and listening to them more would be a way out of the senseless futility of the last 20 years

Read 6 tweets

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13 Apr

What the covid shot taught me is that every time I've been really sick in my life, it was my immune reaction that was making me feel like death warmed over, not whatever innocent virus I had previously blamed. I feel so betrayed. Why *was* I hitting myself?

The human immune system needs a ground-up rewrite to better reflect the needs of stakeholders. There's a quarter billion years of technical debt in mammalian immune response and it shows in the crufty design. And don't even get me started on blood clotting. Disruptors needed!

If human immunological memory used blockchain we wouldn't need these booster shots

Read 4 tweets

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31 Mar

I've gotten a number of replies from customers who tell me they are philosophically opposed to subscription services, but want to support me and would be willing to make periodic donations to the site, especially if I reminded them about it every year or so. 🧐

An observation I made in 2009 still holds true today—people approach a $20 online purchase with the same seriousness, research, and depth of reflection that they would if buying a house or fantastically expensive Italian luxury car

More than one person told me they have to talk it over with their wife, and will make a decision in a few weeks' time. Dude, if converting requires a family meeting and a long, tearful phone call with your pastor, just stay on the one-time plan. You're freaking me out a little.

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30 Mar

Our new business model for writers is so sustainable that we're raising $65 million to continue to run it at a massive loss

Substack reminds me of the early days of Blue Apron, where you could get really amazing cuts of meat or fish home delivered at a fraction of their cost because the company was burning money to build market share. The trick is always to know when to get off the Wheel of VC in time

All that's missing from the Substack business model is a feature where, once you get people to sign up, part of the money that comes in from subscribers they bring in later accrues to you

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28 Mar

Everyone's going on about how serious incidents (like Suez or the Texas blackouts) show that we're too reliant on complex systems. But these incidents are also the only way to build resilience in such systems. We need more of them, at far lower severity nytimes.com/2021/03/26/bus…

The only complex system you should trust is one that breaks all the time, at all scales, and where those breakdowns are routine and the mitigation for it well developed. Never put your data on a server with ten years of uptime

The human response to any functioning complex system is to pile on additional complexity until it breaks catastrophically. So a steady rate of breakdowns, big and small, is the only reassurance that you aren't piling up massive levels of risk somewhere

Read 5 tweets

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