2026-10-17 05:39:03
Happy iPhone Duo Pre-Order Day to those who celebrate. Which is apparently almost no one because either Apple's inventory is comically low or demand is comically high – or both. Personally, I teed up my pre-order the moment the Apple Store came back on line and I still got stuck with a November delivery date. I'm really not sure how I possibly could have done it any faster. I even tasked Muse with backing me up (mostly as a test) and sadly, Moneypenny struck out too.
Current ship dates are in late January. Yes, of 2027. That should be about seven months before the next iPhone Duo is announced. Ouch.
So instead I'll choose to celebrate this as You Can See Everything Release Day. I saw a screening last night and it's as good as you're undoubtedly reading about. There's almost nothing of interest I can say about it that won't spoil elements, so I'll hold my tongue for now. But I sort of knew what to expect and yet I found it quite different and unexpected in many ways...
Inklings is a newsletter featuring links and commentary from M.G. Siegler on timely topics found around the web.
🤝 Apple and Meta Ternus the Page – What is in the water in Cupertino these days? First, Apple teams up with Google, their old "thermonuclear" enemy over Android, now their core AI model partner. Then, Apple signs up to use chips from NVIDIA, their adversary for even longer (a relationship once perhaps soured to the point of falling behind in AI) to help with Apple Intelligence (in Google's Cloud!). Now they're working with Meta, which has been the most heated of their rivals (though OpenAI is quickly moving up those ranks!) in the past several years. I mean, this is great and is providing great quotes from Alexandr Wang, "We're excited for mommy and daddy to be playing nice again." Wang credits Daniel Gross (who of course worked on Apple's early AI efforts and now is at Meta), but presumably the change atop Apple helped too. Who is next, Epic?! Anyway, this is a clear win/win. Apple gets to showcase how good their hardware is at running local models (just as that narrative is under assault from Microsoft) and Meta gets to showcase how well their "open" models (but not their flagship models) can work on local machines. As Ina Fried points out, AI is creating quite a few strange bedfellows, but this one has actually long made some sense. [Axios]
🐝 Will Amazon's 'Bee' Sting? – I'm sort of surprised Amazon is pushing forward with their always-on device explicitly for listening to conversations. Yes, they bought the company because of the product, and yes, it could very well be a useful use case for AI, but as backlash builds against the Meta Ray-Bans for their cameras and as even Apple takes pre-emptive heat for a future future AirPods with cameras – "PervPods" – and a future Apple Watch feature that can yes, listen to conversations to later summarize with the help of AI, it just seems like there are a lot of signals that the mass market might not be quite ready for this product. Sure, Amazon is also saying all the right things with regard to not storing conversations, and encrypting any data, etc, but I'm just not sure it matters right now. All people see and hear with these devices is "surveillance". That will change with time, but it's early in the cycle. And as Amazon should know better than anyone, being early can bee a problem... $75 is a pretty good price though! [Verge]
🍿 Netflix Shakes Itself Up – After losing out on Warner Bros while increasingly losing out to YouTube, Netflix clearly was in need of a shake. Sadly, this was in the form of mass layoffs, but also major changes at the top with Chief Content Officer Bela Bajaria out "immediately". Ouch. Of course, as all the stories on this news paint clearly, such firings are the name of the game, sort of like swapping head coaches in sports. Bajaria came to Netflix after she was fired from NBC. And she rose to the top of content after Netflix fired Cindy Holland. Holland, meanwhile, was just pushed out again from the newly-merged Paramount. And while Peter Rice seems like a great get for Netflix to take over this role, remember that he too was fired from Disney (though for what some viewed to be an internal power move by – now fired – CEO Bob Chapek). I've long argued that part of Netflix's (literal) growing problem was simple: their content, especially movies, simply weren't very good. While the algorithm still made many of them popular, this kind of bad build-up lingers in peoples' minds in terms of perceived quality (and the awards circuit stumbles don't help). Could Rice, who helped Fox and Disney merge, also signal a plan to expand through an acquisition of, say, NBCUniversal, as Matt Belloni (who scooped this news for Puck, though there were previous whispers) throws out there? [Variety]
"A lot of investors have no clue what they are investing in. They set very extreme expectations only to find out that it’s almost like they are in a casino."
– Hock Tan, the boss of Broadcom, with the boss quote – which may or may not have led to the recent nosedive in the stock market.
A literal spy! Speaking of surveillance... I mean, there are several layers of the OpenAI Spy story that are almost beyond belief. A Saudi national, who had worked as an engineer at OpenAI for well over a year – and at Meta for five years before that – (allegedly) uses ChatGPT on his wife's computer to try to conceal his queries for how best to spy on his company... the company which makes the product he's querying. He (allegedly) hides his makeshift eavesdropper behind a TV and somehow there's a surveillance camera back there which captures the most perfect picture of him (below) doing the (alleged) deed. He has (allegedly) wrapped his contraption in toilet paper. Like a fucking pro. And OpenAI quickly figured out it was (allegedly) him by using ChatGPT to look at the evidence – which they're clearly bragging about in the stories about this situation. What. The. Fuck.
🎶 Listening to "Isabelle Fly" by The Lumineers
🍺 Enjoying a Sierra Nevada Pale Ale
🇬🇧 Sent from London, England
2026-10-16 06:37:00
On September 1, I wrote a column looking back at the history of AI "personal assistants" and wondering if now might be the time, thanks largely to the rise of LLMs, for them to actually take over. While Instinct and Town were getting some early love (months after the initial OpenClaw love predictably died down), certainly on VC Twitter, the big players were obviously looming...
Fast forward six weeks and now it's a full-on war in the space. To the point where my computer while recording this Big Technology Podcast with Alex Kantrowitz was on the verge of melting down from running various agents in the background.
During the chat, we dive into why perhaps these services haven't taken off in the past (we're approaching the 40th anniversary of the old Apple "Knowledge Navigator" concept video) and what's different now. Namely, I think the proactive nature of these services helps to overcome a real "blank page meets boil the ocean" issue. That plus leveraging the tried-and-true messaging paradigms (bolstered by ChatGPT itself), should get people to at least try these products. But to keep people sticking around, there will need to be actual ongoing utility – and saving money is a good one! Granted, it may destroy the banking industry and/or anything that relies on ongoing subscriptions, but still...
So if these services take off this time, it may be more a question of timing – how long will all of this take to go truly mainstream? This is obviously where Muse has a huge advantage given the ability to leverage Meta's other multi-billion-user products. And yeah, it remains the number one overall app in the App Store a month after launch. Sora, by comparison, could only hold the top of the store for a few days, even with OpenAI pushing it via ChatGPT.
This is a big part of why I think Muse has a shot here – well that and the fact that it's good. If Meta can convince users to overcome their privacy fears – something which the product is rightly focused on from the get-go. Another interesting timing wrinkle: if the current crop of movies where these major tech players are villains doesn't poison this well, as it were...
I almost can't believe I'm the one defending the blood-sucking social network here, but the fact that Muse is this good without a true frontier model powering it is impressive – and points to a world where it gets even better, fast with "Watermelon" (which, of course, is now live, just after our conversation, in the form of "Wonder).
Anyway, Alex is more Team Dots. That product is also well done, but there I worry about OpenAI's focus and muddled messaging. But it certainly helps, distribution-wise, that it's baked right into ChatGPT itself. Though not nearly as much as the boost Siri AI naturally gets from being pre/auto-installed on basically all Apple devices in the wild. That's why Alex has Apple as the dark horse here, and it's hard to disagree with that, as I've written about in the past.
Still, Siri AI, which, while better than Siri, is no Muse or Dots or the like. Perhaps that points to Apple buying Instinct...
What about Microsoft? Their "super app" is here with (the actually smartly named) "Autopilot" in the passenger seat. Can their hold in enterprise translate to consumer success here too? Or will Bring Your Own AI become the norm at work?
Um, where's Anthropic in this personal AI assistant race? Are they thinking that Claude Code/Cowork will morph into their play? Or do they still simply not care about the consumer market?
What about Amazon? What are they up to here beyond blocking other company's agents? Is this whole thing just going to quickly devolve into another turf war?
But really, where is Google?! They clearly should have been the one to build Muse, as the comments around my original post can attest. And yeah, they've been seemingly working on it with 'Gemini Spark', but even in beta, it's just not breaking through in the same way.
Part of the problem is clearly some internal chaos and confusion which led to a Google I/O conference with some vaporware announcements – notably, Gemini 3.5 Pro. But now that Gemini 4 is here, maybe Google is finally ready to reorient themselves again and come storming back in AI – again?
2026-10-14 20:10:47
The HomeView is, without question, one of the strangest devices Apple has ever launched. Certainly in recent times where focus has been the name of their game. I'm not certain it's unfocused – I'll hold off on full judgement until I have one – but it certainly feels a bit all over the place as a product.
Start with the way it was launched. While Apple invited select media and influencers to a hands-on experience in New York, there wasn't a "keynote" to unveil the device. There wasn't even a pre-recorded product unveiling as Apple has used in the past for these "in-between" mini events. There was simply a press release, a few embargoed stories,1 and a three minute and thirteen second long commercial. Perhaps that's an unfair categorization of the video because it's too long to air on television, nor is it really an infomercial,2 it's just sort of a short of sorts, meant to highlight the essence of the device.
It is also pure chaos.
I'm not sure I've ever felt such anxiety watching a promotional video, and certainly not one made by Apple. I could feel my blood pressure rising with each new "twist". As a parent, I can of course relate to the chaotic nature of trying to get out the door in the morning, but it's obviously jacked up to eleven to showcase all the various things HomeView can do. And it just left me exhausted and mildly annoyed. This fictional family needs to get their lives in order – and their table top cleaned! – in a way that I'm not sure any device could or should help with.
It's almost like Apple was going for a tagline of "HomeView: Chaos, Under Control" but nothing and no one really seems in control here. Worse, I think the HomeView makes the mess worse in a number of ways. At various points, I wanted to yell at the screen, "you don't need to ask HomeView for that, just FOCUS!"
My god what a weird introduction. Hopefully Apple's marketing team was simply aiming to get people talking, because I think that worked. But not necessarily in good ways...
But in a way, it may be the perfect intro video here because it highlights the strangeness of the device. Even when it was just rumored a few years back, I had a hard time figuring out what such a device would be used for. Yes, yes, home controls, but your iPad – or iPhone – can do that. So multi-user home controls, I guess, but what's the actual market size for a stand-alone device there – let alone an Apple-scale device? It had to be more than that, was my thinking. And it is! But again, in very weird ways.
I almost wonder – as I long have! – if HomeView being centered more around being the perfect FaceTime device for your home and family wouldn't be better and more straightforward positioning here...3
While HomeView may sound like a small iPad, it's clearly not one. Perhaps utilizing a square screen was smart in that regard, to avoid the obvious comparison. If anything, it's more analogous to a big Apple Watch. But it's not like it runs Apple Watch apps (thankfully). Instead, it runs... CarPlay apps. What?
I mean, the thing doesn't even run homeOS – the long-rumored name of an Apple OS for... you guessed it, the home. Nor does it run tvOS, Apple's current OS for the home.4 I mean, it doesn't even have an Apple TV app! What?
Instead, it runs... 'HomeView software'. What?5
So it's a device that sounds like an iPad, but looks and in many ways acts like a giant Apple Watch, that runs CarPlay apps. What?!
To be fair, perhaps the plan is similar to the one way back in the day with the iPhone itself. Maybe it will be Apple-built native apps to start with a native SDK to come later, maybe with actual launch of a 'homeOS' to unify such devices? That would make some sense, but for now, it's weird! And it's not like Apple was pressed for time here – this device has apparently been on the shelf (and not on store shelves) for months, if not years, while the world waited for Apple to fix Siri.
Clearly a big part of the reason for this app weirdness is security and privacy. Because the HomeView is meant to be multi-user, Apple is seemingly offloading a lot of that work to the devices you already have, making personalization easier. That is, it sounds like a headache to make people download all their apps – and sign in to them – on yet another device. It may have even been a deal-breaker, product-wise given the lack of physical keyboard with this product.
If you've ever tried to log in to many apps on the Apple TV you'll know what a pain it is. Yes, Apple tries to get developers to use Bluetooth/WiFi/QR Code workarounds, but it's still just not a very elegant solution. "Casting" your apps, as it were, should be easier from a set-up perspective, at least.
But I'm also going to guess this will lead to a fairly confusing and perhaps far less performant product experience. Who-has-the-app-that-the-family-was-doing-that-thing-on? Can they unlock the HomeView so we can use it again? That kind of thing.
Also, why are some notifications showing up here but not there. Why isn't this one video app I want to use showing up at all? What do you mean it can't show my Ring camera feed? Those kind of things. We'll see...
A lot of breaking-at-the-edges issues are going to be tied to the notion of authentication. Apple wants this to sound simple – it recognizes your face! But the devil is in the two-factor details. This is not Face ID even if it sure seems and sounds like it is. Instead, you'll need an iPhone or iPad on the same WiFi for this recognition to fully work. And no, an Apple Watch won't work. What if your kids don't have one of those devices? What if they don't have a phone? What if they have a cheap Android tablet?
Sorry kids, no HomeView for you!
Apple's answer would be to get those devices! But that makes a $299 device much more expensive, fast.
Speaking of, that might be the single best aspect of the device: the price. I had been guessing it would be much higher (though I nailed it in the end) just judging by what Apple charges for the HomePod, let alone iPads. But $299 feels downright reasonable for what is clearly a thoughtfully designed and elegant looking home computer centerpiece. Especially when you consider that the new Apple TV 4K is the same $299 price!
As for why the version with the speaker base and the one with only the screen (which you mount) is the exact same price, I have no idea. But as a nice FU to those buyers, at least you get fewer color options and have to pay extra for a mount.
Anyway, the price is clearly in place with the hope that people will put a few of these throughout the home. Yet beyond the kitchen, the next obvious place would be the living room, but this really doesn't feel like a device for that room – again, even if you wanted to watch something on the small screen, it doesn't even have the Apple TV app! At best, it would be a distraction from the big screen there – your TV. And lord knows we already have enough such distractions in our pockets and hands.
Back to the introduction video, the elephant in that messy, chaotic room is the power cord. How many people have a perfectly placed hole in the middle of their kitchen island? How many people even have kitchen islands in their home? Instead, most people will presumably plug the HomeView into an outlet on the wall, like an animal. And you're not going to be spinning it around and moving it all over the place with such a tether. And you're certainly not going to be moving the wall-mounted one around!
The video almost makes it seem like Apple wishes they could have made HomeView battery-powered. And I'm honestly sort of surprised it's not given all of the above. Clearly, OpenAI is thinking about this direction for their first device. And others, notably Google, have done some clever things with docking a tablet in the past (simply lay it on the dock for powered usage, or lift it off to take around). Maybe that would have felt too iPad-like for Apple. But I'm not sure that's such a bad thing? I wouldn't be shocked if a 'HomeView 2' moves in this direction...
One more thing: the other elephant in this room is Siri. Obviously, "she" will be the key to making this device truly sing. She seems up to the task now, but again, you can see her breaking at various edges due to all the app permissioning and user-switch aspects here. We're likely to get a bunch of, "I'm sorry Dave, I'm afraid I can't do that." because the app he's trying to invoke is not Dave's but his wife's.
Update: About 100 people sent me this and it's perfect. No notes.
Apple HomeView spot but less stressful pic.twitter.com/QFrmesim5c
— Ryan (@ThisIsKodiak) October 14, 2026
1 And I believe at least one publication published early – I saw Wired but perhaps someone else broke the embargo first? – which led to more chaos as Apple clearly tried to push the website live for pre-orders before it was ready, resulting in error pages galore! ↩
2 Remember when Apple used to do those? These feel so quaint now! ↩
3 As a bonus for Apple, how mad would that make Meta? ↩
4 Which presumably would have been roped into homeOS at some point... ↩
5 Yes, HomePod currently runs on 'HomePod Software Version 27' which was forked from tvOS. Probably time to clean this up, Apple. ↩
2026-10-13 21:32:25
Continuing their "we're back" tour, Meta's new 'Wonder' models, built for Muse, put them at the frontier – or so they say. Meanwhile, not back yet, but maybe soonish: Sora?! Say it is so! Read on for thoughts on...
2026-10-13 17:34:35
🔗 Why ‘Social Reckoning’ Went Silent as More Tech Movies Face Box Office Test • THR
On one hand, you can see why Sony would want to go back to the Facebook well/wall. The Social Network opened with $22M, won three Oscars and countless other awards on its way to pulling in $224M at the global box office. And that was in 2010 numbers. Adjusted for 2026 dollars, the box office looks more like $350M. Unfortunately, The Social Reckoning is no Social Network:
Aaron Sorkin‘s follow-up to director David Fincher’s acclaimed 2010 hit The Social Network, for which Sorkin nabbed the Oscar for adapted screenplay, grossed a disappointing $5.5 million domestically, below even the soft initial projections that distributor Sony Pictures had set for the wide release of the $30 million-budgeted film. While the 2010 movie starred Jesse Eisenberg as Facebook co-founder Mark Zuckerberg in the story of the platform’s early days, The Social Reckoning replaced Eisenberg with Jeremy Strong as the CEO. Mikey Madison stars as a Facebook staffer who teams up with a journalist (Jeremy Allen White) to expose dark truths.
$5.5M. It's not a Digger-level disaster, but only because Sony wisely cut the already fairly small budget of $40M for the first film (and again, that was in 2010 money). The reality here was that this movie was never likely to be a big performer at the box office. From the title to the trailer,1 it always just sort of felt like this was set up to be re-heated leftovers.
To be fair, the reviews have been a bit more generous than I would have guessed from that trailer, but they're still middling at best – certainly not the glowing reviews the first film got. How much of that can be chalked up to Sorkin directing this one versus just writing it (which which he won one of those Oscars)? Probably a decent amount. But more so it would seem that his vendetta against Facebook/Meta in recent years (following the success of the first film) was always going to make this follow-up too preachy in a very Sorkin-style.
That's fine, it's art after all. But again, it's also not a huge surprise no one really wants to see that movie – at least not in theaters. This clearly – clearly – should have been a movie that went right to streaming. That's easy to say in hindsight, of course. But it would have been easy to say before that too. In the 16 years since the first film, the world has changed a lot. Yes, Meta is still in court over the various social disasters that Facebook and later Instagram wrought – and they're having to settle those cases for billions lest they lose and potentially have to pay trillions. But that just doesn't feel like a movie anyone wants to watch and relive.
That makes Artificial – aka, the OpenAI movie – far more of a successor to The Social Network, even if only spiritually. And that mixed with the thus far glowing reviews should lead to far more box office (and perhaps awards) success.
There was some concern when Amazon dumped the already-completed film that it was a signal that it wasn't any good, but it may have actually been the opposite signal: it was too good. And that was a problem for Amazon's fresh $50B investment into the subject of the movie...
Anyway, a more interesting test for the Tech Villain anthology hitting theaters this Fall will be You Can See Everything and Musk – because the former is 3 hours long and the latter 4 hours. Those lengths typically don't point to huge box offices – The Odyssey not withstanding, though You Can See Everything is actually longer, yes, longer than one of the most famous stories about length of time – but both also have very strong reviews and early buzz. We'll see. Or we won't!
1 The Social Reckoning? Come on, either go all-in with a title like The Social Nightmare or The Social Disaster or do something more clever – The Antisocial Network... This title just sounds generic. ↩
2026-10-13 15:21:44
🔗 Character.AI Files for Bankruptcy, Agrees to Sell Some Assets for $20 million • Reuters
Ummm...
Character.AI said on Monday it had filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy in the US and agreed to sell some of its assets to Walt Disney for $20 million.
I get that this is more of a bullet-point recap of the filing, but it contains some reporting context and yet somehow, someway this report leaves out two pretty important facts:
1) In August 2024, Google paid $2.7 billion – yes, with a 'B' – to "hackquire" this company. It was one of the first such deals and by far the largest at the time.
2) In September 2026 – just last month – Disney hired Character's CEO, Karandeep Anand, to be their first CTO. He started just 10 days ago and brought a lot of his technical team with him...
Those seem like two pretty key details you may want to mention in your story about such a bankruptcy and asset sale. They even a quote from the current CEO talking about the sale, without noting that he hasn't even been CEO for a month.
Anyway, the writing was clearly on the wall for Character at that point, the bigger point remains what a disaster these "hackquisitions" are turning out to be. I pointed this out last June on the news that Noam Shazeer was leaving Google (again) for OpenAI. This seemed crazy because hiring him was the main reason for the $2.7B Character deal! Google paid all that money for less than two years of service for Shazeer.
Sorry, they also technically paid for the "non-exclusive licensing rights" to Character.AI, but as we're learning today, those are effectively worthless. And they're worthless, in part, because Google gutted the company with their deal, taking not only Shazeer, but several of his top people as well.
Even worse, the company left behind quickly descending into a chaos of lawsuits around AI safety, after several self harm incidents and at least two suicides linked to the service. It's probably not fair to say the hackquisition caused such situations, as there were issues before that deal, but it could not have helped the company not to have their best people – and founders – around to take on the task.
Just a complete and total fail of a deal. Now Disney seems to be getting one on the cheap with their CTO, Character's old CEO, getting some actual IP – not just the "non-exclusive" rights – in a fire sale.
One more thing: Some may also recall that Disney sent Character.ai a cease-and-desist in 2025 over infringing their copyrights...