2026-01-15 08:08:25
Matt Richman, back in 2012:
In 2009, Apple sold more iPhones than it did in 2007 and 2008 combined. In 2010, Apple sold more iPhones than it did in 2007, 2008, and 2009 combined. Last year, Apple sold 93.1 million iPhones, slightly more than it did in 2007, 2008, 2009, and 2010 combined. The pattern continued.
I referenced this old post earlier today, attempting to put into context Meta’s “leak” that they’ve got concepts of a plan to ramp Meta Glasses production up to 20 million units per year. It’s easy to forget — or if you’re young enough, to just accept as history — just how astonishing the growth of the iPhone was in its early years. Every year wasn’t just bigger than the previous year — it was bigger than all previous years combined. Year after year. That pattern only ended after Apple had run out of new countries, new carriers, and new customers to introduce it to.
There’s never been a product like it before, and quite possibly never will be again. In January 2007 no one had ever even seen a device like an iPhone. By 2015 or so, almost everyone in the world who could afford one either had an iPhone or they had an Android phone that looked and worked like an iPhone.
2026-01-15 07:17:02
Karissa Bell, Engadget:
Several of Meta’s VR studios have been affected by the company’s metaverse-focused layoffs. The company has shuttered three of its VR studios, including Armature, Sanzaru and Twisted Pixel. VR fitness app Supernatural will no longer be updated with fresh content.
Employees at Twisted Pixel, which released Marvel’s Deadpool VR in November, and Sanzaru, known for Asgard’s Wrath, posted on social media about the closures. Bloomberg reported that Armature, which brought Resident Evil 4 to Quest back in 2021 has also closed and that the popular VR fitness app Supernatural will no longer get updates.
“Due to recent organizational changes to our Studio, Supernatural will no longer receive new content or feature updates starting today,” the company wrote in an update on Facebook. The app “will remain active” for existing users. [...]
The cuts raise questions about Meta’s commitment to supporting a VR ecosystem it has invested heavily in.
Raises questions, indeed! It was only four years ago that Mark Zuckerberg renamed the company from Facebook to Meta and proclaimed the entire company would now be “metaverse-first”.
A reader told me today that a friend of his who works (well, worked) at one of Meta’s now-shuttered VR studios was vaguely concerned just last weekend because he suspected “about 20 percent” of the company to be laid off. Not him, but probably some people he was required to stack-rank. Turns out he was correct to be worried but his “about 20 percent” guess was off by ... checks with calculator ... about 80 percent. People within Meta who believed Zuckerberg’s public statements have clearly been caught flat-footed by the fact that he’s clearly lost all interest in VR and the so-called metaverse.
The workout app Supernatural is a perfect example. Meta announced their intention to acquire Supernatural in 2021, at the start of their all-in-on-the-metaverse phase, for $400 million. They battled the FTC for approval and it finally went through in February 2023. Now, less than three years later, they’re shutting it down. Devoted Supernatural users are, unsurprisingly, not happy.
It really does raise questions about Meta’s commitment.
2026-01-15 05:53:30
Josh Woodward, VP of Gemini and AI Studio, on the Google blog:
The best assistants don’t just know the world; they know you and help you navigate it. Today, we’re answering a top user request: you can now personalize Gemini by connecting Google apps with a single tap. Launching as a beta in the U.S., this marks our next step toward making Gemini more personal, proactive and powerful.
Personal Intelligence securely connects information from apps like Gmail and Google Photos to make Gemini uniquely helpful. If you turn it on, you control exactly which apps to link, and each one supercharges the experience. It connects Gmail, Photos, YouTube and Search in a single tap, and we’ve designed the setup to be simple and secure. [...]
Starting today, access is rolling out over the next week to eligible Google AI Pro and AI Ultra subscribers in the U.S. Once enabled, it works across Web, Android and iOS and with all of the models in the Gemini model picker. We’re starting with this limited group to learn, but we will over time expand to more countries and to the free tier.
In the small print on the Gemini Personal Intelligence product page, they say “In the coming months, and with your permission, Gemini will be able to draw context from even more of your Google apps and services.” Gmail, Photos, YouTube, and Search are obvious services to start with. Calendar, surely, is forthcoming. But a big one for me — an inveterate note-taker — would be my notes app. I’d rather have an AI assistant know everything in my notes app than everything in my email. For Google, I presume, that will be Google Keep (which I consider a serviceable, but overall crummy app that never seems to have gotten much attention).
This is nicely honest, and sets expectations:
We’ve tested this beta version of Personal Intelligence extensively to minimize mistakes, but we haven’t eliminated them. You may encounter inaccurate responses or “over-personalization,” where the model makes connections between unrelated topics. When you see this, please provide feedback by giving the response a “thumbs down.”
Gemini may also struggle with timing or nuance, particularly regarding relationship changes, like divorces, or your various interests. For instance, seeing hundreds of photos of you at a golf course might lead it to assume you love golf. But it misses the nuance: you don’t love golf, but you love your son, and that’s why you’re there. If Gemini gets this wrong, you can just tell it (“I don’t like golf”).
I feel like it’s unlikely a coincidence that Google announced Personal Intelligence a few days after the short joint announcement that Apple is licensing Gemini technology to power the models for Apple Intelligence. What Google is making available today — in beta, to paid personal users only — is basically the feature set that Apple promised back in June 2024 but had to postpone for an entire additional year last March.
2026-01-15 04:28:33
Jacob Krol, reporting for Techradar:
While Verizon had a good few months, with the last major outage occurring in October 2024, it seems that the popular United States wireless carrier is having some issues. So, if you’re on Verizon and seeing ‘SOS’ in place of network bars, you’re not alone.
Countless users have taken to social platforms like X (formerly Twitter) and Threads to shout issues, but reported problems with Verizon have spiked on Down Detector to over 46,000.
This outage matters, because I’m on Verizon and my phone hasn’t had a signal for two hours.
T-Mobile’s network is keeping our customers connected, and we’ve confirmed that our network is operating normally and as expected. However due to Verizon’s reported outage, our customers may not be able to reach someone with Verizon service at this time.
AT&T, in such a hurry to pile on that their punctuation was slapdash:
Our network? Solid. If you’re experiencing issues, it’s not us.....it’s the other guys. Some things are just out of our hands! - BUT if you’re interested in giving us a try — https://att.com/wireless/free-trial/
Full point awarded to T-Mobile for the better, colder, burn.
Update: Service returned for me around 5pm, but the outage wasn’t completely resolved until 10pm ET. Yikes.
2026-01-15 04:14:09
The letter speaks for itself, and is very much worth reading in full. I’ll quote only from the conclusion, which rhetorically feels very Bill:
Continue to mislead Americans about what is truly at stake, and you will learn that Americans are better at finding the truth than you are at burying it.
Continue to pursue autopens instead of penning laws Americans need, and you will learn that you are signing away any remaining chance of being on the right side of history.
Continue to abet the dismantling of America, and you will learn that it takes more than a wrecking ball to demolish what Americans have built over 250 years.
The New York Times also published a copy of the legal letter the Clintons’ lawyers (two law firms, actually) sent to Comer. It’s not as good a read as their personal letter.
I’ll just add, revisiting a recent topic, that the legal letter from the Clintons’ lawyers was set in Times New Roman. That’s unremarkable, which is Times New Roman’s calling card. The Clintons’ personal letter, on very nice joint stationery, was set in Courier New, an interesting but disappointing choice. The intention is to evoke the effect of a typewriter — to add a personal touch. The letter is very clearly, from the first word to the last, a personal message from Bill and Hillary Clinton themselves. I suspect they jointly crafted every single word of it themselves. It’s not a short letter, but it’s not long, either. Not a word is wasted. But it would have looked so much better in Courier than Courier New (or, even better, the best version of Courier ever made, Courier Prime). The worst aspect of Courier New is that it’s inexplicably thin and wispy. It looks like it should be called Courier Thin, but there’s no good reason for there to exist a thin variant of Courier. The second worst aspect of Courier New is that a handful of punctuation glyphs are inexplicably not thin, and thus stand out excessively, grating on the eyes. Take note of how the commas and apostrophes appear almost bold in the Clintons’ personal letter. I gripe about Arial more frequently, but Courier New is a worse crime against typography. (Both crimes, of course, were set loose upon the world by Microsoft.)
2026-01-15 00:40:09
Daniele Lepido and Antonio Vanuzzo, reporting for Bloomberg (paywalled, alas):
Meta Platforms Inc. and EssilorLuxottica SA are discussing potentially doubling production capacity for AI-powered smart glasses by the end of this year, in a bid to capture growing demand and head off rivals, according to people familiar with the matter.
With sales of Ray-Ban Meta frames taking hold, Facebook-owner Meta has suggested increasing annual capacity to 20 million units or more by the end of 2026, said the people, asking not to be named because the deliberations are private.
20 million units is a real number. But building the capacity for 20 million units isn’t the same as selling 20 million units, and, to my knowledge, actual sales of Meta Glasses are only Bezos Numbers. And for historical context, 20 million units annually would put Meta Glasses somewhere between the second and third years of iPhone sales. If they’re really on pace for 20 million sales per year that’s a real thing. But in 2009 I was seeing a lot of iPhones out and about in the world. I’ve only noticed one guy wearing Meta Ray-Bans in the last few months. That’s personal anecdata, for sure, and it’s possible I’m walking past more people wearing these than I realize because they’re supposed to look like regular Ray-Bans. I don’t think they’re on anything even close to the astounding growth pattern of the early iPhone, but Meta is trying hard to create the perception that they are, and that they’re locking in a first-mover advantage.
And again, leaking that they’re “discussing potentially doubling production capacity” is as different from actually selling 20 million annual units as “going all in” on the metaverse is from laying off another thousand-plus employees from the metaverse division three years later.
