Finished reading: The Wild Robot by Peter Brown. Mostly for kids, but I had already been looking forward to the upcoming movie and kept running across the book, so I bought it. Wonderful story. 📚

Got my updated Covid shot. Going to lie low for the afternoon, just poke around a little with blogging and email. 💉

Adrian Vila blogging about the lens choices on the iPhone 16:

I said it a year ago, and I still think Apple made a mistake with the 120mm lens. The current lineup of 13mm, 24mm, and 120mm leaves a huge gap between the main and telephoto lenses, missing out on key and very useful focal lengths for everyday situations. I’d rather see a 75mm lens on a 48MP sensor, with the ability to reach 120mm using the fancy cropping the main sensor has.

The camera is such an important part of the iPhone, at what point will we get four separate lenses, or the ability to pop a lens out and replace it? 🤪

“I’m voting for @kamalaharris because she fights for the rights and causes I believe need a warrior to champion them. I think she is a steady-handed, gifted leader and I believe we can accomplish so much more in this country if we are led by calm and not chaos.” — Taylor Swift 🇺🇸

Nice job by the ABC moderators for some quick fact-checking and generally keeping things on track, with a little room for back and forth replies. No need for another debate, other than the VP debate. We’ve all seen enough. 🇺🇸

Kamala Harris has a really clever approach to some answers where she talks about the actual question but then in the middle she inserts a quick jab at Trump — your father gave you money, or the world is laughing at you — and he can’t help but respond and get completely derailed into nonsense. 🇺🇸

Kamala Harris off to a strong start, I think. Lots of policy but also layering in some bigger themes. 🇺🇸

Finally cancelling iTunes Match. Created playlists in Music.app to find and download every track with cloud status “matched” or “uploaded” to my Mac. In the process, found a gold mine of old audio recordings off my MiniDisc, circa 2004-2006.

Online grocery prices dropped last month. More surprising, Adobe tracks these kind of prices as part of their enterprise products. Talk about losing focus… That business feels very far apart from Photoshop.

Some good notes from Jason Snell after attending the iPhone 16 event. On AI’s staggered rollout:

They’re promoting a key feature of their new iPhone… that won’t be there if you order one for delivery on September 20. Maybe it’ll be there, in beta, a few weeks later. But only some of it. The rest of it will come in December, or maybe early next year, or maybe next spring. In dribs and drabs over time.

A related problem is that it’s going to be even longer (years) until the new Siri works consistently everywhere. I generally like Apple’s strategy, but on-device models will hold them back.

Stephen Hackett blogging about the increasingly-complicated Apple product lineup:

Sometimes, that means selling older products at discounted prices, but it feels like today’s event was a new chapter in that story. Some of the announcements today were hard to understand, even as someone who has written about Apple for nearly 16 years. The event felt undisciplined in areas, and felt somehow both too long and too short for what Apple had to introduce.

One of my first clicks on an Apple product page is the “Tech Specs” or “Compare” link. It really is a lot to make sense of now.

Not in a hurry to switch, but I will probably opt for the AirPods 4 to replace my AirPods Pro. The pros have never felt comfortable in my ears. It’s interesting that the 4s are split into a basic version and a “with noise cancellation” version, although the hardware appears identical.

Working on something to demo at FediForum later this week. Not entirely sure in what form it will actually ship, but could make for a good discussion. Thinking about the Mastodon API and its role in the fediverse.

Rest in peace, James Earl Jones. I wouldn’t have guessed he was 93 already. An incredible life. Love this quote from him in the AP:

I realized early on, from people like Athol Fugard, that you cannot change anybody’s mind, no matter what you do. As a preacher, as a scholar, you cannot change their mind. But you can change the way they feel.

Solid updates from Apple as usual. They highlighted lots of health-related features, like hearing aids, sleep apnea, and satellite messaging. For environmental impact, I’m still curious if there will be a hit to their goals with the AI private cloud rollout.

Genuinely conflicted about this year’s iPhone Pro color lineup: black, white, silver, desert. I guess black? Need to see more photos to know where desert sits on the spectrum of subtle to Zune.

New Apple stuff is great and all, but hear me out… What if they integrated hardware, software, and services in a way that only Apple can do? 🤪

I’m sorry to be bitter, but in the first half hour of the Apple event, my takeaways are: they really should move back to live presentations, and please stop saying “only Apple can do”… If you say it too much for everything, it loses its impact. (New products look good, though.)

Ben Thompson predicts a $100 price increase for the new iPhones today, bringing it over $1k for the first time. So I guess if the iPhone 16 Pro is $1100, the Max will be $1200. Ouch. 💰

iPhone announcement day! As I talked about on @coreint, for the first time in years — maybe since the original iPhone? — I’m actually going to get a new phone right away. Not excited about the cost, but will be fun to play on the cutting edge a little.

The new iPhone announcement is just a couple days away, and on today’s Core Int we give our thoughts about the upcoming event, including a discussion about AI.

Looking up, at Beyond Van Gogh. In the old Austin American-Statesman building.

This post about Marissa Mayer’s company Sunshine on Platformer is several months old, but I saw it linked again this week and wanted to highlight something:

Employees say they learn what they are working on each week during Monday morning standup meetings, and that their mandate shifts frequently as Mayer changes priorities.

This sounds exactly like how I run Micro.blog, actually. Founder mode, I guess? It sounds chaotic and “bad” but it’s also a strength of a very small team to change our minds quickly.

Good news, everyone. Accidentally left the garage door open and someone stole a couple random things — looks like mostly power tools that are easy to replace — but they left the Power Mac 7500 and Power Mac G5. Suckers! They have no sense of quality and value. 🤪

Talking to Daniel today for the next podcast episode, about AI, and afterwards I was thinking about why I find ChatGPT so effective instead of Google search. It’s not just the “here’s the answer” but also the very fast, clean results. Imagine a web search with 5-10 results that was as simple.