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. đź’°
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.)
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? 🤪
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.
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.
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.
Finished reading: A Wrinkle in Time by Madeleine L'Engle. Somehow I had never read this before now. Also my edition had an interesting afterward by her granddaughter with a history of the book and notes from earlier drafts. đź“š
Cohost is shutting down. From the staff account:
…we’ve struggled to fill the revenue and morale gap. Colin and I have been doing this for five years, Aidan for three, Kara for nearly two. We’ve been at or over capacity on moderation, engineering, and general operations nearly this entire time. We have all been on-call 24/7/365 since we launched two and a half years ago. The day-to-day needs of just running the site meant developing alternative funding options wasn’t possible.
They are going read-only and then will make data exports available.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Kamala Harris off to a strong start, I think. Lots of policy but also layering in some bigger themes. 🇺🇸
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. 🇺🇸
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. 🇺🇸
“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 🇺🇸
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? 🤪
Got my updated Covid shot. Going to lie low for the afternoon, just poke around a little with blogging and email. đź’‰
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. đź“š
FediForum starts today and runs for a few days. It's inspiring to see what everyone is working on. Luckily I don't demo until tomorrow because I'm not 100% together this morning. Covid shot interfered with my sleep… 💉 (Don't let that discourage you! I got unlucky this time, but glad to have it.)
I watched Oprah Winfrey’s AI special. There was some concern before it aired about whether it would represent both sides of the debate, and it’s true it wasn’t comprehensive, but I thought it was actually pretty good. She has a thoughtful, deliberate style, not too sensational or hyped up.
Great post from Molly White on the Hachette vs. Internet Archive decision on controlled digital lending:
In fact, by fighting CDL, publishers are seeking to overstep the established boundaries of intellectual property law to exert continued control over an item that has already been purchased from them. And they are seeking to diminish the critical rights of readers to read the books they want without being subjected to censorship and surveillance.
I’m a big user of Libby but I don’t like that we have fewer rights with e-books than physical books. Open Library’s approach seemed fair to me.
Hello! This is a quick demo of Micro.blog at FediForum.
Learning about Fediverse Discovery Providers at FediForum. Interesting solution to get search and discovery across instances.
Plaud NotePin
I still think there's potentially a space for these dedicated AI-based voice recorders, but none of them are quite right yet. From David Pierce's review of the NotePin:
In my time testing the NotePin, I’ve mostly had it around my neck, and I’ve used it to note reminders while driving, ramble long ideas to myself while walking the dog, and summarize calls and conversations. It’s certainly handy being able to just reach down, press the NotePin until it vibrates to indicate it’s recording, and then yammer away at nothing while my necklace dutifully listens.
Even though it works as advertised, David doesn't think these need to be dedicated devices. iOS 18 and macOS Sequoia will have good transcription built in. The price at $169 also seems a bit high to me.
I never use Siri unless I'm in the car, and there I have exactly three uses:
- call someone
- respond to a text
- record a quick memo
That's it. On road trips especially, my mind will wander, and I'll have an idea for a new Micro.blog feature, or a blog post, or an edit I should make to my book. I don't bother asking Siri for anything complicated because it's not going to get it right.
For transcription, the current Siri isn't very good. I expect it to get much better with Apple's LLMs, but will it be as good as a more powerful model backed by OpenAI? And if not, is it worth buying a special device to get that extra quality?
My ideal AI device would be about the size of the NotePin or the Friend. Transcription would be effortless, with good sync of notes to other platforms or Dropbox. I could also ask it world knowledge questions like I do with ChatGPT. And as a bonus, sure, being able to talk to it and get comforting reassurance like the Friend would be neat too.
It doesn't need a screen. It doesn't need a camera. It doesn't need a laser. It just needs to do these couple LLM-powered tasks exceptionally well.
For something completely new today, I'm revisiting Nostr support in Micro.blog. Making a few tweaks, and support for custom relays.
I hadn't checked out Lillihub in a while. It's so nice. Some unique ideas around conversations in Micro.blog.
I got a lot out of FediForum this week. Mostly lurking this morning, can't really participate. Some fantastic sessions yesterday. I helped lead a discussion on adapting client APIs for different platforms, with great points from folks on ActivityPub C2S and how to go beyond the Mastodon API.
Sean Tilley has a great live blog of FediForum over at We Distribute. Also includes my demo if you scroll back to yesterday's coverage.
Toward a common posting API
Dave Winer blogs about interoperability for Twitter-like systems:
We had that for the blogging layer of this onion, something called the MetaWeblog API. All the popular blogging software supported it. And that meant you could write once and publish to many places.
I've been trying to get people in the fediverse to think about this. The other day at FediForum, there was a good discussion about it.
Here's the current state of things:
- Micro.blog and WordPress support the MetaWeblog API that Dave mentions, but almost no one is building XML-based clients anymore. It also has never been adapted for more modern sign-in with OAuth.
- Micro.blog also supports the Micropub API, which is a simple posting API. It is comparable to MetaWeblog, but without the XML. There's a plugin for WordPress and good support in most apps from the IndieWeb community. It is a W3C recommendation.
- ActivityPub has the client-to-server API, known informally as C2S. Very few apps support it, not even Mastodon. It also feels sort of abstract and is missing a couple things that could be added as Fediverse Enhancement Requests.
- Popular fediverse clients like Ivory and Ice Cubes support the Mastodon API. It is specific to Mastodon, though, and there is disagreement about how or whether it should be adapted to other platforms.
- Threads, Tumblr, and Ghost have their own proprietary posting APIs. These are all dead-ends for interoperability.
In the fediverse community, there is a natural inclination toward ActivityPub because why not have a single specification that can handle both server-to-server federation and client-to-server posting? But in practice, federation and posting are actually different tasks. They don't need to be wrapped together.
With Micropub, the IndieWeb focuses on the social timeline aspects in a separate specification, Microsub. If you want to replace the Mastodon API, using both Micropub and Microsub is a good way to go. They are complementary. Micropub handles creating new posts and managing posts, and Microsub handles browsing the timeline.
So where does this leave us? I'll admit I'm a little conflicted. Mostly because the fediverse developer community has grown quite large, and I don't relish trying to convince anyone of anything. 🙂 But looking at all the possible ways forward with the above standards, there is really only one complete solution that is ready to go today, and that has been implemented for years across multiple blogging platforms: Micropub + Microsub.
We've visited Dallas a lot recently. It sort of amazes me that Dallas has been able to develop extensive new light rail, and repurpose old rail corridors into great walking trails. Comparatively it feels like Austin has done almost nothing. Looking at the old Missouri-Kansas-Texas line, unused.
As a quick follow-up to my post today about posting APIs, I should have linked to the latest Micropub specification. There is also a long list of clients on the IndieWeb wiki. I just added Epilogue there, which also uses Micropub to blog about books you're reading.
Watching the Emmy’s. It shouldn’t bother me so much but folks The Bear still isn’t a comedy. 📺
Happy for Hacks finally winning. Love that show. It has been tough competition going up against hilarious comedy show The Bear. 🤪
We've got a new episode of Core Intuition out today, longer than usual to talk about which iPhones we pre-ordered, thoughts on new features like the camera button, and a discussion of whether the AirPods 4 with noice cancellation are effectively a software unlock.
