1. Betteridge's Law of Headlines, Macalope edition
You know the Macalope, right? The legendary "part man, part Mac, part antelope" of Mac punditry? You don't? Honestly, I think less of you.
Anyway, I don't want to get all judgy about this. But you should read The Macalope's recent column both for its critique of AI and for an addendum to Betteridge's Law of Headlines which I support: "the answer to any Trip Mickle article about Apple is 'NO.', whether the headline is phrased as a question or not."
2. More news from the front lines of monopoly capitalism
I'm not ignoring the news that a US judge has found Google has a monopoly on some areas of online advertising, although I will not that taking longer than five minutes to work this out bamboozles the brain. Neither will I focus on the absurd idea that simply because Instagram "was what it was in 2020 because of the investments that Facebook made in the intervening years" made the ownership of Instagram (and WhatsApp!) by Meta any less of a competition issue. "I bought up all the potential competition but hey I didn't just shut it down so that's OK" is quite the viewpoint.
No, what I love the way that Meta has decided that the solution to Facebook's decline -- driven entirely by its own avarice which has degraded the quality of the feed for years -- is to reintroduce, erm, a feed that's just your friends. I mean, sure, that's better than the utter useless hellscape of AI slop, random "recommended" pages and posts and ads (oh so many ads) that we have now. But does anyone believe that in the year of our lord twenty twenty five the best Facebook can do is go back 20 years? Seriously?
Facebook's problem is simple, and it can be summed up in two words: Mark Zuckerberg. A man notably low on empathy who sees the internet as a way to move every stray dollar, pound, euro and yen from your pocket into his pocket, Zuckerberg decided long ago that no one other than him would be allowed any real power the change the company. He's a perfect example of why the theory of the "benevolent dictator for life" in leadership is utter bunk.
A BDFL can work, but not when when that dictator is a billionaire with zero empathy. As Robert Shaw might have put it, "you know the thing about a billionaire is he’s got lifeless eyes. Black eyes. Like a doll’s eyes. When he comes at ya, doesn’t seem to be livin’…"
3. Stan the Spiv, Warren Street, and the Internet we have lost
What was the golden age of blogs? I would always argue it really got fun sometime around 2005, although I have friends who would say that was when it all went horribly wrong. What's certain is that by 2010 there were a lot of really good, interesting blogs around which created amazing and original posts on just about any topic you wanted to read about.
One of my favourites was Another Nickel in the Machine, a blog which told stories about London's history. It petered out in around 2017, but there are a tonne of great articles on there. One of my favourites was the story of Warren Street, just off Euston Road and a place that will be familiar either because you know the name of the tube station, or you have used it as a cut through to get someone more interesting.
I used to walk down Warren Street every day when I worked at Dennis Publishing, getting out of the tube and walking round to first Bolsover Street then Cleveland Street. When I first started working there, in 1995, Warren Street still had the last remnants of what used to be its main business, buying and selling used cars. There was, I think, one garage still working, and if you looked carefully you could see the semi-hidden frontages of others.
What I didn't know was quite how shady this business had been in the 1950s -- until I read the story of Warren Street and the murder of Stan "The Spiv" Shetty. I think you might enjoy it too.
And it also reminded me of the internet we have lost. Today, if you wanted to create something like this and find an audience, where would you do it? Instagram? TikTok? Another platform full of AI-generated crap and clickbait? The web and blogging democratised publishing. Sadly, the platforms made sure they took back control.
4. DOGE is a Russian asset, part 672
Whether it's deliberate or these little boys are just incredibly stupid, the security damage this is causing will take decades to unpick. At this point, if I was any intelligence agency working with the US, I would regard it as completely compromised.
5. The aging faces of Apple?
It’s a pretty astounding statistic, and one that I felt I had to check, but it’s true: the average age of Apple’s board is 68 years old. The youngest member is 63, and well-off enough to have already retired.
This can’t be good for the company, but it’s not telling the whole story. This, after all, is the board of directors and what DHH seems to want to ignore is that, in a company like Apple, the board isn’t making operational decisions and definitely isn’t developing new products. Apart from in exceptional circumstances, the full board only meets four times a year (the independent directors have to meet an additional four times a year without management present.)
So what about Apple’s senior leadership team? After a bit of digging, it looks like the average age of them is around 58 – by coincidence, the same age as me. By comparison, Meta is about 44. For transparency’s sake, DHH and Jason Fried are 45 and 51 respectively, making 37signals somewhere between Meta and Apple.
All of which proves, I think, precisely nothing apart from DHH is happy to cherry pick data when it suits him.
7. I dream of em-dashes
I found myself waxing lyrical the other day about the hyphen, em-dash and en-dash and realised that I sounded like a dinosaur. But apparently their use has been widely claimed to be a “tell” that text is written by AI rather than a human.
And it is true that LLMs love an em-dash, almost as much as they love a bullet point. And boy do they love a bullet point.
But it’s also true that people like me -- who grew up with proper typography -- also love them. Sometimes I’m sloppy and use hyphens or em-dashes or en-dashes interchangeably, but I use them a lot and I can assure that you I am, in fact, human.
8. Tesla cheats its customers, again
Remember when VW got caught cheating on its emissions tests by intentionally programming its diesel engines to activate emissions controls only during laboratory testing, so that it appeared to meet government standards without the pesky process of, you know, actually meeting government standards?
In a case of “hold my beer” it turns out that Tesla has been using similar sneaky tactics to avoid having to meet its warranty commitments. The company is accused of updating the software in its cars to artificially inflate mileage, thus cutting off the 50,000 mile warranty before owners have actually reached 50,000 miles.
Of course, Tesla is ripping off customers directly rather than ripping off governments, so it probably won’t get anything like the $30bn of fines globally that VW was hit with. But it should be. Oh, it really should be.
9. Here we go again
Once again, the rumours are swirling around that the this year the iPad will get an operating system that doesn’t hobble anyone who wants to do serious work with it or use it as their only computer.
Forgive me if, like Stephen Hackett, I’m sceptical. In fact I would go further: I’m jaded. Maybe Apple will pull a rabbit out of the hat, or maybe it won’t, but I always end up thinking the company has ended up in a situation where it just doesn’t have to try. The iPad is the only game in town if you want a tablet (come on Google and Samsung, you know you’re not kidding anyone). Android on tablet is a joke. It just doesn’t need to do much more than incremental improvements to keep selling iPads by the container load.
10. Reuse, recycle, but most of all, repair
I’ve spent a lifetime not only buying but also promoting the new shiny hotness, whatever that was at the time. I’ve written many reviews encouraging people to spend their cash on this year’s Mac, the latest watch, or even that throw-away printer that’s so cheap you might as well dump it rather than get new ink.
For which, of course, I am profoundly sorry.
Perhaps I’m coming to this -- or rediscovering it -- late in life but I love repair culture now, and that’s why I really enjoyed this article about the “frankenlaptops” made by Indian repair technicians. The tide on repairability was turning, but I am afraid legal efforts in the US to force manufacturers to make products easier to fix and update are likely to stall with the Great Orange Tyrant in power. So I guess it’s up to us now.