More than a decade ago, Apple introduced the iPhone 4, with its new boxy rectangular design. It was the first time we got to experience the Retina display. Fast forward to today, and the new iPhone… | Continue reading
Quibi, a mobile-first video startup primarily known for being an extremely well-funded pet project of woefully out-of-touch co-founders Jeffrey Katzenberg and Meg Whitman, is shutting down. Born in… | Continue reading
When it comes to 2020, “I have tried to keep my sanity is by finding mini-obsessions,” my dear friend Shri writes on her blog. She has been obsessed with bonsais and mechanical key… | Continue reading
Photo by Hasan Almasi on Unsplash This past week social media became a battleground for yet another death match between media and Silicon Valley. So much has been said, so I am going to abstai… | Continue reading
These are strange days — imagine that if Zoom met the $600-a-share price target set by analysts, then it would have a market capitalization that will exceed that of AT&T. While … | Continue reading
Every time Google tweaks its communication offerings, I am reminded that it has become a gigantic company, with the same dysfunction associated with large industrial companies. Today they had anoth… | Continue reading
Our partnership announced that it had raised two new funds. We shared the news with our founders first at our founder camp — held virtually this year. These two new funds, totaling $840 milli… | Continue reading
During today’s iPhone 12 launch event, Apple proudly noted that its voice command service, Siri, was now running on a billion devices and had 25 billion interactions. “That’s less than … | Continue reading
I am pretty sure you have seen this clip that went viral last night. It shows Stanford University’s Robert Wilson walking up to the door of his neighbor, Stanford colleague, and former studen… | Continue reading
One of Internet’s pioneers, Leonard Kleinrock, now a distinguished computer science professor at the UCLA Samueli School of Engineering, in an opinion piece for The Los Angeles Times wonders:… | Continue reading
The pandemic’s horrors are well known to most, but there have been some silver linings. The emptiness of the streets, fewer people driving, and general lack of activity gave us the gift of si… | Continue reading
The horrors of the pandemic are hard to ignore. The long-term damage to society is still unknown. What is undeniable, however, is that we are in a period of extreme, rapid change that will redefine… | Continue reading
Photo by Sincerely Media on Unsplash Inside the US campaign to cut China out of the technology supply chain: Nikkei Asia has an excellent overview of how the current tensions between the US and Chi… | Continue reading
A few weeks ago, Jonathan Stern got in touch, wondering if I would like to participate in a new website he and his best friend, Carter Duncan were creating. “In the spirit of the Federalist P… | Continue reading
I have been fortunate enough to have been invited to the Hodinkee podcast twice in the past. We usually talk about my love of Grand Seiko’s mechanical watches, technology, and photography. Th… | Continue reading
Nine years ago yesterday, Steve Jobs, co-founder of Apple, died. He is gone, but never far from my mind. I am not alone, for all the right reasons. I often think about him and his approach to … | Continue reading
So much confusion When autumn comes around What to do about October How to smile behind a frown? It’s hard to settle down It’s so bemusing Will they cancel the parade? We marched each O… | Continue reading
The release of the much talked about the new James Bond movie, No Time To Die, has been delayed until April 2021. That delay might have been the last straw for Cineworld, the owner of Reg… | Continue reading
Dean Cameron Allen, a 50-ish writer, designer, web-guy, and an all-around rascal, died this weekend in London, U.K. He leaves behind his parents, a former girlfriend and a lot of friends. If the un… | Continue reading
“Good design is actually a lot harder to notice than poor design, in part because good designs fit our needs so well that the design is invisible, serving us without drawing attention to itse… | Continue reading
“We don’t seem to be excited about making our country a better place for our kids,” Steve Jobs, 1996. It was one of the most prescient interviews, but for me, this comment has always st… | Continue reading
September is almost over. Two hundred and five days have passed since I started isolating during this pandemic. As someone who loves traveling, it has been challenging to stay in place. Six months … | Continue reading
ISO 50. Focal Length: 90mm. Aperture: f 8.0. Shutter Speed: 24 seconds. Made with Lecia SL2 I went to the Marine Headlands this weekend. It was supposed to be foggy. In other words, my kind of cond… | Continue reading
So, what do I think of Apple’s Time Flies event today? For starters, I appreciate this more egalitarian approach to Apple events, where everyone gets to watch the live stream at the same time regar… | Continue reading
After over six months of being quarantined indoors, I should by now be quite used to staying indoors. And I am. We humans can adapt to changes very fast. As someone who was in perpetual motion and … | Continue reading
What remains are the things that cannot be relegated to machines and algorithms, copied from others, or reduced to formulas, directions, and recipes: the artist remains—the singular human individua… | Continue reading
As someone who has witnessed the meteoric rise of CNET and its role in technology media from the very beginning, I was shocked to learn that they are being sold for $500 million to Red Ventures, a … | Continue reading
TikTok wouldn’t be selling its US operations to Microsoft. “We look forward to seeing how the service evolves in these important areas,” Microsoft said in a tersely worded bl… | Continue reading
“A wise God shrouds the future in obscure darkness.” Horace San Francisco this morning has been under dense fog advisory, and rightfully so. The ash and smoke from the wildfires overwhe… | Continue reading
When Amazon announced the addition to its board of directors of General Keith Alexander, the controversial former chief of the National Security Agency, the condemnation came thick and fast. A… | Continue reading
Someone was complaining on Twitter about Apple’s iPhone being unable to comprehend the color of the sky. Neither does my Leica SL. It is all too surreal. The colors that one normally associat… | Continue reading
Photo by Tomas Yates on Unsplash The Oracle of Omaha, Warren Buffett, known for occasionally partaking in ice cream from Dairy Queen, is going in for a Snowflake scoop. Snowflake is … | Continue reading
The weather in San Francisco is pretty much the same throughout most of the year. It usually only varies by about ten degrees. The cold means wearing a sweater in the morning with a jacket. A warm … | Continue reading
Never have those who are invisible been more visible in our society, and while they have always merited more gratitude than they have been given, never have we owed them quite as much as we do this… | Continue reading
Somewhere in the Grand Tetons. Photo by Om Are newsletters the new blogs — or is it that blogs are newsletters? I can’t tell. For me, however, the blog is my homestead. A homestead is an isol… | Continue reading
As someone who often laments about the falling standards and the rise of outrage journalism, it is only fair for me to take a moment and acknowledge that good journalism is hard. It is painstakingl… | Continue reading
I don’t have much to say today. I am feeling decidedly low energy and tired. One of those days, when you just want to simply catch up on email and reading. And that is precisely what I have b… | Continue reading
“I wish I had gotten into the environmental work earlier because I think that’s a citizen’s fundamental responsibility. The channeling of creative arts in that direction has been … | Continue reading
In August 1995, only 30% of American homes had a computer. Less than 10% had internet access. I had not become a disciple of broadband. I didn’t even know what broadband! Like everyone el… | Continue reading
Photo by Markus Winkler on Unsplash I woke up thinking, what is news good for? No, I was not being snarky. It was just a question: what is the purpose of news. After two and a half decades in … | Continue reading
The Verge had Jeremy Stoppelman, CEO of Yelp, on their podcast. He was talking up his anti-trust talk against Google. The article that accompanied the podcast didn’t mention anything about ho… | Continue reading
I am enjoying this forthcoming track, The Sound of Someone Leaving (with Aaron Martin) by Phil Tomsett, a UK-based musician who is known for his organic sounding, lush and layered soundscapes. “Absence is powerful. When someone isn’t there anymore, the empty space is charged with … | Continue reading
"What I need is perspective. The illusion of depth, created by a frame, the arrangement of shapes on a flat surface. Perspective is necessary. Otherwise, there are only two dimensions. Otherwise, you live in the moment. Which is not where I want to be." ― Margaret Atwood, The Han … | Continue reading
As you know, I have been following the emergence of new behaviors during the pandemic very closely, especially online commerce. So for frequent readers, it shouldn’t come as a surprise to anyone that the pandemic has been an accelerant for e-commerce. There were already early ind … | Continue reading
It is not that often I wake up in a funk. Today, I have come down with a case of megrims. I think it has a lot to do with the wildfires in Northern California, and the damage they are causing to humans and other ecosystems. San Francisco (and surrounding areas) have the fifth-wor … | Continue reading
A country that doesn’t hesitate to drop $700 billion on its war machine now finds itself quibbling over $10 billion to run a very essential service. Of course, a lot of this talk about shrinking the United States Postal Service has nothing to do with its budgetary shortfalls. It … | Continue reading
I have been an Apple customer for about two decades. I have owned most of their notebooks and loved even their most quirky machines. I loved the Cube. I adored the table lamp style iMac. I love the Powerbook Duo. The first MacBook was all I could think about when in the intensive … | Continue reading
Analysis of cellphone data by X-Mode and Tectonix during four days (Friday to Monday) in mid-July shows that many of the roughly 26,000 devices identified on the Las Vegas Strip showed up in every state on the mainland except Maine in those same four days. This spread reminds me … | Continue reading