After a long innings in the technology industry and as an avid student of history, I have formed a simple personal thesis about technology that doesn’t change much, no matter the technology or era. Value (and values) always trump valuations. I have seen this play out time and tim … | Continue reading
Every weekend, my good buddy Hiten Shah and I head to The Coffee Movement’s Balboa Street location. They make a nice pour-over. And while it’s about a half-hour from my apartment, the coffee is worth the drive, the time, and the money. It’s a long enough drive for us to talk abou … | Continue reading
Fall is the season for baseball’s fall classics. Earlier this week, we saw Shohei Ohtani play the game of his life, leading the Los Angeles Dodgers to the World Series once again. What a game! What a player! What a winner! Three home runs and 10 strikeouts over six innings – this … | Continue reading
When driving down to Stanford earlier this week, a good friend from my Wall Street days, Josh Baylin, called. “I’m heading to the East Coast for a conference,” he said. I’m the guy who starts peppering his friends with questions like a reporter, so I queried him about why he was … | Continue reading
Over the weekend, I got a surprise package from the folks at Apple: a review unit of the iPhone Air. I don’t tend to get smitten by something so quickly, but the “Air” is really up there. It’s so thin you think a strong gust of air could really blow it away from your hands. (Thes … | Continue reading
Apple, to be fair, isn’t selling the same sugar water year-after-year in a zero sum war with other sugar water companies. Their sugar water is getting better, and I think this year’s seasonal concoction is particularly tasty. What is inescapable, however, is that while the compan … | Continue reading
As you know, for the first time since the iPhone era began, I didn’t attend the iPhone launch event. I am gutted that I didn’t get to see the new iPhone 17 devices in person. Still, I couldn’t help myself. I tweeted a bit about the event whilewatching the stream. What can I say? … | Continue reading
Life has gotten in the way of one of my most anticipated annual events. For the first time since the day of its official launch (barring the pandemic years), I won’t be attending the new phone model launch in person, which also means I am going to miss getting my hands on the dev … | Continue reading
A few days ago, when decoding Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella’s memo to his company about layoffs and artificial intelligence, I said that “this is not just about Microsoft, but pretty much every software company will be hit hard by this wave of transformation.” The point I was makin … | Continue reading
Not for the first time, the newsletter platform Substack is coming under criticism for hosting and now (accidentally) promoting Nazi content. Today, John Gruber of Daring Fireball is leading this crusade. This seems to be a recurring occurrence. They have controversies. Many expr … | Continue reading
An hour after I posted my piece about Meta’s Super Intelligence memo, a friend pinged me and pointed out that once again, Mark Zuckerberg has subsumed someone’s idea and phrase and presented it as his own: personal super intelligence. Not surprising, given that “copy” and “subsum … | Continue reading
Mark Zuckerberg, the chief executive of Meta (aka the company formerly known as Facebook), has published a memorandum about “superintelligence” and what it will mean not only for his company but for the world and society at large. It has had a wide variety of reactions ranging fr … | Continue reading
To paraphrase Sigmund Freud, sometimes a memo is not just a memo. That’s why we have to read between the lines of Satya Nadella’s 1,150-word memo. Microsoft’s chairman and CEO, in his message, tried to rationalize the 9,000-employee layoff. I was interested in how he was position … | Continue reading
I have a dark cloud over my head about the news that CBS canceled Stephen Colbert for “financial reasons,” an explanation no one is buying.Well, unless those financial reasons were the regulatory approval of the Skydance-Paramount deal. The Wall Street Journal does its best to ma … | Continue reading
A month ago, I reported that Apple was in the final stages of acquiring the rights for F1 streaming following the success of its movie about the sport. Almost a month later, the Financial Times reported the news. As a matter of principle, I am not linking to the report. As is the … | Continue reading
There are certain sweet-smelling, sugarcoated lies current in the world which all politic men have apparently tacitly conspired together to support and perpetuate. One of these is that there is such a thing in the world as independence: independence of thought, independence of op … | Continue reading
Uber plans to make “multi-hundred-million dollar investments” in both Nuro and Lucid as part of a massive new robotaxi deal that was just announced. The three companies are linking up to deploy “20,000 or more” robotaxis in the US over the next six years. The vehicles will be Luc … | Continue reading
Today, I met a nurse from Millbrae. She helped me with a few medical things. She is very good at what she does. However, that’s not why I am sharing her story; it’s because of her story that I am retelling it. Her dad was born on USS Cleveland. In 1948, when his mom (the nurse’s … | Continue reading
I recently interviewed Eric Yang, the chief executive officer of Dallas, Texas-based visual AI company Topaz Labs, for my newsletter, CrazyStupidTech. His father, Albert, started the business. The company stands in sharp contrast to our valuation-obsessed startup culture known fo … | Continue reading
512 Pixels: If you missed my previous post on the topic, the first version of Tahoe had the dark blue on the right side of the Finder icon, which was criminal. Our 14-day national nightmare is over. As of Developer Beta 2, the Finder icon in macOS Tahoe has been updated to reflec … | Continue reading
The decades-old doctrine of “Web traffic in exchange for permission to crawl” is over, writes Fred Vogelstein in his latest feature for our newsletter, Crazy StupidTech, and as a result, the Internet in the age of AI will be filled with much-needed “tolls.” This change has come q … | Continue reading
This weekend I decided to bite the bullet and embrace the “betas” released by Apple at the recent WWDC. I wanted to try out all the new features that Apple had announced and separate the wheat from the chaff. No, I didn’t download the beta on my main machines. My every day iPhone … | Continue reading
If you think it has been quiet around these ramparts, then it is intentional. I decided to take a break from everything,including writing and social media. Instead, I picked up my camera, packed my bags, and went on a photo trip to Svalbard. I have not been on photo adventures fo … | Continue reading
Tim Cook and Apple are all about Formula 1 these days. As a lead-in to the WWDC keynote, Apple played a short clip of its leading software executive, Craig Federighi, racing an F1 car on top of Apple Park. It was a nod to the new F1 movie coming to Apple TV. And it might hint at … | Continue reading
Michael Williams, a friend for a long time and a fellow aficionado of things made well, has a new publication, The Material Review. He recently invited me to chat about my current photography setup, favorite tools, and the under-the-radar brands and objects that have my attention … | Continue reading
My good friend Chris Michel recently photographed George Dyson, thinker, historian, and writer. The topic of “AI” came up, and I found this worth noting. He’s less concerned about the usual apocalyptic fears and more interested in a quieter erosion: that “Good AI,” the kind that … | Continue reading
Camera reviews are not only pointless, but are also kind of rigged. And there is no better testimonial for this camera hype machine than the “review” of Fuji X half camera by PetaPixel. Fuji X half camera is a camera that has vertical optical viewfinder and a vertical rear LCD. I … | Continue reading
My phone has been pinging non-stop since yesterday. Everyone wants to know the backstory of the biggest acquihire in Silicon Valley history: Sam Altman’s OpenAI buying Jony Ive’s io Products for $6.5 billion. I have a few more clues. It’s why I’m updating my piece on the deal fro … | Continue reading
OpenAI, made the biggest acquihire in Silicon Valley’s history. Sam Altman and his crew bought Jony Ive and his coterie of ex-Apple hotshots for a whopping $6.5 billion. It is an all-stock deal for io Products, a 55-person company that is building an “amazing AI device.” It is ha … | Continue reading
Meet the Monster: a fountain pen so ambitious that it holds enough ink to write a short novel. The pen is a symbiosis of precision engineering, material science, and bold design choices. It is also the story of a young designer's journey. | Continue reading
I think dopamine hits from buying or anticipating the next pen or stationary is a symptom of the world we live in where things are easily available and we are bombarded with dopamine hits all day, every day and it causes a cycle that we repeat subconsciously. Reddit We are willin … | Continue reading
Don’t believe the Chinese AI open-source hype, warns good friend, Pete Warden. Their large language models come at a price — the models are programmed to deliberately obscure historical truths, he writes on his blog. He points out that this isn’t just censorship; it’s engineered … | Continue reading
Given how much I have been using my iPhone as my everyday camera, I decided to put together this blog post to show how far Apple’s smartphone camera technology has come. With WWDC 2025 coming up later this summer, I am interested in how much more Apple and its chip-wizards can cr … | Continue reading
It has been a week, that at best can be described as deliciously weird. I have neither been inspired to write, nor to indulge my passion for photography. Apart from necessary work, I have been out walking, and doing a lot of reading. And making notes for future writing projects. … | Continue reading
A new report by research firm Point Topic says there were more than 1.5 billion global broadband subscribers at the end of the fourth quarter of 2024. The real story, however, is the astonishing rise of two technologies gaining traction for connectivity: satellite broadband and f … | Continue reading
On May 5, Microsoft retired Skype, the startup that sparked a communication revolution. I won’t repeat myself, as I’ve already published a postmortem analyzing Skype’s decline under Microsoft’s 14-year ownership of the platform, for which it paid $8.5 billion. Just like Nokia, Sk … | Continue reading
Perhaps this is the antidote to our modern times! | Continue reading
John Gruber: I’m so old I remember when Facebook renamed itself Meta because the “metaverse” was supposedly the future of the company and, so said Mark Zuckerberg, the future of computing itself. Now, when Zuck goes on Joe Rogan’s podcast and chats for three hours, the metaverse … | Continue reading
“A good fountain pen makes you want to write,” some pen enthusiasts say, but a “great one makes you need to.” As a fountain pen lover and someone who has written with them since my childhood, I subscribe to that view. However, I would argue that a great fountain pen is one that s … | Continue reading
Kaptur writes: Particularly in marketing, where demand for fast, customized visuals is high, 39% of marketers use AI to create social media visuals, and 36% to generate website imagery. The accessibility and sophistication of these tools are rapidly eating into the traditional do … | Continue reading
A “bat” isn’t always just a bat. Sometimes it’s a perfect alchemy of data, science, and ingenuity. The “Torpedo” bat, which is making waves in Major League Baseball, serves as a perfect example. During opening weekend, the New York Yankees hit 15 home runs, partially attributed t … | Continue reading
These days, whenever I think about Google, I recall a line from Madame Bovary. “She wanted to die, but she also wanted to live in Paris,” Flaubert writes, capturing Emma Bovary’s provincial reality and her romanticized dreams of escape. That is Google in a nutshell, isn’t it? The … | Continue reading
As one month ends and another begins, I find myself performing what has become a private ritual with two pens from my unusually large collection of fountain pens. These are not the sober instruments that sign checks or pen manuscripts—those steadfast companions are already loaded … | Continue reading
Bijan Sabet is one of the people in our industry I admire ardently. His work ethic, moral conviction, and understanding of himself have made him a joy. We served together on the board of Academia, where I learned much by observing his combination of empathy and steely resolve. He … | Continue reading
You can now use Claude to search the internet to provide more up-to-date and relevant responses. With web search, Claude has access to the latest events and information, boosting its accuracy on tasks that benefit from the most recent data. Web search is available now in feature … | Continue reading
In this week’s edition of CrazyStupidTech, I wrote about how Chinese domination of “electric vehicles” is going to become a nightmare, not just for car companies, but also for Silicon Valley. More below! The future of cars is code, not chrome. Volvo’s ES90 is the latest example o … | Continue reading
If you’re a visitor to the website, you might have noticed a new link in the menu — Daily Blog. If you receive my writing by email, here’s a brief overview of this new feature. I used to publish a “Daily Om” blog during GigaOm’s expansion beyond my solo operation. It primarily se … | Continue reading
It is no secret that I love fountain pens, and that’s why I get excited about events such as the Manila Pen Show, which is the brainchild of a longtime friend and an admirable blogger, Leigh Reyes. She doesn’t blog much, but she posts everything she used to do on Instagram. And w … | Continue reading